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Comment by deathanatos | Hacker News Reader

I have a suffix (the Roman numeral Ⅳ), and it causes all sorts of problems. Some sites will have me "prove" that I'm me by asking questions about "my" credit history, and very often I'll get my father's. Half the time I've already supplied a SSN… which makes it even more appalling that they can't get this right.

I've also been issued a driver's license for a "4TH". I have no idea how TSA would ever spot a fake. (Since they don't flag me! But I'm also in a demographic that tends to get passes in the security theatre…)

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My wife is from Myanmar, where most people only have one name (no first, last, etc.) and has experienced endless frustration since immigrating here to the US. It's been quite difficult for her and even limiting in some ways and she's broken down in tears more than once.

Some places just put a few letters into each field (like say for the name Jessica, first: Jes, middle: si, last: ca, or something like that). The DMV did that, and then listed her name on her license as <last>\<first> <middle initial>. Others have insisted on putting "nosurname" in the last name field. The immigration people put "FNU" as first name, and her given name in the last. At some places she's put her name twice, once in the first, and once in the last.

Not anything close to what she's had to endure, but my name doesn't fit the standard mold either. I prefer to use my middle name and really dislike using my first name (shared whith my dad, who I don't have a good relationship with). I'm endlessly having to explain every single stinking time I interact with pretty much anyone.

Anyway, the take away is, please please please (!!!) don't make assumptions about people's names! Ideally just one field labeled "name", and let the user interpret that as they see fit. If you need to collect a legal name then you need to validate it anyway. If you really must do first name / last name then at least make the last optional and also include a field for "what should we call you" or "nick name" or something.

Great ted talk about Myanmar names: https://www.ted.com/talks/cynthia_ma_shwe_sin_win_not_good_w...

Just whatever you do don’t put ‘null’ into the fields lol

Or "DROP TABLES"!

> I prefer to use my middle name and really dislike using my first name (shared with my dad, who I don't have a good relationship with). I'm endlessly having to explain every single stinking time I interact with pretty much anyone.

This sounds dramatically overstated. Going by your middle name is normal and doesn't require much in the way of explanations. For example, my father goes by his middle name. This has led to "problems" all of one time -- when he worked for the military, they insisted on the first name. So, during that period, he used the first name.

I know it's a minor annoyance, but it's something that jades me every single day and gets really old after a while. I feel companies and websites should do a better job of being respectful. A "what should we call you" field is simple and easy, would make the service much more friendly to some people.

So do you dutifully put your real first name into all forms? I know people who always go by shortened versions of their name (e.g. Rob instead of Robert). They just put in their preferred name as their first name for everything (uni, bills, etc.)

You can't blame companies for using the name they give you. Are you worried about being accused of fraud or something?

It really depends on where. Some places you'll have no trouble and others you will. Whether or not you'll have problems depends on what you want to do.

I've have the opposite problem in Japan. Virtually everywhere insists that I use the name on my (Canadian) passport as my official name. It's listed as "Lastname Middlename Firstname". Some government offices can handle 3 names (Yay). Some government offices understand the order for Canadian names and since they often can only handle 2 names, will record my name as "Lastname Firstname" (in Japan, family name comes first). Other offices don't understand the order and assume that my single given name has a space in it. Since they can't handle spaces in their software they list my name as "Lastname Middlename". No amount of explanation will detract them as they have to do it the way they've been told.

So now I've got 3 official versions of my name in Japanese official databases (4 if you count the version that is truncated because my name has too many characters). Luckily none of their systems talk to each other ;-) -- though I had one heck of a time getting my "My Number" (similar to social security number) registered because of the confusion. I feel sorry for any Portuguese people (who often have a lot of names) who live in Japan ;-)

The situation in the US is not nearly so bad, but I've definitely heard of problems before.

Is there a reason your wife didn't adopt your last name?

