9 ms·

But should we really worry about the 0.01% outlier who has seven different names, each consisting of some kind of personal scribble that changes depending on th

But should we really worry about the 0.01% outlier who has seven different names, each consisting of some kind of personal scribble that changes depending on the phase of the moon? More on topic, why should official systems allow for names of arbitrary length? Obviously your 1800 character preference for last name is not going to fit on all standard forms of identification. A standards-compliant name should be issued and you can use your preferred name for personal matters.

TillE 13y ago
> the 0.01% outlier who has seven different names, each consisting of some kind of personal scribble that changes depending on the phase of the moon? I cannot adequately express my dislike for this kind of mockery. Seriously, fucking stop it.
- jrockway 13y ago
  Probably time to adjust your meds.
- grannyg00se 13y ago
  Did you read the link in cstross' reply? I'm not mocking anything. Some combination of those rules would actually require this type of naming situation.
  - kordless 13y ago
    Did you really just rationalize this using a blog post? To quote #36 on the list you are referencing: "You’re kidding me, right?" Scribble: to cover with scribbles, doodles, or meaningless marks. Names aren't meaningless, and TMK names don't change depending on the time of month. By phrasing things the way you are, you are making generalized (and fictitious) blaming statements about something that is very personal. And you got called out on it.
    - grannyg00se 13y ago
      This entire sub-thread is a reply to part of my response that is centered around that blog post, so yes, I rationalized it using said blog post. Did you really just ask that question because you wanted to pretentiously infer some kind of unreasonable rationalization? Addressing all of the issues on the list pretty much boils down to accepting a scribble as a valid name. And if you are going to accept point 8 on the list that people's names change at any non enumerable event, then that is just as difficult as a name that changes based on the phase of the moon. Worse, actually. Moon phases are at least predictable. The point is, I'm creating a plausible scenario that fits the suggestions in the list. It is not necessarily fictitious, and it is absolutely in no way worse than the list's expectations. Please identify how I made any type of "blaming statement". If you're going to call me out then go ahead and call me out. As far as I'm concerned I've been accused, not called out.
    - superuser2 13y ago
      The "scribble" may have been given meaning by becoming this person's name, but if it's not in any character set, it probably doesn't already have meaning as a character in any known written language.
- cstross 13y ago
  Agreed. The real issue is that too many programmers apply their own cultural norms to the issue of naming, in ways which privilege their particular culture at the expense of others'. (You want to be able to identify people uniquely? Fine: allocate them a globally unique ID string within your own system. Then let them link this to whatever the hell they want -- be it an Anglophone forename-middlename-surname string sequence, or something entirely different that fits their cultural requirements. Once you get into designing a procrustean name storage architecture and insisting that everyone uses their true name, then you are inflicting your own culture's naming requirements on them, which is offensive at best. Especially when it isn't necessary.)
  - Muzza 13y ago
    Why shouldn't my culture be privileged in my country? I understand that you British are almost done giving away your country for some bewildering reason, but I certainly don't want that where I live.
  - grannyg00se 13y ago
    Sure. You go ahead and create a "culturally sensitive" system that allows people to create randomly changing names based on multiple character sets and unlimited length. On an infrastructure that was put in place in 1980 with a minimal budget just to get something running quickly because it was supposed to be temporary. Most systems aren't going to be built with infinite flexibility. Some might argue that wouldn't even be possible. And perhaps it has absolutely nothing to do with the programmer's own cultural norms, but the system they are programming on, the budget they are dealing with, and their level of competency. Not every action that is offensive to a particular group is done deliberately to offend that group or even with the knowledge that it could be offensive.
