What Are “Unusual Characters”? | Hacker News Reader

What Are “Unusual Characters”?

shkspr.mobi

29 pointsedent29 comments

As a person with non-ASCII characters in name, i much prefer this approach than letting such characters pass but somehow fail on them later (which is not uncommon e.g. in airplane tickets or hotel reservations). Unless a system is vetted to handle Unicode properly, it should just be upfront about that.

Shallow rant about an interesting and important topic.

They could just be lazy/uncaring/incompetent. At least as many of them as racists.

I don't think the author was implying active hostility on the part of the EE programmers.

> It's the banality of bigotry which gets to me. Usual. Normal. Standard. They’re just dull ways for dull people with limited imaginations to dehumanise other people. The people who designed this form probably didn’t think of themselves as racist. They just designed, built, or perpetuated a system which was exclusionary.

Laziness, carelessness, incompetence lead to poorly designed systems, including systems which exclude groups of people.

Bigotry means intent. I think the author was just misusing that word.

Come on. There is a huge stretch in jumping from only supporting ANSI due to legacy, laziness, whatever to being inadvertently “racist”. It is clumsy to say “usual” instead of “a-zA-Z”. It is not an exclusionary system. No one gets left out due to lack of unicode.

It's not just that the system is exclusionary (and definitionally it is, even if only for technical reasons).

It's that the phrase "unusual characters" is inherently exclusionary - if your name isn't spelled a certain way, it and you are unusual.

Moreover "unusual" is never actually defined. So it's doubly insulting because the definition of "unusual" itself is something like special knowledge held only by the in-group.

Not to mention it's just bad UX, and clearly bad design if your name can just be two apostrophes.

Agreed, for the most part. The biggest problem is the word “unusual” in my view.

I think all systems should be designed to support full Unicode text at this point, but it’s hard to fault someone for failing to do so without more information. It may be due to Unicode text restrictions in back-end apps or related systems that were outside the scope of the project. Or it could just be laziness.

> No one gets left out due to lack of unicode.

Except people with names that don't fit into the ASCII character set, I guess?

What if this was a government site that you have to interact with for some reason? Something where using your full name is important?

You use a romanized version instead of e.g. kanji. Or you lose apostrophes. My name does not typically fit english forms and i personally would blush if I had to say I’m being left out. Sure, it would be better if I did not have to do this, but bucketing this into the “the system is racist” argument together with other real issues, imho, its compeltely tone deaf.

People shouldn't have to misspell their names because the software sucks.

That is true. It is also not my point above.

> What if this was a government site that you have to interact with for some reason? Something where using your full name is important?

In the US, your legal name for government purposes generally consists only of the characters a-z/A-Z without diacritics (whether - and ' are included depends on the state).

I understand the author's intentions, yet it's funny how he himself makes discriminatory assumptions:

> We’re a decade on from “Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names“

What if the programmer is 20 years old?

EDIT & Clarification: People here assume the person should have read HN and should have read the article in question.

I know quite a few programmers who don't know what HN is.

And what if the programmer doesn't speak English well enough to feel comfortable reading stuff in English?

patio11 published “Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names” ~10 years ago. That doesn’t depend on how old you are. https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...

You never come across posts from 10 years ago? I regularly happen across articles that I would not have been old enough to meaningfully use when they were first posted. The internet is a wonderful thing.

That one in particular has shown up several times on HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Falsehoods%20Programmers%20Bel...

While it may be possible that the designers for a large telco are all tweenagers - I think that's unlikely.

And, most of the young people I know have far more empathy and a broader outlook than many "industry veterans".

The Peano axioms are much older. We teach them in school. Let's hope that those falsehoods will also be taught in school. (In a different school, of course -- where people learn software development.)

Then ideally their education should have been based on modern assumptions about which people they could expect to be dealing with.

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