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Comment by silveira | Hacker News Reader

I have a first name composed of two names, and one of them with an acute accent. This is enough to cause some of my credit cards to be printed with a repeated name because they assume my "second first name" to be a middle name too. The acute accent results in encoding problems once in a while.

But nothing compares the problems that people with names longer than 30 characters have to face. Creating a SSN card, or driver license, or pretty much any official document can be very painful. The name does fit in their systems and the attendants just don't know what to do and most of them are very reluctant in using abbreviations.

Every programmer should at least read Patrick's article that is cited in the story: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b...

And if you are naming kids and want to save them a lot of bureaucracy in their lives, give them short names.

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I'm reminded of Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame)'s anecdote about being "blessed with a name that is mercifully short and simple":

"After a long flight I've already got my car, got to the hotel, checked in, and am fast asleep. Boutros Boutros-Ghali (Secretary General of the UN) is still stuck at the car rental counter at the airport patiently explaining his name to the befuddled clerk."

(Although admittedly, whilst I understand the humor intended, I could also see this anecdote as being perhaps a little offensive, too...)

That list makes me very sad. Not because it's not interesting, which it is, but because it'd be so much more interesting if it discussed each item as it went.

This one, for example:

    People’s names are assigned at birth.
    OK, maybe not at birth, but at least pretty close to birth.
    Alright, alright, within a year or so of birth.
    Five years?
    You’re kidding me, right?

Don't leave me there! Tell me which culture assigns names more than five years after birth!

I'd love to see an annotated version.

>Tell me which culture assigns names more than five years after birth!

In the United States of America it is common for females to change their name at marriage, substituting their birth surname for that of their husband.

Also, in many tribal cultures the definitive name is not assigned until an adulthood rite of passage has been passed.

Adult names also change to reflect upgrades in social status such as the completion of a PhD, admittance into a society, acquisition of nobility titles, etc.

That's changing a name, not assigning a name. The list is implying that some people don't have names for at least five years after their birth.

...or maybe it's not; without expanding on the items in the list, it's kinda hard to tell.

I knew someone, an American, whose wife was (I believe) Chinese and they did not give their baby a name for one year. They lived in California where it was legally required to assign the name in the first year, I'm not certain if they would have waited longer, or not, if they would have been allowed.

It's rare, but in cases of amnesia grown adults with no memory of their identity would have a name assigned to them sometime after receiving medical attention.

And if you are naming kids and want to save them a lot of bureaucracy in their lives, give them short names.

I think it depends. Sometimes it's helpful to give them names that are just long enough to make their identities unique, so when they apply for police clearances, for example, they are not mistaken for similarly-named people with criminal records, or even nasty reputations.

I suspect the worst case is when you have a name that is neither common nor unique that you share with someone who is notorious in some manner. I used to know someone who lived in the same city and shared a name with someone who was in the news for some unsavory activity related to a local sports team. He literally had death threat voicemails left on his phone.

A family member of mine shares a name with a fairly notorious con artist in the SoCal area, who has been convicted multiple times for a series of increasingly big, elaborate, and bizarre frauds. Their names are just unique enough that many people assume my family member is the criminal. Fortunately, the felon was put away for 30+ years recently, so we hope he won't continue to make local headlines.

Let's just hope that nobody comes to try and "return" your family member to prison.

LOL. People have definitely tried to call the cops on him before. The con artist's picture has rarely been printed, and nobody in the general public knows what he looks like. They only know his name. So that used to make the mistaken-identity issues even worse.

Steve Bartman?

Howard Spira

Several years ago, my then-current girlfriend and I spent a couple days a week at a casino about an hour and a half away.

One day, both my girlfriend and my mother started receiving weird messages from people, saying they hoped I would be okay, that they were "praying" for me (ugh), etc.

The mystery was solved later that day when I received a Google alert for my name and discovered a news article where someone with the same name had been at a different casino, won a large sum of money, and was later beaten and left for dead (fortunately, he survived and recovered).

> And if you are naming kids and want to save them a lot of bureaucracy in their lives, give them short names.

This is not just a computing issue; my parents come from different continents, my wife from another and we live in yet another. Finding a name for our child that could be pronounced by all the various relatives was very hard -- we found a single phoneme name and went with that.

Our hyphenated family name is essentially unpronounceable and unspellable to most people.

Have a friend with two names, one of which is two words. That one fails all kind of checks on its own, but it gets worse: many places ask for the local equivalent of the ssn which has a part derived from the name. So if he omits the name, sanity checks on that field will fail.

if you are naming kids and want to save them a lot of bureaucracy in their lives, give them short names.

- Thing One and Thing Two.. I wonder if it will fail..

Quintus, Sextus, Septimus, Octavius and Decimus — Roman names for fifth...eighth, tenth son.

Prima, Secunda, Tertia, Quarta, Quinta, Sexta, Septima, Octavia, and Decima — first to tenth daughter.

Octavia survived into modern English: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octavia_Spencer , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octavia_E._Butler

Balinese use birth order in their names. There are a lot of Wayans.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balinese_name

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