10 ms·
When your last name is Null, nothing works
- aquafox 2y agoFWIW, Null is the German word for zero.
- Terretta 2y agoThe real mistake is Hoare not also offering a type for "na". "No value" and "not applicable" are entirely different cases...
- impish9208 2y agoGift link: https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/null-last-name-computer-scientists-forms-f0a43b08?st=2u7onu https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/null-last-name-computer-scient...
- neonate 2y agohttps://archive.ph/KxNNu https://archive.ph/KxNNu
- robertlagrant 2y agoWho's checking if a string matches "null" rather than is null!?
- portaouflop 2y ago[flagged]
- bandrami 2y agoOh friend.... you have so much to learn
- lores 2y agoAny time "$var" is interpolated without check into an INSERT, and any maintainer finds it easier to just check for null as a string rather than ask a DB admin or committee to update the DB after a lot of red tape and risk assessment. So... very often.
- hsbauauvhabzb 2y agoGuess I’ll change my name to ‘;drop table customers then ;)
- lores 2y agoYou can make a good case to spend time sanitising requests to avoid catastrophic failure, but the "null" problem is one that quickly becomes a lot of work and risk to fix after the fact, for no obvious benefit except what's seen as the pedantry of some nerd, so it gets ranked all the way at the back of the list... until someone named Null comes along, and probably still even then.
- hsbauauvhabzb 2y agoI disagree. If your system is failing to correctly type check strings during SQL interpolation, you should probably kill it with fire.
- lores 2y agoI don't disagree... In most cases, it's not your system, though, it's someone else's.
- hsbauauvhabzb 2y ago> You can make a good case to spend time sanitising requests > In most cases, it's not your system, though You can’t pick and chose whether you own a system or not when presented with an opposing argument. That’s not how this works.
- lores 2y ago"System owner, we need to spend $10K to sanitise requests or a kid can destroy our business overnight". "System owner, we need to spend $10K to clean up the database and code so that null and "null" are not the same thing, even though it works 99.99% of the time". Do you see the difference?
- hsbauauvhabzb 2y agoThere’s a few condescending answers here. You will find this more common in weakly typed languages like PHP and VB and maaaaaybe JavaScript, where null == “null” will probably evaluate to true.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- IggleSniggle 2y agojs doesn't have this particular problem, but it does have both `null` and `undefined`, which will have varying semantically different usages depending on local conventions. For example, some will prefer to use `null` to mean that a value is _intentionally_ missing (for example, the db explicitly returned a null value), while `undefined` does not have any such connotation. These exist for frontend engineers to navigate decisions often far removed from their influence. Anyway, `null != ''` and `null != 'null'`, but `null == undefined`. However, `null !== undefined`. A lot has been made of js Truthy/Falsy equality operator, but most js programmers will take steps to actively avoid it coming into play. Probably the `void` operator is still under-used though in frontend code, though, since there's some pretty surprising legacy things that can happen when interacting with DOM APIs (like `checkbox.onclick = () => doSomething()` resulting in different checkbox behavior depending on whether or not `doSomething` returns a boolean or undefined).
- hsbauauvhabzb 2y agoI would call myself a relatively good developer and I fully understood type checking occurred via ===, and compare by value caught me. In my defence, I assumed this was less of an issue in modern JS, but thou shall not break backward comparability, apparently.
- koakuma-chan 2y agoI treat usage of `==` in JavaScript as undefined behavior.
- Sohcahtoa82 2y ago
- hotsauceror 2y agoPeople who neither know, nor care, what they’re doing. When you’ve worked with people who are allowed to write code that interfaces with databases for more than about two weeks, you may be dismayed to see the large overlap between those two groups.
- CivBase 2y agoPlenty of systems represent all values as strings, and "null" is the obvious (although probably not the best) way to represent a null value as a string.
- francisofascii 2y agoWhich systems do this? I could see situations where reading in a text file, you have might assume the value null is not the string "null". I am struggling to think of other situations.
- CivBase 2y agoBash, C strings, URL query strings, and CSVs off the top of my head.
- WantonQuantum 2y agoC definitely does not represent null as a string.
- CivBase 2y agoNo, but it also doesn't let you store null in a string variable. Well... it does, but that would just be an empty string.