Presumably, if she wanted to change her name to avoid these problems she'd have done that independently. Most people would not want to change their name because of badly programmed systems.

Also, many people (and many cultures) consider adopting your husband's surname to be weird.

It's not something Burmese women are used to doing, and if you think about it it's kind of a weird holdover from a much more patriarchal time. But, if she'd known how difficult it would be I think she would have anyway.

Tons of immigrants at Ellis Island did not have last names, and were assigned them on the spot, or made them up on the spot. Sometimes with humorous results.

I imagine it would be extremely difficult to operate in the US without a last name. She doesn't have to adopt yours obviously, but she could pick one.

For example Osama Bin Laden. Bin is not his middle name, and Laden is not his last name. It means Osama son of Laden. But his relatives in the US use "BinLaden" as if it were a last name.

In other words, "I dislike that name, as it doesn't fit the One True Way Of Naming. Here's a Real(tm) name for you." How very nice of you /s

Or, as the article says, "39. People whose names break my system are weird outliers. They should have had solid, acceptable names, like 田中太郎."

That's like saying, I don't like having an @ symbol in my email address, fix it, make it work the way I like it.

Sometimes you just gotta make accommodations to where you live. Having a last name for legal purposes doesn't really change anything about you.

Quite the opposite, IMNSHO: "I don't like people using + in their emails, ban that! Everyone should have an address [a-z]{3,}@[a-z]{3,}\.[a-z]{2,4} - anything else is HERESY! You gotta make accommodations, else you'll break my overly restrictive assumptions."

You mean like when you move to a country and are oppressed into having to write addresses on envelopes in the way the local postal service expects it?

If email systems were a national thing, and I'd move somewhere where they didn't accept "+" in email addresses for, say, official government communications, then .. yeah, I'd have to get a new email address.

Personally I find it much more annoying if people mispronounce my name (which happens in a personal face-to-face setting) than if I had to write my name down in a certain way on a form, to make it work with the system. It's just an identifier for the system. I wouldn't get the same SSN or phone number either--which is just about as silly to expect.

It would be nice if they had standard ways of dealing with names that do not fit in such a system, so that at least the variant to make it work would be the same everywhere else. But to demand it to be taken verbatim and work correctly in the system, that's like moving to another country and demanding you keep the same land line number.

If there was a specific postal service for each building, each with their own set of requirements, you mean. And each, of course, insists that theirs is the One True Way. Yeah, that's a nice world to live in: change yourself ten ways from Sunday to fit into various, mutually incompatible and completely arbitrary rules; all so that the original developer making the rules up on the spot would have an easier job.

That was very informative. Thank you for sharing this ( and useful for my day work ).

I know that western naming convention is just that, a convention, but it does help to see how other cultures handled it.

Apart from all this, it is always interesting how a given system deals with exceptions.

I have the suffix III which often gets written iii, and sometimes get attached to my last name so they just say it and then and accented "ee" sound on the end. There have even been other variations, but those have all been one-off exceptions.

Even at the government level, identity isn't solved. I have two government issued IDs, both current, that contradict each other and once barred me from getting on a flight. I also have to visit the IRS in person regularly to confirm my identity. I had multiple issues with standardized tests when I was younger, including one instance where they both wanted to delete my score because they thought I couldn't fill out my name correctly and they also wanted to give me an award (which ultimately made me a National Merit Scholar) - the best part is because of the confusion on my name they had a hard time figuring out whether or not they were supposed to give it to me (as in they thought I both did and did not exist in their system due to the naming error).

The above are just a handful of examples, there are many more and those aren't even necessarily the most extreme. The only thing I know for certain is my children will not share my name, or have any weird shit attached to it.

I have a hyphen in my last name that caused the California DMV to make one of my last names a middle name, and the Social Security Administration can’t verify my name on their website also due to it.

I feel like it’s time software needs to level up, ok 30 years ago sure mistakes were made, but now if you live on planet earth you have to know how names work after how many thousands of years our current systems have been in place.

