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Your last name contains invalid characters (2010)
- m3kw9 3y agoIn some systems it may say your last name contained a “sexually explicit” term.
- Natfan 3y agoHooray, the Scunthorpe Problem[0]! [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem
- happytoexplain 3y agoIf your stack supports Unicode (where utf8mb3 doesn't count), is there any practical reason to even validate name fields beyond silently removing anything in categories Zl, Zp, and C?
- jerf 3y agoThe possible need to integrate with other systems that don't. If you tell me your name is (real Unicode Chinese here) but I have to integrate that with a system that requires English letters only, I may be stuck. There are cases where that happens for real and not just due to other computers not supporting Unicode properly; for example it is completely unreasonable for every postal system in the world to have to support every language in the world for addresses.
- partdavid 3y agoThe only real way to handle it, even though it's not a fully general solution, is to ask the user if it needs to be different than what you've said is their canonical name. For example, just ask "How should your name appear in a address?" (only if different from your name) or "How may your name appear in government records?" (for when you need to look these up, like for known traveler info). That's not fully general but it at least accommodates many of these use cases and doesn't run afoul of the "automated rudeness" problem the blogger is talking about.
- BobaFloutist 3y agoSurely every alphabet/character in the world is a much smaller set than every language though? Say, roughly Unicode sized?
- jerf 3y agoThe scale of "all the postal mail in the world" is about as large as it comes, so to a first approximation, every little potential issue you can imagine, as well as every one you can't, will actually happen. Is that "fragile" in Russian or "urgent" in Mongolian? Is that bit of text the oblast or the road? But even beyond that, even expecting every postal system in the world to have to understand every script is itself not feasible. I don't mean this to offend, but Arabic is just a scribble to me. I know from reading articles about the difficulty of typography that Arabic letters are generally strongly affected by their preceding and/or following characters, but that only from HN, not from my normal day-to-day experience. I couldn't even parse it into letters correctly or safely. The ideographic languages have no spaces, so I can't break them into words safely. (After some non-trivial study of Japanese, I could mostly do it, but still only mostly.) It's not a reasonable expectation to put on every postal system in the world.
- happytoexplain 3y agoI agree that potential integration with non-Unicode systems is a real concern I hadn't thought of. However, your examples of complexity in the service of demonstrating why a system might not support Unicode don't seem to affect or be affected by the allowance of all printable Unicode characters in digital representations of proper nouns, unless I'm misunderstanding. I.e. I don't understand why these problems mean that a postal system might elect to not support all scripts in storage (I get why it means the OCR software for a postal office might not support scripts outside their own country's scripts).
- jerf 3y agoBecause having the script in storage is not enough to derive the other possible representations that may be needed. partdavid's answer is correct, you may have to ask for other representations to be provided to you. This is much like the naming scenario, where I may need both your legal name for legal reasons, which may have local restrictions on it, and I may also have a field that is basically "What do you want me to call you?" which may have arbitrary unbounded Unicode for all I care, I don't care if my system calls you the Lord and Master of Zalgo Text. But there's no programmatic way to get from the latter to the former, or indeed, even a human way.
- dang 3y agoRelated: Last name contains invalid characters [2010] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27769788 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27769788 - July 2021 (2 comments) Your last name contains invalid characters - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1438355 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1438355 - June 2010 (73 comments)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- borski 3y agoRequired reading: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...
- paulddraper 3y ago> PS Would accepting the hyphen actually destroy your database? IDK but every time I programmatically create an AWS resource, I have to go crawling through masses of disorganized documentation to see what character substitutions to make. Hyphens do destroy AWS's database. :shrug:
- Alex3917 3y agoRDS databases only allow alphanumic names -- no hyphens, underscores, spaces, etc. Even though it's a small thing, it's an absurdly bad user experience to have to enter the exact same name two or three times spelled differently just to set up some basic AWS infra.
- aodonnell2536 3y agoI’ve been dropping the apostrophe in my last name my entire life just to prevent from dealing with the headache it could potentially cause. Quite irritating, it feels as if my last name is being slowly changed by shoddy software
- sjrd 3y agoMy first name (Sébastien) fits in latin1 (ISO-8859-1) and I still can't trust airlines websites to deal with it correctly, so I remove the (mandatory in French) diacritic. I don't know how people with names outside of that range navigate online. It's pretty appalling that we haven't fixed this yet.