- jpc0 2y agoIn C, and many other languages at that, strings are just arrays of bytes. So you absolutely could store null in a string... It is even a valid ascii and UTF character. Now most string handling functions treat it as the end of a string in C but that is only by convention. How you would display null to a user is a different story all together but representing it in a string is not an unsolved programming problem, generally its when you need to actually display null that it becomes a hard problem because how do you display the absence of something, specifically when a space is not an absence. How do you serialise a string... Well it's already serialised given your specific endianness... So you just indicate that... This is 280 bytes of UTF8 data... It can contain as many nulls as you like, until you get 280 bytes of data you don't have all of it.
- bilekas 2y agoPeople who know that the majority of people are stupid and will mess up even nulls.
- mtmail 2y agoThere's plenty of name=Null, name=Undefined, name=Unknown entries in OpenStreetMap. Some are real places, some are mistakes, not easy to tell especially for restaurants or bars.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- kalleboo 2y agoColdFusion/ActionScript https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4456438/how-to-pass-null-a-real-surname-to-a-soap-web-service-in-actionscript-3 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4456438/how-to-pass-null...
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- arkh 2y agoI'd guess some data transferred between systems as a homemade CSV. Empty field = empty string, but some field is nullable so someone decided that Null would be a way to declare a null field. 20 years later and multiple systems depending on each others, random hidden CRONs in the middle and now people called Null have a problem.
- CSMastermind 2y agoThis happened to a kid in my high school. Last name null, broke the system they used to print report cards.
- Vilian 2y agoMandatory https://xkcd.com/327/ https://xkcd.com/327/
- drpossum 2y agoWhy is this mandatory? Who made the mandate?
- dwaltrip 2y agoIt’s a bit. It’s quite popular to link an xkcd whenever it’s relevant, along with one of a few different catch phrases. “Mandatory” being one of those. For this phrase in particular, the joke is that there is usually an xkcd for most situations, and that it is our “duty” as nerds to link to the appropriate one. It’s an inside joke for nerds. I hope this explains the custom to you.
- impish9208 2y ago> It’s an inside joke for nerds. I love inside jokes. I hope to be a part of one someday.
- Vilian 2y agoBobby tables has a gun on my back
- RandomBacon 2y ago> Who made the mandate? I did
- femto 2y agoIt gets to the point where you don't have to click the link. You just think "Oh, #327 again." Maybe xkcd needs its own url scheme, something like: xkcd://327 Edit: Written 8 years ago: https://github.com/biappi/XKCDUrlScheme https://github.com/biappi/XKCDUrlScheme
- renatovico 2y agomy have a ç and during first 10-15 years all system broken and my "vat" first letter is 0 same problem, if the dba genius use integer random bugs happen :(
- gingersnap 2y agohttps://xkcd.com/327/ https://xkcd.com/327/
- brazzy 2y agoLittle Bobby Tables is all grown up and has had their first kid, Ignore All Previous Instructions
- hughdbrown 2y agoAnd owns the eatery, Restaurants Near Me.
- epolanski 2y agoI knew a person who's full name was `Mai Null`. It always made me laugh because "Mai Null" means "never null" in Italian and because he's had plenty of issues due to his family name.
- Davidbrcz 2y agoThat should be part of every test suite
- AlotOfReading 2y agoFor many years, my mother's proper legal name on her birth certificate was the empty string. This wasn't usually a problem before computers as she'd go by a given name instead, even on government paperwork. She started having issues with systems being unable to process her information in the late 90s and early 2000s. Background checks would fail, passports couldn't be issued, and so on. She eventually had it changed, but I imagine it'd be even worse now.
- great_wubwub 2y agoThere must be an interesting backstory here. Did her parents deliberately not name her? Did they forget?
- andrewmcwatters 2y agoAh yes! Little miss (indecipherable silence).
- boxed 2y agoI mean.. there are tons of people without last names in the world. https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...
- easton 2y agoAnd first names, which causes some government agencies to put FNU in that field for "first name unknown". My mom told me about a time they had someone with that situation at work, and people would call the person FNU until they were corrected.
- DC-3 2y agoI have my own mildly amusing story of breaking systems with my name. I have a twin with the same first initial. Any time we had to use a system at school which constructed usernames from some combination of first initial, surname, and date of birth, only one account would be provisioned between the two of us. It became almost a ritual in the first term of the school year for us to make a visit to IT Support and request a second account... there was always a bit of contention between us about who got the 'proper' username and who got the disambiguated one!
- seafoamteal 2y agoIt's weird that none of the systems automatically fell back to disambiguating with a number or something similar if the 'proper' one already existed. I'm wondering if you were a year or two apart instead, would the system simply silently fail to create a new username for the younger sibling when they joined?