"how names work"

part of the issue is people writing software making decisions about 'how names work', and there being multiple interpretations of it. I've wanted - many times - to build in just 'name' in systems, vs "first name", "last name", "middle name", "suffix", etc. Because... inevitably, clients have to support someone that doesn't fit that mold. The end user probably has dealt with it dozens of times already, but it's still bad for them, and usually unnecessary. MOST of the time, we only ever take "first" and "last" and concat them on the screen anyway, then keep them separated for someone to sort via excel...

We used to have problems with non-ASCII chars in names, we fixed that with UTF, we had problems with currencies and numbers, we made libraries that understand locales and even directions of writing, time zones same thing. So it’s time for us to resolve names now with standard libraries that have been thought through like the above.

While I'd probably run in to edge cases, it would be nice to actually point to a standard and say "the libraries all support standard XYZ. that's built in - doing it any other way is going to mean problems ABC and cost $$".

It's actually interesting that frameworks provided by platforms such as .NET, Java, etc., don't include an abstraction for the representation of names.

Such abstractions exist for dates, times, calendars, currencies, calculations with money, and so forth, but not names.

On the one hand I can understand it, because names are so complicated, and how would you sit down and come up with something good enough to represent all of them?

On the other hand they're prevalent in such a high percentage of line of business and consumer facing apps that it's almost ridiculous that every single developer on the face of the earth at one time or another has to come up with their own half-baked implementation.

It's especially ridiculous when you consider that so many of these home-rolled implementations, if not all of them, are rife with terrible flaws that constantly cause frustration and inconvenience to a small but significant number of users.

A dedicated, well-maintained name abstraction is certainly something that needs to happen. More than interesting, it's a bit bizarre that this hasn't been done yet (AFAIK.)

In terms of developer-facing complexity, this could be a laughably simple thing to use- just a type that supports equality, perhaps ordering, and conversion to string. Only the constructor would need to be complex. :)

I guess the reason this hasn't been done is simply that the implementation would never be "correct"- there is no formal specification of human names out there, and there would always be cases where some poor individual with an unusual name falls afoul of the system. Strictly fewer cases than we have today, where everyone rolls their own name system, but still some; it's not a solvable problem the way timezone conversion is.

But, on the other hand, that's the way the world is- messy. Developers are going to have to learn better best practices for communally doing our best in cases where there is no perfect answer, because there's only going to be more of such cases as tech continues to eat the world.

I’m pretty sure it’s solvable, the main problem is that we break up names into first and last to identify the parts and we do bad data quality checks. Let’s say we did just have one field and a service that was trained on each counties’s variations that could return the parts of the name you wanted. So some database and detection system to understand the pattern. It’s definitely possible since we humans do read and understand names just fine in our own locales.

It would help if we quit using that and had one field for the full name and then another one for "how do you want to be addressed".

I've in the past written stuff that generated an index of names; this was sorted. While you can certainly sort on a free-form text field, the culture here is that name indexes are generally sorted by family name. So, to do that, you have to have some understanding of what the family name is, which a free-form text field does not give you.

But a lot of software has no need for the breakdown, and would be better served by a free-form field.

Then at least be upfront with the user about why you're asking, because they might well answer differently (e.g. include a different number of parts of their last name) if they know your purpose is to sort the name than if they think it's being used for a different purpose. They might even give totally different names.

That's the most important part of the comment above: The concept of a name is so overloaded that unless you ask about the string to use for the specific purposes you intend to use it, then there is very little you can do with it.

I'm not convinced it is solvable. I don't think the general case is reliably solved even by humans.

E.g. is Carlos the same person as Karl?

Well, that depends. Was one of them localized, or are these the actual given names. Just this weekend I was on an offsite and saw a Spanish book about Karl Marx, or Carlos Marx as they had written it in the title, in the library of the house we stayed in.