- NooneAtAll3 3y agofrench airlines?
- mort96 3y agoMy favourite is when they stress the importance of typing the name exactly as it appears on the passport or on a debit card, then doesn't accept my name. This is why I don't use Namecheap anymore fwiw. They used to accept 'ø', they redesigned their interface, I had to add a new debit card to my account, their new system didn't accept 'ø' yet told me to write the name "exactly as it is on the card". Customer service just told me to write a name that's not mine in the billing info; I moved to a different registrar instead.
- BobaFloutist 3y agoIt's not quite the same, but every time I put my apartment number in the second address field (which is more or less exactly for apartment/duplex numbers etc), it thinks for a second and says "USPS has a suggested more accurate address" which simply appends it to the street address. Why do we even have that field anymore?
- emilecantin 3y agoI've been called Â~™mile or similar a few too many times before discovering my name is actually spelled Emile on my birth certificate. I stopped even trying for Émile at that point. Also, to the original article's point, it looks like these websites would exclude like half of Québec's population; dual last names are very common here (women keep their names after marriage, making the "mother's maiden name" security question pretty stupid).
- nevir 3y agoAlso consider that in some cultures, people have no last name, or multiple last names. Have one input: "What should we call you?" and, if you really need it: "your full name"
- kjetijor 3y agoI'll add another airline story. SAS, the Scandinavian flag carrier - which you'd think would have Scandinavian characters down. I've had an account with them since, well, they got a web presence. My last name contains an ø - for which; technically at least Norway accepts both o and oe as valid transliterations. Order a ticket online, they pick the transliteration for ø as o, passports transliterate ø to oe - the less ambiguous choice. This generally isn't a problem until you want to travel to one of the APIS countries - USA or UK, which won't let you check in if the name on your passport doesn't match the name on the ticket. I have tormented many check-in counter staff with this, especially at regional airports that don't see a lot of international travel.
- NooneAtAll3 3y agotransliteration of documents most likely is covered by a national standard it should be possible to file a complaint to you country's standardization agency and they will pressure the airline with fines
- emilecantin 3y agoMy mom's last name is Saint-Pierre, but it's actually written as St-Pierre on her passport. She almost couldn't get on the plane in Atlanta last year because of that. You'd think such a simple abbreviation would be accepted, but apparently not.
- probably_wrong 3y ago> won't let you check in if the name on your passport doesn't match the name on the ticket. This is always a paranoid worry of mine. Even worse, some airlines tend to include the academic title in there too, meaning I've had tickets reading "MRDRWRONG, PROBABLY". Not only does it not match my passport, but it also makes it look as if I'm a murderer.
- eckesicle 3y agoHi. I wrote part of this flow for SAS on the original mobile app years ago. I am so sorry. We had to do it because the underlying backend is Spanish and the APIs are insane. Behind our JSON-wrapper is an adapter to translates it into teletype friendly format … spaces, new lines and tabs makes it look like a ticket you’d get from a travel agency in the 1970s. This format is also the reason why your name is truncated on your ticket (or so I was told). IT in the airline industry is insane and many systems are many decades old at this point. A bit surprised you have trouble with APIS though.
- Tomte 3y agoI have an umlaut in my last name. Once, checking in to a flight within China security didn‘t want to let me through. Because „Müller“ (as an example) on the passport is not identical to „Mueller“ on the ticket. I eventually made it through when I pointed out that the machine-readable code on the bottom of the passport contains the string „MUELLER“. Names outside US-ASCII are always problematic.
- netsharc 3y agohttps://geeksta.net/img/large/schei-encoding-white.jpg https://geeksta.net/img/large/schei-encoding-white.jpg I googled "Chinese passport" to have a look, and conveniently for them, they have the ASCII version of the owner's name under the Chinese name.
- p1mrx 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Chinese_passport_(2012_version).jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Chinese_passport_(2012_ve...
- dctoedt 3y agoObligatory XKCD reference: Little Bobby Tables — https://xkcd.com/327/ https://xkcd.com/327/
- soneil 3y agoSince we're sharing war stories .. I have an O'Name. My employer game me an email address, first.o'name@corp. This, while being technically valid, broke many things as you can imagine. I asked repeatedly to have it changed, but to no avail. I got used to reciting my ID number on the phone because that@corp worked too. One day, I got a call from IT, almost apologetically asking if they could change my email address because it was causing them issues. I pointed out I'd requested such approximately every 3 years since I started. It turns out they'd never received those requests. I'll give you two guesses ..