- philipwhiuk 2y agoIf they were a year or two apart the DOB would have disambiguated it.
- philipwhiuk 2y agoAt my school you were provisioned as <two-digit-start><first-three-firstname><first-three-last-name>. e.g. Joe Bloggs starting in 2000 is 00joeblo Cue problems when two "Simon Smith" join in the same year. They were given 00simsmi and 00smisim I think. I am pretty sure they spent 7 years at school forwarding each other email as various teachers assumed the default would work.
- ghaff 2y agoA former employer had a first letter of given name + last name (actually first 5 letters) convention for email addresses. They did have a fallback--usually with second letter of given name. But, of course, a lot of people just automatically emailed the convention with the result that certain email "twins" got misdirected mail. A very common one at one point was that the CFO shared a first letter of name with his daughter. As I recall, he actually had the email in the usual convention so it's not like his daughter was receiving lots of highly confidential financial info but there was regularly misdirected mail.
- zenethian 2y agoThe number of times that a website rejects my first name because it has a hyphen in it, even in 2025, is astounding. I get told all manner of things by support staff, like "just leave it out" as if it's just not an important part of my name or anything.
- andrewmcwatters 2y agoSame, as someone with two middle names. Both scenarios are very common.
- jihadjihad 2y agoI’ve wondered about this myself, though I only have one middle name. Do you typically enter both middle names into the “Middle Name” form field?
- fallinghawks 2y agoNot the person you asked, but I also have a 2 word middle name. I enter both but it's a crapshoot as to whether it will take the first, the second, or both. I think a lot of older systems could handle 2 words in the first name (e.g. Joe Bob or Mary Ann) but not the middle.
- fph 2y agoIf your full name is John Charles Paul Jacob Smith, then by definition the middle name is "Paul" right?
- Detrytus 2y agoSo with even number of names there would be no middle name at all? :)
- kmoser 2y agoMr. T once joked that his first name was "Mr", his middle name was the period, and his last name was "T": https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=10158317051194205 https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=10158317051194205
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- andrewmcwatters 2y agoI think we should all embrace a future where legal names are just straight up binary streams. I can finally realize my true potential and be recognized as Mr. “:100 emoji:(Unicode zero-width joiner):fire emoji:(null character)(base64 encoding of a QR code that links to a website with a photo of my face),(vcard data, recursively referencing this last name somehow)”
- BonoboIO 2y agoBig Endian or Little Endian ;-)
- smallstepforman 2y agoBOM?
- kmoser 2y agoThat discriminates against people whose names cannot be written in Unicode. You need to include the ability to accept various image formats, as well as audio for names that don't have a written form.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- hcarvalhoalves 2y agoE. Musk son’s name will be fun. Hyphen, number and uncommon unicode character.
- world2vec 2y agoI have 4 names (two first names and two surnames), pretty common thing in my country. But I've had issues several times when flying because they assume it's two different people? How stupid is that?
- ghaff 2y agoI have one airline that just tacked my middle name (which I basically never use) directly onto my first name for my account. It's never been an issue so I haven't ever gone to the trouble of correcting it but it means I always have the "wrong" first name on my tickets relative to my official IDs.
- DidYaWipe 2y agoYeah, why aren't names quoted in these systems? It seems that this Null problem is specific example of failure to quote strings properly. What about last names like "da Silva"?
- tromp 2y agoRelated: Null Island [1] > Null Island is the location at zero degrees latitude and zero degrees longitude (0°N 0°E), i.e., where the prime meridian and the equator intersect. Since there is no landmass located at these coordinates, it is not an actual island. The name is often used in mapping software as a placeholder to help find and correct database entries that have erroneously been assigned the coordinates 0,0. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_Island https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_Island
- dang 2y agoSee the "islands" section of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43121116 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43121116!
- gxonatano 2y agoMy name, Ĝonatano, contains a ĝ, which is an uncommon letter outside of my language, Esperanto. But when I go to set my username to "ĝonatano," I'm often told that usernames "may only contain letters or underscores," as if ĝ weren't a letter. (You can see that I've approximated it in my HN username, but I don't need to do that on web services that correctly understand that letters exist outside of ASCII and Latin-1.)
