Hacker News Reader

Comment by hirundo | Hacker News Reader

From Frab's schema.rb:

  create_table "people", force: :cascade do |t|
    # ...
    t.string "first_name", limit: 255, default: ""
    t.string "last_name", limit: 255, default: ""
    t.string "gender", limit: 255
    # ...
  end

Our schema has a similar table, but with "prefix" instead of "gender", where on the front end a list pops down with Mr., Ms., etc. We just use the prefix to form the full name.

I wonder where the need to track gender comes from in such an app. We manage events and conferences too, but gender hasn't come up beyond the salutation. Since they do care about gender maybe they will soon also want pronoun and possessive_pronoun columns.

View on HN

The "first name, last name" fields are worse, IMO.

- It doesn't apply for many cultures.

- The only justification to collect them separately is to link with third-party data.

- They should stop playing around and just ask me what they want to know, "How would you like to be addressed?"

> It doesn't apply for many cultures.

I'm struggling to come up with a list of those.

Middle names are definitely not universal, sure, but I can't seem to find a list of cultures that can't map down to "first name, last name".

Iceland, Indonesia, Turkey, Ethiopia, everything I've come across seems to have adopted some superset of "first name, last name" in the last hundred years.

> The only justification to collect them separately is to link with third-party data.

In Japan, many organizations are required to collect this for legal compliance.

> They should stop playing around and just ask me what they want to know, "How would you like to be addressed?"

That is a good thing to ask -- and certainly suitable for generating nametags! -- but I can still see many cases for needing to have a legal name. Generating receipts, etc.

Checkout "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names": https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...

and the W3C’s "Personal names around the world": https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-personal-names

> I can't seem to find a list of cultures that can't map down to "first name, last name".

It's the meaning of them that's mainly the problem. In western cultures, the first name is your given name and the last name is your family name. In eastern cultures the first name is your family name and the last name is your personal name.

So without more information, you don't know whether to call them "Mr [first name]" or "Mr [last name]". If you don't know what to call them after they've filled in the name fields in your form, that's a pretty fundamental failure.

> I can still see many cases for needing to have a legal name.

Sure, but first name / last name is not a good way to do it.

> In eastern cultures the first name is your family name and the last name is your personal name.

First name and last name are bad proxies for given name and family name. Anyone from an Eastern culture filling in an English form knows or should know that. If they don't, it's mostly their fault.

> So without more information, you don't know whether to call them "Mr [first name]" or "Mr [last name]".

You call them "Mr [last name]".

This is mostly an imagined problem, and it goes away if you ask for "first name/given name" and "last name/surname", which removes any ambiguity.

(I happen to have an Eastern name, so I did not call it an imagined problem because I knew nothing about it.)

> First name and last name are bad proxies for given name and family name.

It sounds like you are agreeing with me here.

> Anyone from an Eastern culture filling in an English form knows or should know that. If they don't, it's mostly their fault.

A bad form design collects bad data and it's the fault of the person filling it in? How about we just use better form fields?

> This is mostly an imagined problem, and it goes away if you ask for "first name/given name" and "last name/surname", which removes any ambiguity.

If you acknowledge that this ambiguity can be resolved by changing what you are asking, why are you arguing this point? Just use better form fields.

> (I happen to have an Eastern name, so I did not call it an imagined problem because I knew nothing about it.)

I have a western name and my name is backwards on all sorts of documents and I've been called "Mr Jim" a huge number of times because of this issue. It's not mostly imagined, it's extremely common in my experience.

If you want to know their legal name, ask for their legal name. If you want to know what you should call them, ask what you should call them. First name / last name are not good fields for this and the solutions are simple.

> If you acknowledge that this ambiguity can be resolved by changing what you are asking, why are you arguing this point? Just use better form fields.

I mean, it's a very simple cosmetic fix and has no bearing on the schema. I thought you were arguing that the first name / last name model is fundamentally broken, but I guess you were not.

"The full name of singer Shakira is Shakira Isabel MEBARAK Ripoll. She is the daughter of William Mebarak Chadid and Nidia del Carmen Ripoll Torrado.

The full name of actress Penélope Cruz is Penélope CRUZ Sánchez. She is the daughter of Eduardo Cruz and Encarnación Sánchez."

In spanish, the family name is next-to-last. Shakira would be in the phone book under "M", not "R".

Indonesia definitely has people with no last name. Former presidents Suharto and Sukarno are pretty well known examples!

This is a toolkit. You use whatever parts you want from it. Both fields are large enough to hold the full name if that is how you roll.

The software needs to have a database layout that supports the superset of what all individual users need.

yes, sometimes that's handled as "full name" and a call-me-this "preferred name" rather than first and last.

also, postgres, which most rails apps seem to prefer, has no performance gain for 'string' over 'text' so might as well use 'text' so you have no potential problems with long names (less of a problem with genders, presumably).

There are lots of reasons to need them separate. Alphabetizing by last name, showing only the first name in some places, only last name in some places...

Some conferences are in locations with restricted accommodation facilities, and if you don’t specify a roommate, you are paired with someone of your gender.

So that’s why the gender might be needed.

As far as the preferred pronouns are concerned, I see them as something with heavy political connotations. No one who is not hard left believes in the necessity of the xir pronoun, and of course there are trans people also among the right!

So, to me it’s completely acceptable that something so controversial is not included.

Automatically pairing people by gender is pretty weird IMO. As a trans woman I have to find my own roommate or find an organizer to intervene and explain my life story to them.

The choice works for 99% of people, and it’s always very clearly stated. If you have any problem with the default choice, I am sure the organizers will do their best to accommodate your request.

The same holds for special dietary requests, special assistance, people arriving late or leaving earlier, people traveling with partners, with children, etc...

I don’t want to be rude, but please just realize that usually the defaults try to accommodate as many persons as possible, and then there’s always the possibility to ask.

Do you have any better solution? I would be interesting in hearing what you think!

I can see how that would be frustrating. What would be an alternative?

The gender field was added for FrosCon. They used it to select what kind of t-shirt you want.

Other uses have been to suggest shared sleeping arrangements.

> They used it to select what kind of t-shirt you want.

Then it's incomplete without a "shirt_size" column.

The gender _might_ be used to ensure diverse speaker selection.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com