- layer8 3y agoA long time ago, I used “/” as a separator in email address localparts under my domain (as in “foo/bar@example.com”), because that’s a valid email address syntax and I filtered my email into corresponding folders. As it turned out, some MTAs mapped localparts to local file system paths, with my email addresses wreaking havoc…
- nneonneo 3y agoAh, time to use `foo/../../../etc/bar@example.com`! (Replace bar with passwd - I was blocked from submitting my original comment by Cloudflare's WAF...)
- pixl97 3y agoHeh, back in IE3 or IE4 days the temporary internet files directory would commonly save files temp files with the domain they came from without an extension. So if you visited microsoft.com it could save some asset in temp internet files as 'microsoft.com', which a com file is a valid executable extension. Of course this would trigger many anti-virus programs to scan it and now freak out that random content is ending up in executables. It took a bit of time between Microsoft making the temp internet a 'special directory' and AV working properly in the directory, and the browser not saving attacker controlled literals to the filesystem to get past these. Also fun in NTFS because it could cause bluescreens was the AUX, CON, PRNT filenames. Your post just reminded me of that kind of issue.
- nitnelave 3y agoMy wife's last name is only 2 letters long. Some websites don't accept that as it's too short (take that, Xi Jinping!) Conversely, I've had to fill forms in Korea that included space for only 4 letters, including both first and last name. Needless to say, my 3 first names plus last name didn't fit.
- qingcharles 3y agoI knew someone with a one letter first name "J". Most times he would have to put "Jay" as his first name. This caused big problems whenever he booked airlines tickets as the name on the ticket didn't match his ID.
- NoZebra120vClip 3y agoWhen my father was born, his parents gave him a normal given name, but endowed his middle initial as only a single letter. They said, when he grew up he could choose whatever name fit that initial. The initial happened to match his father's given name, and when he was old enough, he reliably chose to take that name as his middle name. It is certainly an endearing story of filial devotion, and a distinct lack of finicky SQL databases or web input validation in the 1950s.
- Tommstein 3y ago> I knew someone with a one letter first name "J". I wonder if we know the same guy. There can't be many Js running around.
- qingcharles 3y agoLives in LA?
- Tommstein 3y agoNope, unless he's moved and I don't know about it (haven't talked to him in a long time). Looks like there may be at least two Js running around!
- plasticbugs 3y agoI can pile on to this. I had to rename my employer's Microsoft Teams app because it doesn't autocomplete the app's name after an apostrophe is typed in the Microsoft Teams app (both native and web). For example, typing "@O'Shaughnessy Demo App" into Teams to fire off a command to our bot would automatically stop populating the autocompletes after the apostrophe is typed. So users would be forced to scroll through the entire list of usernames that begin with O to get to our app name to type a command into our bot. Our workaround was to rename the application to "Demo App by O'Shaughnessy". Microsoft is aware of the bug after we posted in their dev forums, but has not fixed it yet. You'd think that typing the full "@O'Shaughnessy Demo App do thing" into the app without relying on autocomplete would work, but it does not.
- cerved 3y agoI don't expect anything to work in Teams
- OldGuyInTheClub 3y agoIt makes me miss Skype for Business. Teams is down there with Sharepoint in terms of craptaculence.
- giancarlostoro 3y agoI still miss MSN. It just worked for non-work stuff. I met my wife during the peak MSN years.
- pixl97 3y agoAh, little Bobby Tables must be this guys son.
- deathanatos 3y agoMy given name includes a generational suffix (a roman numeral); my home state, upon issuing a drivers license, wrote that out as an arabic ordinal numeral. E.g., instead of "III" for "the third", I got "3RD". On an official government ID. I eventually moved, and every state after that wasn't quite that dumb. Needless to say, this matches nothing at all, like airline tickets, or my birth certificate or passport. Shockingly, this was never a problem.
- layer8 3y agoMaybe Unicode should specify an equivalent of UAX #31 [0] for person names. ;) [0] https://unicode.org/reports/tr31/ https://unicode.org/reports/tr31/
- dpedu 3y agoI didn't notice the date of the article until I got down to the screenshots of the old Mac OS X "aqua" UI controls. And wow, I forgot how good they looked. The drop-downs just scream "interact with me, you can click on me" unlike this flat and low contrast stuff we have today. I miss it.