- noahjk 2y agoTo be fair, Esperanto is, as far as I can tell, not very widely used. The letter ĝ mostly returns Esperanto results. Using that letter in a place where others may need to communicate or type the letter would be a severe burden on almost anyone else you interact with, outside of Esperanto communities. I'm sure there are plenty of people who share your frustration with accented letters, ñ, umlauts, etc, though. I'd hope that most systems can handle those letters, although I wouldn't hold out hope that Ĝ/ĝ would be high on the priority list.
- gxonatano 2y ago> as far as I can tell, not very widely used Well, it's the most widely spoken international language, spoken in over a hundred countries, by an estimated 2-5M people. There's a rich literature (probably 30-50K books), vibrant music scene, and support in open source software (Linux, Firefox, Google products) is usually pretty good. But the issue is not how widely Esperanto, or any other language, is spoken. If you assume that languages should only be supported according to their number of speakers, you leave no room for useful languages, bridge languages, auxiliary languages, or growing languages. Even if Esperanto had only 100 speakers, it'd be worthwhile to support, if it's easy to learn, and easy for non-speakers to understand. It's not a "severe burden" to consider non-ASCII letters as letters. Unicode is pretty straightforward to work with, and if you want to support more than just English, it's a necessity. There's no need to have a "priority list" of letters you consider more or less important than others. That attitude comes across as very Anglocentric.
- deleted 2y ago
- dang 2y agoRelated. Others? Names: Hello, I'm Mr. Null. My Name Makes Me Invisible to Computers (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42922038 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42922038 - Feb 2025 (35 comments) We have an employee whose surname is Null (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41939162 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41939162 - Oct 2024 (6 comments) We have an employee whose surname is Null (2010) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34115623 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34115623 - Dec 2022 (17 comments) How to pass “Null” (a real surname) to a SOAP web service? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21492461 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21492461 - Nov 2019 (10 comments) My last name makes me invisible to Computers (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15046223 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15046223 - Aug 2017 (135 comments) Hello, I’m Mr. Null. My Name Makes Me Invisible to Computers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12426315 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12426315 - Sept 2016 (208 comments) If your name is 'Null,' you may have problems doing anything online - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11375282 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11375282 - March 2016 (1 comment) Hello, I’m Mr. Null. My Name Makes Me Invisible to Computers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10512811 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10512811 - Nov 2015 (24 comments) An actual guy named “Null” messes up people's databases - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9390569 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9390569 - April 2015 (4 comments) We have an employee whose last name is Null (2010) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6738743 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6738743 - Nov 2013 (35 comments) We have an employee whose last name is Null. He kills our employee lookup (2012) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6140631 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6140631 - Aug 2013 (236 comments) An employee, whose last name is Null, kills our employee lookup app - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3900224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3900224 - April 2012 (148 comments) --- License plates: A 'Null' License Plate Landed One Hacker in Ticket Hell (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31082288 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31082288 - April 2022 (11 comments) The 'NULL' License Plate (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29609924 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29609924 - Dec 2021 (6 comments) Guy got the license plate “NULL” and it was a total disaster - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23913507 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23913507 - July 2020 (9 comments) NULL license plate not such a bright idea - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20676904 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20676904 - Aug 2019 (467 comments) --- Islands: The Many Lives of Null Island - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41073777 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41073777 - July 2024 (21 comments) Null Island Tourist Shirt - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38713055 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38713055 - Dec 2023 (44 comments) Null Island is one of the most visited places on Earth, and it doesn’t exist - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35651871 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35651871 - April 2023 (87 comments) Null Island, the most real of fictional places [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31080519 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31080519 - April 2022 (37 comments) Null Island - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21854780 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21854780 - Dec 2019 (56 comments) If You Can’t Follow Directions, You’ll End Up on Null Island - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12090980 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12090980 - July 2016 (54 comments) The Republic of NULL Island - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11734180 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11734180 - May 2016 (15 comments) The Geographical Oddity of Null Island - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11600396 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11600396 - April 2016 (14 comments) A Brief History of Null Island - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10949292 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10949292 - Jan 2016 (7 comments)
- aithrowawaycomm 2y agoThis is hilarious: Even those without the last name Null are finding themselves caught in the void. Joseph Tartaro got a license plate with the word “NULL” on it nearly 10 years ago. The 36-year-old security auditor thought it would be funny to drive around with the symbol for an empty value. Maybe a police officer who tried to give him a ticket would end up writing null into the system and not be able to process it, he joked to himself. In 2018 he paid a $35 parking ticket. Soon afterward, he said, his mailbox was flooded with hundreds of traffic tickets for incidents he hadn’t been involved in. Tickets were from other counties and cities for vehicles of different colors, makes and models. A database had associated the word “null” with his personal information and citations were sent to Tartaro, who lives in Los Angeles.