    - pessimizer 13y ago
      >Not every action that is offensive to a particular group is done deliberately to offend that group Irrelevant. >or even with the knowledge that it could be offensive. Irrelevant to your argument, which is that we should continue doing it even after we figure out that it's offensive, because fuck them.
- Pxtl 13y ago
  The link mentions > People’s names are all mapped in Unicode code points. At this point we've gotten into absurdity. Yes, supporting Chinese people and Hawaiian people with superlong names and people with first/last vs last/first or hyphenated or non-alphanumeric or whatever... all the stuff that can be supported with a single string of UTF-8? That's all reasonable, and there's a very real progrem with programs that don't support those kinds of names. But going over the line into names that can't be expressed in any form of text known to a computer? At this point, the ludicrous exaggeration is only barely further than the silliness included in the "Falsehoods" list. He's not mocking "you have to support a half-German half-Chinese person who was raised with an Inuit nickname". I'll happily support Prof. Dr. Ms. 陳 (ᒥᓂᔅᑕ) Wolfeschlegelsteinhausenberdorft III. That's fine. But the "Falsehoods" article says that isn't enough, and is pretty much describing "seven different names, each consisting of some kind of personal scribble that changes depending on the phase of the moon". Normally I'm the first to complain about racism and those kinds of insults, talking down to people who are just too much trouble to bother with. But that "scribbles" comment is literally outlining the lengths the article describes.
esw 13y ago
My wife took my surname when we married, but rather than hyphenate she decided to go with a space. Although the names are each quite short (e.g. "Jones" and "Smith"), this has proven to be a significant challenge for our bank, and even on her drivers license (which compressed her name to JONESSMITH). It never occurred to either of us that a ten character last name with a space in the middle would be problem to anyone other than people who want to cite her research.
- mhb 13y ago
  It never occurred to either of us that a ten character last name with a space in the middle would be problem Really? Because a space is commonly used as the delimiter between first, middle and last names. Wouldn't you think that, at a minimum, there would be some ambiguity about whether Jones was (one of) her middle name(s) or the first part of her last name?
  - DanBC 13y ago
    First name: [ANN] Last name: [SMITH JONES] Seems easy enough, right? They don't have one big field for [ANN BETH SMITH JONES] and then try to guess what name is forename or surname. Some systems don't like hyphens, or don't like spaces, or appear to accept them but silently drop them kludging the two names in SMITHJONES. Add the 'scunthorpe problem' and things get even more frustrating. One of the Google feedback pages declined my feedback because my (legitimate, linked to my Googlemail account) email address and name contains "Cocks".
    - randallsquared 13y ago
      Google+ currently even chooses to disbelieve that a person's first and last names can be the same. Oddly, this wasn't the case a few years ago, since I managed to create an account with my real name, then. Trying to consolidate all my accounts under one failed recently, though.
      - achy 13y ago
Ziomislaw 13y ago
not everyone is as bleak and uninteresting as yourself.
ronaldx 13y ago
> should we really worry about the 0.01% outlier 1. Yes, this is sometimes known as discrimination. 2. Yes, you have no way of knowing the size of the market if you are excluding them - this may be disguising a group that's significantly larger than 0.01%. 3. Yes, if you cater to these people when your competitors cannot/do not, you have a captive market. 4. Yes, everyone is 0.01% in some fashion - if you continue to apply this reasoning, you will eventually exclude everyone other than yourself.
- grannyg00se 13y ago