- gumby 3y agoAuthor didn't mention the other problem which is that sometimes the hyphen is replaced with a space rather than being dropped (while other sites, or sometimes other parts of the same system) won't accept a space either. Plenty of people do have spaces in their surnames (like Conan Doyle) and shouldn't the system be able to distinguish between "Conan Doyle" and "Conan-Doyle"?)
- zqna 3y ago90% of Lithuanian girls/women last names end with ė. Which is mandated by the government, so as long as parents hold Lithuanian passports then you will be stuck with your ė. So, good luck opening a bank account abroad for your baby daughter.
- medo-bear 3y ago> 90% of Lithuanian girls/women last names end with ė. Which is mandated by the government Why is this mandated by the government?
- hutzlibu 3y agoCultural war it seems. "VLKK Chairperson Violeta Meiliūnaitė claims that legalising such a spelling would “violate the Lithuanian name system and have a negative impact on the country’s linguistic and cultural identity and distinctiveness”." https://media.efhr.eu/2023/09/27/vlkk-legalisation-of-female-surnames-with-an-a-ending-would-have-a-negative-impact-on-the-language/ https://media.efhr.eu/2023/09/27/vlkk-legalisation-of-female...
- pwdisswordfishc 3y agoThere is a legal requirement to adjust names to conform to Lithuanian morphology. This includes foreign names.
- robocat 3y agoChildren's names are restricted in many countries (including my own, New Zealand): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naming_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naming_law Hopefully someone will add the reason for Lithuania. Iceland: Parents are limited to choosing children's names from the Personal Names Register, which as of 2013 approved 1800 names for each gender. Since 2019 given names are no longer restricted by gender. The Icelandic Naming Committee maintains the list and hears requests for exceptions. New Zealand: Below is a list of banned names in New Zealand:* [Asterisk], 4Real, 89, Anal, Bishop, Constable, H-Q, II, III, Justice, Justus, Knight, Lucifer, Mafia No Fear, Minister, Mr, Queen Victoria, Royale, Saint, Sex Fruit, Talula Does The Hula From Hawaii. Note I suspect * is special because I think it is a is placeholder in the Dept. Internal Affairs for none (I had an acquaintance that changed their name to a single word and the asterisk appeared in their surname field officially - also see http://wookware.org/name.html http://wookware.org/name.html ) And hilariously Australia had this girl called Methamphetamine Rules recently: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/sep/19/can-you-name-your-baby-methamphetamine-rules-in-australia https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/sep/19/can-y...
- widforss 3y agoMy name is Aron Gunnar Mauritz Widforss (chill out, I'm Swedish, so everything about me is public anyway). In Sweden this does not cause me any problem because every person and system understands to refer to me as Aron Widforss. Well, I don't live in Sweden ... so right now every system is presenting me as Aron Gunnar Mauritz, making every person interacting with those system refering to me as Aron Gunnar Mauritz. Which is madness to me. Naming customs are subtle and hard for other cultures to grasp.
- FlyingSnake 3y ago> I'm Swedish, so everything about me is public anyway I'm confused, Isn't EU much more privacy focused and with GDPR etc it's easier to reduce your internet footprint?
- widforss 3y agoYes, unless your data is part of a public database. The principle of public access to official records [1] combined with the Swedish freedom of the press act [2] makes my full name, our version of the SSN, an estimate of my salary as well as my address just a google search away. Which is not a problem for me. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_public_access_to_official_records https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_public_access_to_... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_Freedom_of_the_Press_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_Freedom_of_the_Press_A... EDIT: There are even search engines to find out who in an area have been convicted of various crimes.
- bombcar 3y agoWhich is doubly funny because a common childhood rhyme here is “My name is John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt” - if you can’t handle that name you should rewrite your program.
- Am4TIfIsER0ppos 3y agoThe systems are dropping your surname or are condensing the others to a first name?