- sepositus 2y ago> A database had associated the word “null” with his personal information and citations were sent to Tartaro, who lives in Los Angeles. I'm not the biggest expert on databases, although I've worked with them a bit, but how does this occur in the first place? Usually, associations are done with primary/foreign keys. What database would allow null in that case?
- TheBozzCL 2y agoIt'd be sufficient if a system involved somewhere in the process converted null values to strings. There's innumerable ways, but here's a simple one in Java: final String myNullString = "" + null; System.out.println(myNullString);
- dragonwriter 2y agoIf there are multiple systems involved, one of them produces a null and the other takes that as a key to create a record, but somewhere in between it gets stringified, then the string null might be accepted by a system using string keys.
- h4ck_th3_pl4n3t 2y agoAnd here we have identified that the system doing that uses PHP and its associative arrays.
- cafard 2y agoAlmost 30 years ago, the nutritionist Gary Null published books, had a show on Pacifica and so on. His basic message, I think, was that we should eat a diet that was less heavy on meats and processed foods. This is probably not wrong, but I thought him a bad influence on the household menus. I did object to his Pacifica show--he or somebody he had on mentioned "the Twinkie defense" not as a farce but as a plausible judgment; and he had some AIDS quack on, whose advice could only have been dangerous to the HIV-positive.
- cortesoft 2y ago> His basic message, I think, was that we should eat a diet that was less heavy on meats and processed foods. So that was the Null hypothesis?
- James_K 2y agoIt's rather fun that computers have these magic words in them.
- b3lvedere 2y agoBack then i was so amazed i could "destroy" MS-DOS just by typing CTTY CLOCK$. Or Window 98 just by executing /CON/CON
- ProllyInfamous 2y agoAre these the MSFT equivalent of `rm -R` [delete everything on your linux box]?
- outermosthouse 2y agoThere is a great Radiolab podcast episode about the woes of null names: https://radiolab.org/podcast/null https://radiolab.org/podcast/null
- cvwright 2y agoI had a relative named Null, who worked in tech in the 80s, 90s, and 00s. Apparently it caused him so many issues that he finally gave up and changed his name to the name of the town where our family came from. I think he was a Java guy too. I’m sure that just made it worse.
- geoelectric 2y agoEspecially if he wanted kids, since I don’t think Java would’ve supported propagation.
- protocolture 2y ago>changed his name to the name of the town where our family came from. Was he from DROP TABLE?
- rco8786 2y agoMy last name is a popular Irish name with an apostrophe in it. I have tons of issues with my name in forms. I'm basically a walking SQL injection detector. But also I've started to drop the apostrophe in most of my online profiles and things. So I think we're starting to see the end of apostrophes in people's names, thanks to some fun oddities of the internet and common database technologies.
- layman51 2y agoDo you also get the apostrophe get mangled into something like `'` ?
- rco8786 2y agoAll the time!
- AndrewDavis 2y agoReminds me of the story of the French politician with a forward slash in their name. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emeline_K%2FBidi?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emeline_K%2FBidi?wprov=sfla1 I can't find a reference anywhere, but I remember reading that when their child was born they couldn't process a birth certificate with the name containing a slash, so it was changed to a dash for the kid.
- schnable 2y agoReading the article, I'd guess the introduction of the slash was introduced because the actual letter (Ꝃ) wasn't available on earlier technology like a typewriter. Funny that the "fix" caused problems with the next generation of tech.
- 6LLvveMx2koXfwn 2y agoAt least they had the excuse of being named - whoever came up with `/e/OS` as the name for a phone OS in the age of the internet needs a strong word! 1. https://e.foundation/e-os/ https://e.foundation/e-os/
- 2y ago
- dehrmann 2y agoOne place I worked, customers (usually merchants) sent product data through an API my team managed. I was working on a data validation project and ran across an item that was getting rejected. One of the fields customers can set is tags. The item was a t-shirt with a joke about null pointer exceptions, so someone set tags to include ["null", "pointer", "exception"]. Our parser coerced it to null, then returned an error because that array can't contain nulls.
- maxchristman 2y agoI have two middle names, and it amazes me how many digital systems cannot handle this in 2025. I have yet to find a bank that supports spaces in your middle name, and multiple airlines have decided to just concatenate my middle names together.
