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Comment by aurelian15 | Hacker News Reader

Two weeks ago, when I applied for a new passport (in Germany), I was asked to make sure that my personal information on a printed out form was correct.

Immediately the line saying "Artist's/Religious name: null" caught my eyes. I told the officer: "Well, the info about my artist's name is wrong. I don't have one."

As I was expecting beforehand, I was told: "That's exactly what 'null' means here." To which I replied: "And what if my artist's name was 'null'?". To which I got no satisfactory response. I guess these problems are only apparent to programmers...

So, if anyone wants to cause confusion, now you know how.

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Reminds me of a tweet I saw a while back where someone was told their four digit pin couldn't be a year. To which they replied "aren't they all years?"

https://twitter.com/mralancooper/status/652532677979959296

and my "solution": https://twitter.com/jtaylor/status/772607233829969920

Well, technically, any PIN starting with one or more zeroes is not a year.

Based on my own interactions with the Bürgeramt I think it would be most fun to have a Religious Name of "null null" -- at which point it's win-win, since you can confuse the bureaucrats and/or demand that your full Religious Name be recognized since, well, religion.

(Or, to up the ante, one might consider "Keine Angabe" as a Religious Name. It would stand out amongst the nulls, while also being the actual null they are trying to point to.)

If I remember correctly, "null" is only on the printout but not displayed on screen. As applications are handled completely electronically there is some chance that those two cases are actually distinguished (i.e. only the largely irrelevant printing part of the software has this problem).

What if someone has an "artist's name" and a "religious name", and they're not the same?

You have 2 lines of 30 characters each to work with. Likely they will be separated by a slash but as far as I know details for this are not regulated.

Note that you need to submit proof. For an artist's name it needs to overshadow your common name in at least some parts of life and entry is at the discretion of the officer. Famously, a sex worker was not allowed to add her artist's name into her ID card.

If your artist name was 'null' then Artists's/Religious name: null would be appropriate, would it not?

In this particular case, yes. That's not the issue. In the general case, the issue would now lie in deciding whether null is actually a name or a 'value' indicating the absence of one.

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