  1. We discriminate all the time when building systems with finite resources and there's nothing wrong with setting reasonable limitations. Just because you use a politically sensitive word doesn't automatically make it wrong. 2. If you want to argue for an arbitrary budget increase to satisfy an unknown market size that may be larger than 0.01% whose requirements are drastically different than the others - go for it. I'm not going to do that. 3. Congratulations, you win the possibly larger than 0.01% market that I ignored. In the meantime I've iterated on several other useful bits that the vast majority of users care about. 4. The number of input fields in my dataset isn't infinite.
- Dylan16807 13y ago
  You will eventually annoy everyone, not exclude them. And bureaucracy always ends up annoying people. Obviously you want to aim to be flexible, but I don't think there should be an obligation, for example, to support characters that aren't in unicode.
nnash 13y ago
>why should official systems allow for names of arbitrary length? > A standards-compliant name should be issued >More on topic, why should official systems allow for names of arbitrary length? These are really incendiary statements (a local may accuse you of being insensitive[1]) that places the fault of the issue on the aboriginals of Hawai'i for observing their traditions rather than the programmers who should have known better. From what I understand DB's get re factored all the time and if the drivers license can fit her name I fail to see the issue. [1]euphemism for racist
- grannyg00se 13y ago
  "If the drivers license can fit her name...." You just accepted a length limit. Congrats on being culturally insensitive.
  - nnash 13y ago
    It can fit her name; however, the way they stored her name in the db cut it off by a few letters or so. Your reading comprehension doesn't seem to be very good.
superuser2 13y ago
Agreed. For those of you who are offended, do you provide a graphics tablet, AutoCAD, 3D printer, reference-quality microphone, synthesizer, full spectrum analyzer, and every instrument known to humanity every time someone needs to be identified by your software? If we can't expect the name to be in a character set, why can we expect it to even be two dimensional? What if it's an object? What if it's a sound that Western voices can't make without years of training, ala Tuvan throat singing, with no written form? What if it's a sound that needs to be played on an instrument known only to the person's tribe/nation/whatever, and the only one in existence is a family heirloom halfway around the world? What if it's something like a particular pattern of brainwaves created by meditating a certain way? Maybe a little extreme. There's an African language which is primarily location-based. People are raised from birth with an extremely accurate innate sense of spatial position through dead reckoning. Greeting someone and identifying yourself requires specifying your location and the direction you're facing. Fascinating stuff. There's a great Radiolab segment about it: http://www.radiolab.org/2011/jan/25/birds-eye-view/ http://www.radiolab.org/2011/jan/25/birds-eye-view/ So is it racist to choose a column type for holding names that isn't designed for GIS? If you did, isn't it racist to use a system based on Cartesian coordinates instead of the native way of representing locations? My point is that you cannot possibly cover all the edge cases for the ways people identify themselves, and calling that offensive is just silly. Giving people identifiers that you created is also offensive - that's prison/Nazi crap. So what do you expect us to do? A blank box in the character set of the primary language(s) where the application is used with zero validation and zero transformations is a reasonable demand. Calling it racist and offensive to fail to cover every edge case is a bit of a stretch.
poink 13y ago
I think your tone is a bit condescending towards people who have names that don't fit our norms, but to some extent I agree with you. Let's be honest, for every person with five hundred characters in their real name there's going to be a thousand people who accidentally pasted a bunch of text into the wrong field, and at least ten jackasses who are just trying to see if they can break your app in some interesting way. Accommodating everybody is a pretty tall order (see: Prince). Where's the appropriate place to draw the line?