- genewitch 2y agoI have one middle name but a last name like "von Treer" and no DMV has ever put my name correctly on my license. They put it like j have two middle names, including "von" in that example. It gets me hassled every time a cop looks at it.
- rabiescow 2y agoHow you dont consider such scenarios setting up your database is mind boggling to me. I do this for a living, albeit, marketing databases, but how you don't realize that people from all over the world live here too and you have to account for everyone is just astonishing to me...
- kmoser 2y agoI think it's a combination of several factors: first, most banking and airline systems were developed back in the 1960s, and it was simply more convenient to shoehorn everybody into the first-middle-last format, especially when the majority of their customers did fit that model. Second, this was before the government (and businesses) were so picky about everything matching perfectly, and you could get away with mismatches more frequently because you had more human eyes looking at things. Those humans would easily realize that when the customer they've known for years as "Jane Smith" shows up with a birth certificate reading "Jayne Smith," it's the same person.
- elorm 2y agoHa I'm surprised no one mentioned one of the most common name maltreatment complaints. The Gaelic patronymic prefix Mc/Mac. When treating Mc/Mac names, the first letter after the prefix is always capitalised.. e.g McDonald's, McCarthy, McCain, McCoy, McConnell etc but you're more likely to see mcdonalds, mccoy, mcconnell. Orthographic case preservation reports were like the biggest complaints that no one was interested in fixing during a short stint in the airline industry. That and hyphenated names.
- tsm 2y agoMy surname is Macdonald—some ancestor generations ago decided to use the lowercase d. When I lived in the US it took considerable coaching to get humans not to write McDonald, and some just couldn't get it. I then moved to Scotland, where exactly zero people have defaulted to Mc instead of Mac. However, the computer systems of both the NHS and the University of Edinburgh apparently don't store the case of strings and reconstruct the capitalization after the fact. Both systems list me as MacDonald and there's nothing I can do about it. I'm relatively okay with this—before computers McDonald, MacDonald, Macdonald, and M'Donald were all functionally equivalent. But now I do worry about the implications of having official documents with variant spellings
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 2y agoWowrks where archive.ph is blocked: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/when-your-last-name-is-null-nothing-works/ar-AA1zqzoi https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/when-your-last-name-is-nul... Text-only: https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA1zqzoi https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA1zqzoi
- bustling-noose 2y agohumans should come with a big UUID that is generated at a central database to keep out duplicate and then just a name without any last name for social connections. this would also solve discrimination on many levels. would be a nightmare for privacy and tracking but we are all being tracked anyway.
- rabiescow 2y agothe CIA/NSA wet dream... We're not supposed to make it easier for them to control and target us...
- krior 2y agoI highly doubt that the lack of a unique identifier hampers their ability to track us.
- globular-toast 2y agoInteresting idea, but the point of uuid is to not be centralised, otherwise you'd just use a serial number. So if we assume everyone is born in a room with an address everyone could have a uuid like xxxx-yyyy-zzzz where xxxx is the postcode/zip code of the address, yyyy is the room number (only needs to be unique at the address) and zzzz is the time (only needs to be unique in the room, so local time is fine). This is similar to the uuid v1 scheme.
- WalterBright 2y agoBack at Caltech in the 1970s, every student got a free account on the PDP10. The account username consisted of 3 letters, and Caltech would assign them by the first letter of their first name, middle name, and last name. Enter Tim Rentsh. He didn't have a middle name, so Caltech asked what letter would he prefer, so he said X. TXR That became his nickname, and stuck so hard he legally changed his name to Tim X Rentsh. Eat your heart out, Elon! :-)
- rabiescow 2y agoThis is a great watermark if the company's backend developers are awful or not. I work with this type of stuff and you have to be pretty awful to screw up a string variable "null" as an actual null value...
- conradev 2y agoReminds me of the time I figured out how to put an emoji into my name at work I eventually got an email from an engineer asking if I could remove it. They apparently had been working for a few days to try to add unicode support to their internal database and it wasn't going so well.
- worik 2y agoI have a space in my last name - no problems so far. My email is root@... (thank you Neil Stephenson for the idea) that is rejected sometimes.
- ProllyInfamous 2y agoWhat exactly was Stephenson's idea? What am I missing about root@... ?
- EduardoBautista 2y agoProbably because some programs filter it out because of the risk of the "root" user such as `root@localhost`
- DeathArrow 2y agoTLDR: using typed languages has benefits.