Clearly in this instance the names are the same, but that requires knowing that Carlos Marx maps to Karl Marx and that Karl Marx is a famous name; otherwise you can't assume the name was translated.

There were many other names on books in that library. I don't know which one of them - if any - also maps to someone known under another name, because that requires me to know which person they are about.

Is Curt, Curth, Kurt the same person? My uncle had all three on different documents, and delighted in telling people about it.

What about countries like the UK, where there is no legal requirement to notify anyone of a change of name, and where a the legal way of formally changing your name - a "deed poll" is just a document structured in a certain way where you assert that you are known under a certain name? My ex is known under at least three different name combinations, all of which are present on different sets of legal documents.

Some subsets of the issue is solvable, but for example there is no way of taking a full name and returning the "name this person prefers to be known by" because the name does not contain that information. You can make a pretty good guess.

But you'll fail dramatically for people from different countries. And don't think for a second you can guess correctly based on where a name is from - many names are used in different countries, and often as different elements (e.g. firstname one country, lastname another; feminine name one place, masculine another), and many people have names that combine different nationalities (e.g. my son has a name that combined an English firstname, a Nigerian middle name and a Norwegian last name).

The only reliable solution is to not assume any one single string can be used as a generic name - you need to ask what to use within a given context and within whatever constraints you have.

I actually attempted to do this.

I used ML techniques to help smooth over some of the difficult parts (there are many difficult parts). The hardest cases are ambiguous names, for instance delineating Hispanic vs. Puerto Rican naming conventions (they're different). The fundamental approach involved pushing all ambiguity up to the end user, so they always have the option to correct the system.

https://www.alphanym.com/demo/?jm2

We already have an abstraction for names: a text field. Trying to be more clever than that will break for someones name.

Which is great until the client asks for a friendly name (given name) identifier. GitHub uses name, we use first/last name. So we just shove the GitHub name in the first name spot and ask people to organize what looks right.

Our partners suggested string.split(' '), which produced interesting results against the sample list of github users.

A lot of software would be much better without stupid clients asking for the wrong things.

Eh, I understand it. They want to put some name in the identity control in the header. Putting the full name in is guaranteed to go wrong. We might start asking for a nickname for that purpose.

Why is the full name guaranteed to go wrong? A better assumption is that there is no reasonable nickname and you have to use their full name.

Use two fields: name and display name. Anything else will break for someone. In most cases where something asks for my name its really not even necessary and certainly not necessary to split it into first/last/display/friendly etc.

This is not sufficient if you’re going to localize to languages other than English. In some languages, proper names get declined like other nouns and thus change spelling in different contexts.

Are there examples where splitting it in First/Last name (or any other split) would help with that? It seems like that would always either be a problem or something to design around while localizing.

It’s fundamentally language specific, so any comprehensive solution is going to need to interface with the localization system. Really, names should be keyed by (user, language, tag) triples, where the localization defines the acceptable tags based on language requirements. For example, a single person may need their name stored as:

  en:disp     Eric
  is:disp:nf  Eiríkur
  is:disp:þf  Eirík
  is:disp:þgf Eiríki
  is:disp:ef  Eiríks

Designing a UI to collect this information is left as an exercise for the reader.

Since asking a user to enter every possible variant is unwieldy and without doing so, the problem is unsolvable, I’ll stick with my original suggestion of using a single field. Yes, some names will break, but far fewer than if first and last names are required.

You're assuming that you're 'friendly' enough with your users that they want you to use their given name.

Oh yeah that touches a nerve. I hate it when I have filled in my name and email somewhere, maybe I forgot doing it, and I receive a newsletter, which opens with and greets me with just my first name.

No. Just because I signed up for your mailinglist doesn't mean we're on a first name basis! I hardly even remember your business exists, do you remember me? Anything else about me except my email and my full name, from which you deduced my first name? Then let's not pretend we're buddies.