- xlii 3y agoI had my share of problems, so I didn't use non-latin chars in my name as much as possible, but there was an instance that really surprised me. It was around 2010 and I joined (as a contract) company which used Google's Cloud Platform for their products. It was initial phase, but stuff was ramping up quite quickly. So, since I was contractor, and it was supposed to be short gig, access was given to my Google account, which was one of not that many places that had my full name visible (mostly for visibility and official matters). Week or two later I was to do something with CDN, or Cloud Files, don't remember the product, but it was managed through Python script. As soon as I logged in and tried to do something I got familiar error about unsupported encoding. That was weird, but as that was Python script I quickly figured out that the reason was that Google was pulling my name from their account and their script couldn't handle it. Oh well, happens, I mailed support (what a time to be alive back then!) and went toward my way not really expecting much. I received response shortly after, that in this case it wasn't possible to fix the access script. After few back and forth where I pushed against using latin chars in every Google product possibly support finished with something along the lines "well, you can just change your name in that case". Funnily enough, for company that was hiring me it was the last straw and they took their business elsewhere. I, personally, was annoyed for a long time, but today it only makes for a good anecdote. I never used any GCP products though.
- giancarlostoro 3y agoI avoid all of this by just using my father's last name instead of using the hyphens. If it's not something purely official like a job application, banking, etc, I don't care enough to put my full last name. I guess I've been doing it so long, I never realized how broken some sites are for people. Even when I get employed, I just register as "Giancarlos Toro" everywhere.
- Tommstein 3y agoIn a similar vein, I remember people giving me shit at some point because some fingerprint reader sucked at reading my fingerprint, like it was my fingerprint's fault and not the shitty fingerprint reader's. That's not how it works . . . .
- bombcar 3y agoWife has a capital in the middle of her first name, no spaces. Think JoAnn. Surprising number of systems can’t handle this gracefully even when they handle McGuffin as a last name just fine.
- EarthAmbassador 3y agoMeta and a Google have both deigned to butcher Latin surnames which often have spaces. Monocultural government and customer service reps do it too. The result is 100 aliases in my credit report with forms of my name I would never use, and many conversations spent explaining and proving my identity.
- bensonn 3y agoI love the war stories people are sharing. I am surprised nobody is addressing the main point of the article- the frustration of being blamed. Mistakes and technical limitations are understandable, but why blame the customer? An automated error message was still written by a human. Human people decided the response to "invalid characters". Subbing in a computer for a human doesn't create a valid excuse. Saying, "being nice doesn't scale", doesn't make things right. My war story- tried to get a copy of my birth certificate. My mother doesn't have a middle name. Never did. First and last only. The county office required me to tell them her middle name. After much arguing they said her last name was her married name and her middle name was her maiden name. When I asked what her name was before marriage, I finally got it much to the dismay of the employees. At least I had a human to look at. That eventually, with much work, used common sense over programmed logic.
- scooke 3y agoYou think this is bad? Imagine having three names; you go by the 3rd, but always get addressed with the first. The first - WALTER.
- caligula1989 3y ago[flagged]
- happytoexplain 3y agoIt's not rude of the developer, it's rude of the message in that context. I.e. it's rude of the computer, due to a non-rude oversight of the developer. But guess who doesn't know any different? Most people. Regardless, it's not bitching to describe that reality, and the problem is interesting. In fact, nowadays, the tendency to overreact to overreactions is just as big a source of uncalled-for negativity as the ostensible first-hand complaining. I don't perceive any actual offense in the blog post, the way you're using the word, but I do perceive it in your post. I could be wrong on both counts, but that's my perception on reading.
- mo_42 3y agoWe just have too many assumptions about names. There should only be one input field that asks for a name. Even systems that require a legal name should be like that as there are people whose legal name cannot be written in two forms.
- crooked-v 3y agoI once had a distant co-worker whose entire legal name was "Steel". It was a government job, so I can only imagine what sort of nightmares he went through for payroll.
- Tor3 3y agoAnother one is where they have a limit on how short a name can be. I even remember a discussion on the Linux kernel mailing list about that. Linus himself wouldn't accept names shorter than (IIRC) three letters. But I was in high school with a guy from another country, his name consisted of a single letter. He didn't even have a first or last name, only that letter. And it was official - when the loans and stipends arrived it was all printed on the common wall on 132-char folding paper, from the governmental student loan bank. His name (one letter) was there. (p.s. I did present what I wrote above on said mailing list back then, but as far as I remember people simply decided to ignore it as too rare to care about, in addition to those who for some reason taught I just made it up (why should I?))
- seszett 3y agoA former French secretary of state for the digital sector was Cédric O. I think it's a Korean name originally.
- mmis1000 3y agoEven your name can be written into two fields. Assume order of first name and last name is also problematic. There are languages that put the Last name on the front. It looks kinda annoying (or even solecism in some condition) when someone speaks your name in reverse.