- b3lvedere 2y agoIt's amazing to watch systems do things as humans initially have intended, then see those system fail in the most spectacular ways, because the humans didn't think of every possible failure scenario. I've had great fun with my surname, which contains of two words and just a space in between. Lots of systems thought my "maiden name" was the first word and adressed me as Mrs. My wife has three first names, adopted my surname when we married and her own surname. Nobody gets it right. We don't care and have fun with it. I've also had great stress with my surname, when some algorithm at the tax authorities decided it sounds a bit like coming from a Slavish country and along with other parameters decided to tag me as a fraud. Still an ongoing problem.
- rollulus 2y agoA tax office algo discriminating you because it believes you could have foreign roots, sounds like you’re a tax payer in the Netherlands!
- nilram 2y agoHave you come into the scenario where a doctor's office is trying to find your medical records? Or a hospital? Or an emergency room, trying to fetch them from an office in another town or country? Better to have a good attitude than not, but the phrase "it's all fun and games till someone loses an eye" comes to mind.
- yuye 2y ago>It's amazing to watch systems do things as humans initially have intended, then see those system fail in the most spectacular ways, because the humans didn't think of every possible failure scenario. You should come to Taiwan! They've never considered non-Chinese names. If you something online and pay by card, you can choose to ship it to a 7-Eleven or other convenience store, so you can pick it up at your own convenience. They'll ask for the name on your ID card/Passport, which the store will check before handing the parcel to you. The problem? Many online stores do not accept names longer than a handful of characters. Chinese names are almost always two or three characters long, rarely four. Five or more characters exist according to a quick Google search, but I've never seen them myself. Good luck with western names, where even a short name like "John Doe" will be considered too long (The space counts as a character). If you're a foreign resident, you can choose to get a Chinese name to deal with the parcel issue. Now you have two legal names: The name on your passport and the Chinese name. If you deal with public institutions, they'll prefer to use your Chinese name. Private companies have their own policies: Banks, for example, prefer to use the name on your passport. I've had issues with my insurance claims being rejected because the name on the government-provided documents did not match the name they had on file.
- stevoski 2y agoUs computer scientists (or developers or coders or whatever we are called at the moment) typically think we are really smart. We can be unbearable know-it-alls, really. And yet we screw up, collectively and individually, over and over again on the fundamentals of making good software that serves people, by making not-very-well-thought-out decisions. Your surname is a word we decided should mean nothing/empty/unknown? Oh, we didn’t think about that. Um, can you just change it?
- jwr 2y agoThis is terrifying, because it implies that so many computer systems interpret user-supplied data as what should be out-of-band values. No computer system should ever interpret what is in the "last name" field, it should be a sequence of characters only. Every attempt at interpretation is an exploit waiting to happen.
- notarealllama 2y agoTyped data?! What's next, unit tests? Memory safety? Where will it stop?
- hsbauauvhabzb 2y agoI’m still convinced unit tests are a Santa clause type situation where it takes. While to figure out it’s really just a story told to naïve juniors
- LoganDark 2y agoI would put memory safety before unit tests if it were me.
- Arisaka1 2y agoI especially love when non-technical managers boldly claim that the customer doesn't pay for best practices and clean code, as if it's some sort of costumer-focused bold declaration that is more in touch with reality than what every other developer thinks.
- 2y ago
- bluelightning2k 2y agoAn ironic thought: if it became too cumbersome and you decided to change your name but the name change system has the same issue.
- bloak 2y agoIn case anyone else was wondering, the name Null seems to come from Ulster; the "ul" in "Null" seems to come from the "Ul" in "Ulster": https://www.houseofnames.com/uk/null-family-crest https://www.houseofnames.com/uk/null-family-crest (However, online information about the history of names is unreliable: there's a lot of spam and slop in that area.)
- at_a_remove 2y agoI wonder if the worst possible name would be something like "Null van Hooten-O'Brien" ... there's probably room to make it more painful.
- RandomBacon 2y agoFirst Name: "Mister Dave" Middle: "van Hooten-O'Brien" Last: "NULL" Mr. Mister Dave van Hooten-O'Brien NULL
- marcyb5st 2y agoDefinitely not as bad, but I had problems with my name (Marcello) as well because it contains the name of a musical instrument. So I can only imagine what they are going through. The latest was Swiss airlines website which was kind of shocking since it is a proper Italian name and one of the official languages of the confederation. Most annoying instance was with the ESTA online application many years ago (fixed last time I tried) that forced me to go to the a US embassy/consulate in person.