This of course depends on how "friendly" I'm willing to be with said business. Which differs if it's an Etsy store, ordering food online, my bank, insurance, etc. I especially hate it when the news letter is in fact 99% ads and promo babble, but has this 1% of useful info that I want to be kept up to date on. We're not close, I'm letting you spam my inbox, call me "your grace" or something.

Can you actually go wrong with just using someone's full name, and erring on the side of being a tad too formal? Is this just a problem with marketing companies that want to "connect" and become "buddies"?

This already breaks names which inflect.

What’s this? A name that changes when you are talking to someone directly? In some Slavic languages this happens.

Usually the name would change according to the full rules of noun inflection in whatever language. In Latin, a noun has 6 cases, of which vocative (indicating direct address to the noun) is one.

Irish has a vocative case that can modify names, and is an official language of a UN member state.

Which isn’t really a problem you can solve. If names change in the context that they’re used, it will always be broken, so why break more names by trying to be clever?

Actually I think it should be ok, because you’d enter the name in the nomative case and then when you write it on the screen you’d declinate it based on the language you’re displaying it in, which would be the same for every name regardless of its origin.

Tried that once. Horrible, terrible, no good idea. (The only rule you can be sure of is "there are countless exceptions, and exceptions from the exceptions", everything else is a minefield in a quicksand) Asking for "how should we address you" is far easier, even if a few users fill in "Your Galactic Imperial Majesty".

I'm not saying you can solve it. A single text field isn't a solution either. You cannot avoid breaking some names.

A single field breaks fewer names than forced first and last names, though, and is a simpler implementation too. Plus, as long as you accept any input (besides blank, I guess), then the only way it will be broken is during display and at least the user sees the exact name they typed in, exactly how they typed it in.

A single field also breaks the expectation that people do not get called by their full names in every interaction. This is a very common expectation, and violating it makes you sound subtly more like an evil robot.

Is this a lesser offense than mangling a name that doesn't cleanly split into first/last? At the individual scale, probably.

The impact, in aggregate, on UX/sales/utility? Could definitely go either way depending on your userbase.

That's not an evil robot, it's a polite robot.

Better than the slimy feel I get when a robot calls me just by my first name. You're a robot, we're not buddies.

It's a string. Dont even try anything else.

Exactly this, and I really don't see what the fuss is all about in the above comments.

Because it’s extremely diverse between cultures and countries how names work. Here in Germany it’s typical to have several first names and it’s legal to use any of it, even though it might be just the name of your godfather/godmother.

FHIR has a relatively general definition for names, but multiple general and country-specific extensions exist for it: https://www.hl7.org/fhir/datatypes.html#HumanName

This is a solved problem from a modeling standpoint. The HL7 Reference Information Model allows any entity (such as a person) to have multiple names. Each name can be tagged with a type (legal, maiden, alias, etc) and validity date range. A name can contain multiple parts in any order, optionally tagged as prefix / suffix / family / given. Names can also be explicitly marked as null if unknown or not assigned. There are open source RIM implementations in several languages.

Interesting; I didn't think I'd see an HL7 reference in this thread. I work somewhat with FHIR, which also has a HumanName[1] data type, and I think it handles most of the cases in this thread.

For those not familiar: FHIR is a standard that covers health and patient data. IMO, it's a pretty good model. (HL7 is the organization, and there are few other standards under it.)

I'm less familiar with RIM; could you link to it's definition of a name? (The best I could find suggested that it was nothing more than an unconstrained piece of text.)

[1]: https://www.hl7.org/fhir/datatypes.html#humanname

What's the purpose of structured modelling of names? Why does it matter which parts are family vs given vs whatever else? Lots of the W3C International Examples they give use a `<text>` field. Why not just use that?

https://www.hl7.org/fhir/datatypes-examples.html#2.24.1.13.1

It matters for collation order, if you want to show a list of patients sorted by family name.

