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Comment by wilg | Hacker News Reader

Yeah but it's kind of a whole thing to respect people's autonomy to control their own names. Plus, you can just copy-paste.

Edit: Not to mention if you are asking for their "legal name" for legal purposes then you would have to accommodate any valid legal name in any country.

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Having not studied Korean or Arabic, I would have a real hard time with copying and pasting, and knowing whether the name is a surname, or first name, or whether those cultures employ a first name or last name.

(For example, many Asian cultures with Chinese influence start their names with LASTNAME FIRSTNAME, so one might have a name of 蔡英文, where 蔡 is the surname, and 英文 is the given name. Japanese also has the same custom, 武金城, where 武 is the surname, and 金城 is the given name.)

That’s why I think a harmonized approach—even if it has a bit of English hegemony—is acceptable, just as we have done so in scientific journals and publications.

But romanizing doesn't solve any of those problems (except maybe having to copy/paste, but with uncommon/foreign names you'll have to re-look at it thrice either way). You're still gonna wonder if 'Sung' is the first, second or third name, because your mistake was assuming that it works like this in the first place.

If you read scientific journals, they have dealt with ASCII names, sometimes with last names in all caps, with the given name.[0]

For example, KANESHIRO, Takeshi, with the names of the authors of a paper.

[0] https://reader.elsevier.com/reader/sd/pii/S0022247X9895987X?...

A better approach is just using whatever name they provide in full. If you need a short name (which is not the case in the original .txt file), ask for one. Just treat names like opaque blobs.

There's always a tradeoff between autonomy and practicality. Do we need to implement drawing for all "text" inputs (and outputs) so that people like Prince won't have any issues expressing their autonomy with something like this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_(musician)#/media/File:...

(I'm aware that this was a stage name, but it is a legal name in the US)

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