- lqet 2y agoCould someone with insider-knowledge elaborate on that? Why on earth would you exclude names that contain names of musical instruments from anything? Is it common that fake names contain musical instruments?
- jadyoyster 2y agoYou can book a seat for an instrument. I've seen EXTRA, ITEM SEAT mentioned as name for one particular airline but maybe it can get more specific with others?
- mike_hearn 2y agoIronically, this article is full of the sort of semantic confusions that cause the problem in the first place. The reporter clearly hasn't run the article past an actual programmer as she seems to think this outcome is a deliberate design choice rather than a bug: > Null was first programmed 60 years ago by a British computer scientist named Tony Hoare ... Hoare probably wasn’t thinking about people with the 4,910th most common surname. He later called it his billion-dollar mistake, given the amount of programmer time it has used up and the damage it has inflicted on the user experience. Obviously Hoare's statement wasn't about this problem at all. She's also giving readers the impression Microsoft has some sort of policy against using null values: > “It’s a difficult problem to solve because it’s so widespread,” said Daan Leijen, a researcher at Microsoft, who says the company avoids use of null values in its software. Whatever Leijen said, I'm pretty sure it wasn't that. I really don't get why journalists so rarely do basic fact checking of their own articles by asking an independent source for a final read-through. Many of them actually have policies against doing this, which leads to an endless stream of garbled articles that undermines their credibility without them even noticing.
- teddyh 2y ago> I really don't get why journalists so rarely do basic fact checking It takes time and effort with no discernable upside. In fact, knowing the true facts would make it harder for journalists to bias the story in the way they want to without them feeling a bit bad for lying. It’s easier for them if they don’t know. > that undermines their credibility without them even noticing. Not really. Even the vanishingly small minority of readers who know the details of the story in question suffer from Gell-Mann amnesia, and continue to believe that all other stories (by the same paper, and even from the same reporter) are perfectly accurate.
- unyttigfjelltol 2y ago> It takes time and effort with no discernable upside. The true answer is incentives, opportunity and aptitude. Incentives are skewed to writing something that will engage readers, the human version of the social media algorithm. Opportunities are short because reporting is done on deadline without the luxury of time to deeply ponder intermediate drafts. And reporters are writing around the edge of their expertise and training all the time. That specific reporter specializes in "personal finance" so it's a wonder the article even begins to make sense. And writers have to be good at two things at the same time, journalism and whatever they are trying to write about. It's hard to be excellent at multiple disciplines. When you put it together, it's sort of magical when a news room works at all.
- egorfine 2y agoWait until you hear about the struggles my brother [object Object] has to endure.
- null_name 2y agomy legal last name has been "Null" for a bit over half a year, and I've had no problems. before changing it, I asked a friend whose legal last name had been "Null" for a couple years. it hadn't had any issues. this article (and the one about the British guy) is overblown.
- RandomBacon 2y agoInteresting. Why change it to "Null"?
- null_name 2y agoI needed to change my legal name because my existing one was unavoidable and distressing (trans reasons). I have, have had, and will have too many names to privilege one as "most correct." I've been trans too long to believe government names are "real" anyways, and I also didn't want the association with my birth family anymore. so I wanted an "empty" legal name, something that nobody calls me (but I won't be upset when doctors do), something that represents the rejection of the ultimate validity of itself, and something that sounds cool. I also like being just mildly annoying. $redacted_firstname Null fit. The funny thing is, the real thing that's caused me problems is that I changed from a name with a middle name to one without. Some systems did not handle this transition well. PATCH instead of PUT, or something.
- RandomBacon 2y agoThank you for the explanation and further details about the middle name. I don't think there is such a thing as a "government name". There is a concept of "legal name" which seems to be just whatever name is on your ID. Anyone can change their name on a whim, the only issue is getting that changed on important/vital documents (as well as companies to recognize the name change, for which they have policies of requiring legal documents). There is a public interest in not letting people "change" their names too easily/often as that is a common way for criminals to evade.
- nokeya 2y agoI knew a girl, her last name was just “E”. Amount of misunderstandings and problems from any type of legal entities was astonishing.
- ninalanyon 2y agoIn most cases name fields in databases need not be divided into separate given and family names. There should instead simply be one field in which one enters one's full name. Searches for names almost always have to have a fuzzy search fallback anyway because of spelling mistakes and variant spellings.