Is this a current use case, or did that just make sense 100 years ago? (As in these assumptions: "tracking actual relationships in data is Hard, and family name correlates strongly with real-world relationships") I mean, it sort of works even today, but neither of the assumptions are as strong any more.

It's still a current use case for healthcare provider workflows. Also helps a lot when doing automated record linkage between different systems.

Unfortunately due to the way the HL7 web site is structured there's no way to give a direct link. Go to the Normative Edition, Foundation, Data Types, Basic Types.

http://www.hl7.org/implement/standards/product_brief.cfm?pro...

The FHIR data model is a little simpler to allow for easier implementation. In the vast majority of real world healthcare use cases it works well. But from a modeling standpoint if you need to cover odd edge cases it sometimes helps to look back at the old RIM.

"First" and "last" is a wrong representation anyway, because it assumes people always write their names in that order.

That breaks for chinese, japanese, korean, and probably multiple other types of names.

s/first name/given name

s/last name/surname

But this has it own issues, like assuming people have either a given name or a surname in the first place.

I know a Romanian online and his surname comes first... It’s a historic IT clusterfuck to assume all names are firstname, lastname

Myanmar is another one, almost everyone has just one given name unless they are specifically following the western or some other style (and that's rare in my experience). The last name field should always be optional at a minimum.

> "First" and "last" is a wrong representation anyway, because it assumes people always write their names in that order.

I do not see this as a problem. If i know English so i can fill english-labeled form on english webpage, i would also have a bit of cultural knowledge to translate first name to given name and last name to surname.

> But this has it own issues, like assuming people have either a given name or a surname in the first place.

This is only a problem if the form validates that both fields must be non-NULL. Problem is not with the split itself but with the validation code.

Also hard to decide which is the surname to use with some names/cultures.

My native country, Norway, went through an assimilation period of standardising surnames a few hundred years ago. Before that your name often was in 3 parts:

First names(s) - father's name - farm/manor/village.

So names were something like "Ivar Ragnarsson of Torp" or "Sverre Haraldson Bjerkeli". (With the -son bit to say whether a son or daughter).

With assimilation into standard more Continental Christian Danish society and most likely standard registration for tax - people dropped either the farm name or the father's name in their names. And froze the father's name in the surname in future generations. And changed the -son to a more Danish -sen for all genders. So, since the 1700s people have just 2 parts to their names. Unlike Iceland which has kept the naming tradition.

However,... what is common again today is to have 2 surnames. One from each parent. Unhyphenated. Similar to the Spanish convention (first-name - father's surname - mother's surname) but not as standardised, and mostly opposite order with father's surname at the end being the official family surname. And that makes internationalised computer systems so complicated.

My children have both our surnames, both by choice and necessity so either of us can get through passport control with them. (mother's surname - father's surname). But they had to have their surnames hyphenated to be able to register their births and British passports. Which still angers me today as my family convention of the latter surname being the main one is now mostly ignored.

How does that work after 2 generations? Wouldn’t you end up with names like this, and longer afterwards? Which ones are carried on?

Bob Jones Alexander Richardson Hill

I don't know about the OP, but in Quebec this is fairly common. Usually you have 2 surnames until you turn 18 and then you choose one of them. I really like the idea of this, personally.

People are free to choose what they want but you mainly keep only the "main" surname from each parent.

I know in England there was a tendency of people keeping both names of powerful families[1][2], then as double-barreled surnames. Which then sometimes went a bit nuts a few generations later if they married into other double-barreled families [3].

I think it was when I visited Stowe School, the seat of the Dukes of Buckingham and looked at the family tree, that I even saw some surnames repeated if they married into other families which shared one of their multi-barreled surnames...

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/nov/02/keeping...

[2] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/family/parenting/are-we-heading-...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Temple-Nugent-Brydges-...

It sounds like all you really need to handle names reliably is to ask for the entire name in one field, then have another field for their preferred name (which could be the first name, or the middle name, and a diminutive). And if you need to do something more formal with a title (like Mrs Lastname), potentially have that as a third field.