TillE 13y ago

> the 0.01% outlier who has seven different names, each consisting of some kind of personal scribble that changes depending on the phase of the moon? I cannot adequately express my dislike for this kind of mockery. Seriously, fucking stop it.

jrockway 13y ago
Probably time to adjust your meds.
grannyg00se 13y ago
Did you read the link in cstross' reply? I'm not mocking anything. Some combination of those rules would actually require this type of naming situation.
- kordless 13y ago
  Did you really just rationalize this using a blog post? To quote #36 on the list you are referencing: "You’re kidding me, right?" Scribble: to cover with scribbles, doodles, or meaningless marks. Names aren't meaningless, and TMK names don't change depending on the time of month. By phrasing things the way you are, you are making generalized (and fictitious) blaming statements about something that is very personal. And you got called out on it.
  - grannyg00se 13y ago
    This entire sub-thread is a reply to part of my response that is centered around that blog post, so yes, I rationalized it using said blog post. Did you really just ask that question because you wanted to pretentiously infer some kind of unreasonable rationalization? Addressing all of the issues on the list pretty much boils down to accepting a scribble as a valid name. And if you are going to accept point 8 on the list that people's names change at any non enumerable event, then that is just as difficult as a name that changes based on the phase of the moon. Worse, actually. Moon phases are at least predictable. The point is, I'm creating a plausible scenario that fits the suggestions in the list. It is not necessarily fictitious, and it is absolutely in no way worse than the list's expectations. Please identify how I made any type of "blaming statement". If you're going to call me out then go ahead and call me out. As far as I'm concerned I've been accused, not called out.
  - superuser2 13y ago
    The "scribble" may have been given meaning by becoming this person's name, but if it's not in any character set, it probably doesn't already have meaning as a character in any known written language.
cstross 13y ago
Agreed. The real issue is that too many programmers apply their own cultural norms to the issue of naming, in ways which privilege their particular culture at the expense of others'. (You want to be able to identify people uniquely? Fine: allocate them a globally unique ID string within your own system. Then let them link this to whatever the hell they want -- be it an Anglophone forename-middlename-surname string sequence, or something entirely different that fits their cultural requirements. Once you get into designing a procrustean name storage architecture and insisting that everyone uses their true name, then you are inflicting your own culture's naming requirements on them, which is offensive at best. Especially when it isn't necessary.)
- Muzza 13y ago
  Why shouldn't my culture be privileged in my country? I understand that you British are almost done giving away your country for some bewildering reason, but I certainly don't want that where I live.
- grannyg00se 13y ago
  Sure. You go ahead and create a "culturally sensitive" system that allows people to create randomly changing names based on multiple character sets and unlimited length. On an infrastructure that was put in place in 1980 with a minimal budget just to get something running quickly because it was supposed to be temporary. Most systems aren't going to be built with infinite flexibility. Some might argue that wouldn't even be possible. And perhaps it has absolutely nothing to do with the programmer's own cultural norms, but the system they are programming on, the budget they are dealing with, and their level of competency. Not every action that is offensive to a particular group is done deliberately to offend that group or even with the knowledge that it could be offensive.
  - pessimizer 13y ago
    >Not every action that is offensive to a particular group is done deliberately to offend that group Irrelevant. >or even with the knowledge that it could be offensive. Irrelevant to your argument, which is that we should continue doing it even after we figure out that it's offensive, because fuck them.
Pxtl 13y ago
The link mentions > People’s names are all mapped in Unicode code points. At this point we've gotten into absurdity. Yes, supporting Chinese people and Hawaiian people with superlong names and people with first/last vs last/first or hyphenated or non-alphanumeric or whatever... all the stuff that can be supported with a single string of UTF-8? That's all reasonable, and there's a very real progrem with programs that don't support those kinds of names. But going over the line into names that can't be expressed in any form of text known to a computer? At this point, the ludicrous exaggeration is only barely further than the silliness included in the "Falsehoods" list. He's not mocking "you have to support a half-German half-Chinese person who was raised with an Inuit nickname". I'll happily support Prof. Dr. Ms. 陳 (ᒥᓂᔅᑕ) Wolfeschlegelsteinhausenberdorft III. That's fine. But the "Falsehoods" article says that isn't enough, and is pretty much describing "seven different names, each consisting of some kind of personal scribble that changes depending on the phase of the moon". Normally I'm the first to complain about racism and those kinds of insults, talking down to people who are just too much trouble to bother with. But that "scribbles" comment is literally outlining the lengths the article describes.

esw 13y ago

My wife took my surname when we married, but rather than hyphenate she decided to go with a space. Although the names are each quite short (e.g. "Jones" and "Smith"), this has proven to be a significant challenge for our bank, and even on her drivers license (which compressed her name to JONESSMITH). It never occurred to either of us that a ten character last name with a space in the middle would be problem to anyone other than people who want to cite her research.

mhb 13y ago
It never occurred to either of us that a ten character last name with a space in the middle would be problem Really? Because a space is commonly used as the delimiter between first, middle and last names. Wouldn't you think that, at a minimum, there would be some ambiguity about whether Jones was (one of) her middle name(s) or the first part of her last name?
- DanBC 13y ago
  First name: [ANN] Last name: [SMITH JONES] Seems easy enough, right? They don't have one big field for [ANN BETH SMITH JONES] and then try to guess what name is forename or surname. Some systems don't like hyphens, or don't like spaces, or appear to accept them but silently drop them kludging the two names in SMITHJONES. Add the 'scunthorpe problem' and things get even more frustrating. One of the Google feedback pages declined my feedback because my (legitimate, linked to my Googlemail account) email address and name contains "Cocks".
  - randallsquared 13y ago
    Google+ currently even chooses to disbelieve that a person's first and last names can be the same. Oddly, this wasn't the case a few years ago, since I managed to create an account with my real name, then. Trying to consolidate all my accounts under one failed recently, though.
    - achy 13y ago

