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Comment by isxek | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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).

Steve Bartman?

Howard Spira

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