Sometimes the dumb solution is better than trying to be clever, and it saves some trouble with localisation.

W3C recommends the same pattern: [0].

[0]: https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-personal-names

> Sometimes the dumb solution is better than trying to be clever

It's astonishing how often this turns out to be true, which has been probably the single most important lesson of my career. I think it's that clever solutions tend to depend on more assumptions, which rarely have P(true) = 1.

The idea that a person's name should be parsed and managed by software is amusing to me. How about just getting rid of concepts like "last name" and "first name" (which already embed a lot of cultural assumptions), and only ask for a "full name"? In some countries people don't have both first and last names. In some countries the last name customarily comes before the first name. In some countries the structure of names is more complicated and the son's name includes a copy of his father's name. I don't think software will really handle all these oddities correctly, given that just a single parent can undermine all the system's rules by choosing an unconventional name for their children.

For what it's worth, in Singapore, where there are significant Indian, Chinese, Malay ethnicities but also highly westernized, the government identity card provides just a single full name. Parents can choose their children's names in accordance with their culture—or not. You can put your first name before your last name, after it, or surrounding it. Or include your father's name if needed.

That's the W3's recommendation:

https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-personal-names...

By ignoring the structure in data acquisition phase, you just postpone decisions about structure to data processing phase, now without necessary information about the structure (which could be obtained in data acquisition phase).

For example, such basic functionality like changing sort order between given name and surname would be much more complicated.

Besides, the whole story is about the problem that name including title was in one field and later processing (title removal) misbehaves due to insufficient information.

Is it important to parse names like that? You can just do a search by substring in most cases

Worked on some business software previously, and customers insisted on first/last or first/middle/last, despite the fairly obvious issues. They also demanded address fields in a US style despite needing to support international addresses (I still have no idea how their staff handled that).

People want to follow the conventions they know, even apparently if they're told it will cause issues.

I worked at a place that required a middle name. I don't have one, so at their instance, I picked a name, "Xavier" became my middle name.

Yet in reality, nobody actually needs a name that's sorted by surname: that's a holdover from paper phone books. We have search, and we have stable sorting algos. Every requirement "sort by surname" I've ever seen turned out to mean "sort the names in a predictable way, btw this is the way we always did that, because we always did that."

(Yes, familiarity is a part of UX; but do note that this one specifically is a historical, not intrinsic, motivation)

Credit cards forms handle this perfectly. There is just a name field. It seems odd that this is perfectly acceptable for financial companies that in essence loan billions a year but its not ok for anyone else.

I have a similar situation, it's so frustrating. I couldn't buy insurance from Progressive because Lexis Nexis thinks I'm my father and it was too much of a hassle to resolve. Simply because I'm a Jr and we lived at the same address (obviously) for about 18 years.

I still have problems with this because I have the same name as my dad. The worst was when my bank account was locked because his boss at the time had been taking taxes off their cheques but not paying the government. For some reason they called my bank and locked my account thinking I was him(at the time they thought he wasn't paying taxes, it was all worked out eventually) despite our birth dates being nearly 30 years apart.

It happened without any explanation. I had to go to the bank and ask why I couldn't use my debit card. They explained.the government had a hold on my account. I ended up having to prove I was not my dad with a bunch of pieces of ID. It took like half a day to get access to my account restored. I was 20 or something at the time. There was no way I could me mistaken for someone in his 40's.

I'm surprised it was so quick.

Normally when I discover things like that which require some interaction with bureaucracy at some level, I find out on a Friday afternoon at 4pm, have to wait until Monday, then things are resolved for days because people are 'backed up' on Monday...

>There was no way I could me mistaken for someone in his 40's.

But when designing automated systems, you can't add in a condition of "unless person doesn't look their age". If one can't use names as a unique identifier, then that leaves a number issued at birth by a central government. But as I understand, even SSNs aren't unique and get re-used.

