Hello, I’m Mr. Null. My Name Makes Me Invisible to Computers | Hacker News Reader

Hello, I’m Mr. Null. My Name Makes Me Invisible to Computers

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17 pointsomnibrain24 comments

I was just talking to my students yesterday about making assumptions with user data, and in this particular instance, assuming that a last name is only one word.

Years ago, when I first started using Google AdSense on my website, they had problems with my physical address. Specifically, they did not allow you to use a PO Box address as your physical address. Makes sense. Well, I lived in a rural area, so my physical address was "Route 1 Box 246" (back then there was NO other designation for the house location that I could use, now commonly known as a "911 address"). The website would not allow me to sign up because "Box" appeared in the middle of the address line. I sent them an email and they had it fixed remarkably fast, but I have used it over the years as a good example of a case for not making assumptions on input.

Somebody once set up a report for us using Microsoft controls. When processing some addresses in I forget what state, it encountered values that looked like 25E155 as scientific notation and blew up on floating point overflow. It was not hard to tweak the input once we figured out what was going on.

This is why writers like Chris Date take great pains to explain that "null value" is an oxymoron. Null is a "mark", not a value -- it exists entirely apart from any domain. Any language or environment that doesn't respect this abuses the entire concept.

I am reminded of those systems which cannot accept that a person (perhaps of Indonesian origin) has only one name. Or that cannot accept that a last name has an apostrophe in it. Or that cannot accept a name with a space in it.

Is there a resource of every weird case in people's names, that is publicly available and of modest size, that could be used for software testing? It would be nice if people like Mr. Null could add their name to such a list, and it became generally known among software developers.

Naturally, such lists have been compiled over the years--sadly, unexplained database errors have mysteriously prevented the lists from being propagated and maintained.

Well, his parents couldn't name him Bobby Tables, so he has to go by Christopher Null instead :)

https://xkcd.com/327/

Just tested it on my programs and they don't have a problem with his name fortunately.

How did Bank of America start parsing "null" in the middle of an email address, I don't know...

Well it was info@nullmedia, so presumably enterprising young fool just wrote: if $hostname =~ m/^null/

That is just shoddy programming... the string "null" should never be equal to the type null...

The string "Null" is very different from NULL

Which language(s) struggle with this?

I personally have never used a programming language where it's possible to confuse null (pointer) with "null" (string). Can anyone provide an example?

I'm not buying it. In what popular language would 'Null Media LLC' as a string have 'Null ' dropped from it. You'd be bending over backwards to write a system that would do that. If his last name was an escape sequence, I could understand.

String.Replace("NULL", ""); //Just in case --Mark

"replace null with" returns almost 70 million results on google, so maybe this is a more common occurrence than I believed.

"replace null with" will include lots of hits relating to situations where you substitute database nulls with a default value (all of the hits I get on the first page seem to be that kind of thing, from the snippet), rather than replacing the string "null" with an empty string in a string.

So, those 70 million hits are probably not an indicator of the popularity of the latter practice.

> Responding to a request for comment for this article, a media relations representative for Bank of America expressed concern and assured me the appropriate IT employees would be informed of the issue.

That made me chuckle.

The household diet briefly suffered from my spouse's taking the dietician Gary Null semi-seriously. If only Pacifica's scheduling software had suffered the flaw...

The name I use for all my test accounts is Null O'Reilly.

I actually know someone called Dave Null. At first, I thought it was a funny pseudonym. Then I did a Facebook search and found there were dozens of Dave Nulls....

Don't forget Little Bobby Tables:

https://xkcd.com/327/

This being in the US, I wonder why BoA has not been sued yet for harrasment, discrimination and what not.

Well I certainly hope someone learned to sanitize their database inputs!

Oh, little Bobby Tables... you scamp!

My friend Or has the same problem. They often have to spell it 0r.

Some shady devs may compare serialized string to know whether object was null. db value Contains null value for null able string

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