- piva00 3y agoHacker News user patio11's list of falsehoods programmers believe about names[1] is always fun to be thrown into these discussions. Follow-up from this John Graham-Cumming article around the same time. [1] https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...
- eesmith 3y agohttps://shinesolutions.com/2018/01/08/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names-with-examples/ https://shinesolutions.com/2018/01/08/falsehoods-programmers... gives examples. One counter-example for "People have, at this point in time, one full name which they go by." I learned from the 2020 election concerned the Georgia voter fraud claim that someone used the name "James Blalock" to vote, years after he died in January 2006. Thing is, it was his 96-year-old widow, "Mrs. James Blalock Jr.", who voted. That was the name she registered as, back when using "Mrs. <Husband>" was a common custom.
- lostlogin 3y ago“People have exactly one full name which they go by.” My case was actually this. I took a call from a person with a name that was one word. Not first name, not last name, just one word. I never found them in the system as the name wasn’t in the database as far as I could tell. They were quite irritated.
- jbverschoor 3y agoThat’s a different problem. I’ve word as the full name. People can have multiple full names.
- lostlogin 3y agoAre these any rules with names? Having nothing at all might be something that doesn’t happen. Edit: Nope, rule 40.
- paranoidrobot 3y ago
- _glass 3y agoMy last name contains the character ß. This silently fails often, that's why I put in ss almost everywhere, because a lot of important mail had then encoding errors. Also difficult is the transition between different countries, that don't have this letter. In Germany for official communication it has to be ß, but in the other country it has to be ss. That's why we need proper unicode support everywhere.
- gwd 3y ago> That's why we need proper unicode support everywhere. A couple of years ago when I wrote a little webapp to do some scheduling stuff for our community's yearly conference, I just used plain unicode strings for usernames, including spaces. I didn't really see why not: The database (SQLite) handles unicode, the backend (golang) handles unicode, the frontend handles unicode, nothing ever gets passed into a shell program or put into CSV or anything, all queries are parameterized; why bother making pointless restrictions?
- aftoprokrustes 3y agoThis is I think a much bigger issue, and pretty much impossible to understand for most users: the fact that the frontend happily accepted your name/e-mail/whatever is _not_ an proof that it can handle it. I tried to use gmail's feature that you own all addresses of the form my.name+whatever@gmail.com when registering to services, but it silently failed so often that I do not even bother trying anymore.
- lifestyleguru 3y agoA mere email... I had a situation with a bank when their website accepted new password but the backend implicitly and without feedback trimmed the new password to 10 characters.
- happymellon 3y agoHSBC had this problem. Not sure if it still does, but it's a big enough institution that I feel it deserves being called out.
- bschwindHN 3y agoThis still happens regularly in Japan (and elsewhere I'm sure). "Enter your name" -Okay here's my name "No, you need to enter your name in kanji. Of course, everyone has a kanji name, right?" That, along with refusing half-width roman characters, requiring them to be full-width and all that kinda shit. Basically stating up front on their own website that they suck at programming.
- fusslo 3y agoI wonder if a kanji name is a legally recognized name. Like, I don't know kanji, could I just pick random characters that end up being nonsense? or will I get in trouble interesting anecdote
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- adelie 3y agoyou can't really have a 'nonsense' name - there's a list of around 3000 characters you're allowed to use in names, but in theory, you can put together whatever you want. you'll just get side-eyed for having a weird name, that's all. that being said, i think most of these websites that ask for a kanji name will require you to show ID with that name when you show up in person, so you might run into trouble if you just pick random characters.
- SenHeng 3y agoThere are only 3000 legal kanji characters. But people have started naming their children in hiragana and katakana. Still no romaji allowed. Yet.
- kansai 3y agoYou can register a legal alias (通称名) that you can use on forms. I know people who have done this with just single a single kanji to avoid a lot of the headache associated with having a foreign name or (god forbid) a middle name. I've considered a few times registering my legal alias as 一一 to have a two stroke full name.
- brunoTbear 3y agoI was concerned that the author might have been running into the Scunthorpe Problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem). My last name contains a naughty substring. I feel for the author and their hyphen!
- dessimus 3y agoOr similarly a clbuttic mistake (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/clbuttic https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/clbuttic).
- labster 3y agoThat used to be a mbuttive problem.