As an aside though, cultures that use the same name for multiple people in the same family confuse me. To me, the purpose of a name is to identify, so what is the point of naming someone the same? Perhaps, historically, it was a way to establish credibility before the time of credit reports and phones.

> “As an aside though, cultures that use the same name for multiple people in the same family confuse me.”

i’d wager their desire for affiliation is stronger than their desire for differentiation. individualism isn’t as valued in many cultures.

There are all sorts of reasons.

In some Irish families (mostly older people now), people had a Gaelic derived name and a legal English name, because the authorities banished Gaelic names. When you do genealogy, it’s very difficult to track people in certain circumstances as spellings and references change.

That happens in areas of Brazil that had German immigrants. They had their German-style names, but at one point, Brazil forced them all to adopt Portuguese-style names.

SSNs are not (yet) reused. There's ~900 million potential SSNs, we've run through half, and are using ~5.5 million a year, which gives us at least another half a century before we have to start reusing.

I actually wrote an API for handling personal names, because software mangling people's names irked my pedanticism. The fundamental takeaway is that names are ridiculously complex, equivalent to any other part of natural language. For every rule you could contrive there are exceptions, and many more legitimately ambiguous cases.

You shouldn't ever use first/last name fields, because they force users to adapt around your system (many names don't follow this structure). A long unstructured text fields is best, because it can accommodate nearly anyone who's name can be spelled with unicode. Finally always check your interpretation of a name with the person in question, seeing as they're the end authority.

https://www.alphanym.com/demo/?jm1

I also have a roman numeral suffix and experience the exact same issues all the time, its insane! I understand what my parents were going for with the suffix but that tradition will end with me if I have kids.

The credit agencies also started attributing debt to my name from someone with a very similar name and social. Of course they don't like paying their loans and so every once in a while my credit tanks while I go through the process to get it cleared up. As far as I've been able to find there is no long term solution to this, I just have to deal with it every couple years.

My first name differs from my sibling's by two letters (and same last name), and I often get credit history "verification" questions about him. I mean, they're two very different names, and whatever BS company it is that's behind this is complete crap.

I can’t use online question verification systems.

The people I bought my house from have the same last name as me. So every time I do one of those, it asks me questions about them. I know none of their information as I never met them.

My wife has the same maiden name as her mom, with a middle initial that is one letter apart.

This flags more corrective correlation, so despite having a different last name for 19 years, insurance companies and Bank of America get them confused. The insurance is worse because you cannot appeal insurance data.

I have a suffix as well (II), but I stopped using it years ago. I have one old credit card that has my full name including suffix on it that I have to remember to include the suffix with, but that's about it.

Maybe it would help to spell out II as "The Second" or IV as "The Fourth"? People with hyphenated or apostrophed last names could even spell out their punctuation too. But then how do you standardize on the spelling of punctuation?

FORTH solved the punctuation spelling problem by systematically documenting how every word (including punctuation) is pronounced, so you could unambiguously speak FORTH programs over the telephone.

http://forth.sourceforge.net/standard/fst83/fst83-12.htm

-Don O Apostrophe Dell Hyphen Hopkins The Fourth (Not to be confused with Don O Tick Dell Minus Hopkins The FORTH)

Never knew this about FORTH, very interesting!

I had a friend in college named jane smith, capitalized as so—that is, not capitalized. She always entered it this way and it always appeared to be correct until the next nightly database cleaning job ran and gave her initial capitals. Eventually the registrar told her that nothing could be done but that a note was made in her file to ensure her diploma was printed properly. Of course it wasn’t, but they did re-print it free of charge without complaint.

(Name changed to protect the innocent.)

I also have a numeral. Sometimes as a child, when I went to the local hospital they would initially pull up my father's information instead of mine. I'm not sure how they thought that could be correct, given I was a child in the 2000s and my father was born in the 70s.

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