Ziomislaw 13y ago

not everyone is as bleak and uninteresting as yourself.

ronaldx 13y ago

> should we really worry about the 0.01% outlier 1. Yes, this is sometimes known as discrimination. 2. Yes, you have no way of knowing the size of the market if you are excluding them - this may be disguising a group that's significantly larger than 0.01%. 3. Yes, if you cater to these people when your competitors cannot/do not, you have a captive market. 4. Yes, everyone is 0.01% in some fashion - if you continue to apply this reasoning, you will eventually exclude everyone other than yourself.

grannyg00se 13y ago
1. We discriminate all the time when building systems with finite resources and there's nothing wrong with setting reasonable limitations. Just because you use a politically sensitive word doesn't automatically make it wrong. 2. If you want to argue for an arbitrary budget increase to satisfy an unknown market size that may be larger than 0.01% whose requirements are drastically different than the others - go for it. I'm not going to do that. 3. Congratulations, you win the possibly larger than 0.01% market that I ignored. In the meantime I've iterated on several other useful bits that the vast majority of users care about. 4. The number of input fields in my dataset isn't infinite.
Dylan16807 13y ago
You will eventually annoy everyone, not exclude them. And bureaucracy always ends up annoying people. Obviously you want to aim to be flexible, but I don't think there should be an obligation, for example, to support characters that aren't in unicode.

nnash 13y ago

>why should official systems allow for names of arbitrary length? > A standards-compliant name should be issued >More on topic, why should official systems allow for names of arbitrary length? These are really incendiary statements (a local may accuse you of being insensitive[1]) that places the fault of the issue on the aboriginals of Hawai'i for observing their traditions rather than the programmers who should have known better. From what I understand DB's get re factored all the time and if the drivers license can fit her name I fail to see the issue. [1]euphemism for racist

grannyg00se 13y ago
"If the drivers license can fit her name...." You just accepted a length limit. Congrats on being culturally insensitive.
- nnash 13y ago
  It can fit her name; however, the way they stored her name in the db cut it off by a few letters or so. Your reading comprehension doesn't seem to be very good.

superuser2 13y ago

Agreed. For those of you who are offended, do you provide a graphics tablet, AutoCAD, 3D printer, reference-quality microphone, synthesizer, full spectrum analyzer, and every instrument known to humanity every time someone needs to be identified by your software? If we can't expect the name to be in a character set, why can we expect it to even be two dimensional? What if it's an object? What if it's a sound that Western voices can't make without years of training, ala Tuvan throat singing, with no written form? What if it's a sound that needs to be played on an instrument known only to the person's tribe/nation/whatever, and the only one in existence is a family heirloom halfway around the world? What if it's something like a particular pattern of brainwaves created by meditating a certain way? Maybe a little extreme. There's an African language which is primarily location-based. People are raised from birth with an extremely accurate innate sense of spatial position through dead reckoning. Greeting someone and identifying yourself requires specifying your location and the direction you're facing. Fascinating stuff. There's a great Radiolab segment about it: http://www.radiolab.org/2011/jan/25/birds-eye-view/ http://www.radiolab.org/2011/jan/25/birds-eye-view/ So is it racist to choose a column type for holding names that isn't designed for GIS? If you did, isn't it racist to use a system based on Cartesian coordinates instead of the native way of representing locations? My point is that you cannot possibly cover all the edge cases for the ways people identify themselves, and calling that offensive is just silly. Giving people identifiers that you created is also offensive - that's prison/Nazi crap. So what do you expect us to do? A blank box in the character set of the primary language(s) where the application is used with zero validation and zero transformations is a reasonable demand. Calling it racist and offensive to fail to cover every edge case is a bit of a stretch.

poink 13y ago

I think your tone is a bit condescending towards people who have names that don't fit our norms, but to some extent I agree with you. Let's be honest, for every person with five hundred characters in their real name there's going to be a thousand people who accidentally pasted a bunch of text into the wrong field, and at least ten jackasses who are just trying to see if they can break your app in some interesting way. Accommodating everybody is a pretty tall order (see: Prince). Where's the appropriate place to draw the line?