- brian_cunnie 3y agoI couldn't make changes to my USPS (United States Postal Service) account for years because it kept flagging my last name, "Cunnie", as an obscenity.
- ant6n 3y ago„ear“? „ar“?
- labster 3y agoI’m starting to think Bruno has been lying to us about being a bear all this time
- brunoTbear 3y agoIt would be rather silly to assume all bears have the same last name "bear"! It's not as if people all walk around saying "Oh hi I'm Timothy Human" "Nice to meet you, I'm Rachel Human, are we related?" Which, come to think of it, is kind of a funny notion, and a nice reminder that despite our differences we really are all related!
- 3y ago
- willmacdonald 3y agoMy last name is Macdonald, however most banks in the UK change it to MacDonald, which is incorrect.
- Engineering-MD 3y agoClearly the easiest solution is the alls caps last name convention: MACDONALD which wold be correct for both
- 4ggr0 3y agoThat annoys me on lots of US-based websites. ä, ö, ü etc. seem to be well supported, but my name contains a rarer character/accent combination(still not that rare and very common in lots of places) and I frequently have the issue that american websites tell me that my name is invalid. European websites never bother me about it, of course :) Doesn't bother me that much but I've had moments where a service told me that "Your name MUST match the name on your ID", only to then complain that I can't use a certain character. Which is present on my ID. Well.
- Symbiote 3y agoFortunately it's only my address, but "København Ø" fails even on websites in Europe sometimes. The postman understands "Kbenhavn", "K~#benhavn >&" and so on. Very occasionally some address verification thing can't match my address, as one side or the other within their system is corrupting it.
- vidarh 3y agoNorway has a village that's just named "Å"...
- euroderf 3y ago> I've had moments where a service told me that "Your name MUST match the name on your ID", only to then complain that I can't use a certain character. Which is present on my ID. Well. In a just world, the website would be taken offline at once, and kept off until fixed.
- undebuggable 3y agoEven for an European in another European country one has to have prepared ASCII-alised name(s), surname, and address in home country. ASCII characters and digits only. The variety of systems, encodings, and input methods is legendary, complaining is pointless. BTW JGC says his surname contains a hyphen but technically he is using the minus character.
- Symbiote 3y agoHe is using the Unicode "Hyphen-Minus" character. This is the hyphen-minus, U+002D: - (and ASCII too) This is a hyphen, U+2010: ‐ This is a minus, U+2212: −
- bux93 3y agoI don't know if complaining is pointless in your situation. Some Belgian citizen did, and they got a ruling that the bank needs to upgrade their EBCDIC system to support diacritics to spell their last name correctly. https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/10/ebcdic-is-incompatible-with-gdpr/ https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/10/ebcdic-is-incompatible-with... I don't know if the bank ended up fixing it, though.
- undebuggable 3y agoThere always exists that one institution which will not accept your diacritics and usually it's a bank, city hall, tax office, or an airline.
- ytch 3y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37332126 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37332126 > Ask HN: How to handle Asian-style “Family name first” when designing interfaces? the discuss shows it's so hard to handle name of people from any countries.
- spuz 3y agoI'd like to think that we've made progress in web development in the last 14 years. I wonder if people like JGC still experiences this kind of issue on certain websites?
- rustybolt 3y agoAn employee of a major US airline had the audacity to declare my last name invalid, and literally made me pick a different name that "the system" would accept. My last name literally only uses ASCII characters, not even dashes or accents. I did pick another name at that time because I had been waiting for an hour, so practical concerns trumped principles, but it's ten years later and I still feel offended when I think about this.
- palmfacehn 3y agoHow does that work when they check your ID at security?
- deathanatos 3y agoMy tickets rarely, if ever, have my name correctly on them. It is nearly always truncated. It has literally never been an issue, and I suspect the agents are just used to this.
- delecti 3y agoLucky. The one time I flew when my ID didn't match my ticket (using an airline account that I forgot to update with my married name first) and it was a pretty big headache. I had to stand in the security line for about 15 extra minutes for them to verify that yes First Maidenlast was the same person as First Marriedlast. I made sure to get the situation fixed before my return flight.
- hutzlibu 3y agoThen you have to rely on the common sense of the person checking you.
- lifestyleguru 3y agoI was likely some COBOL system with UI displayed by some miracle on a modern PC with windows. The employee probably didn't even know what encoding is, they didn't intent to question your identity.