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Comment by andruby | Hacker News Reader

I know this isn't the answer, but I am happy to have a globally unique name.

I was lucky to have not one but two uncommon surnames. (grandmother remarried, children got an extra surname). There are only a dozen people with that combination of surnames.

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I, too, have pretty good reason to believe I have a globally unique name. Which makes me wonder, how common is that? I have no idea how even to begin coming up with a rough estimate. I can’t even make an educated guess about the order of magnitude.

> There are only a dozen people with that combination of surnames.

How can you be sure of that?

I have no idea how it works in other countries, but in Poland there are publicly accessible `.csv` files with data about names and surnames in the PESEL system (the ID assigned to people with Polish citizenship) since its creation. A double surname would be marked as a separate entry. If something like this exists in other countries, checking the rarity of a combination of surnames would be quite easy.

Do you have a link to these? I'm curious if my name is unique

You can download the CSV's here: https://dane.gov.pl/pl/dataset/1681,nazwiska-osob-zyjacych-w....

For the benefit of non-Polish-speakers:

- Nazwiska - surnames

- żeńskie - female

- męskie - male

hm, I was expecting to get first-names and last-names. Is there a CSV I'm missing?

I'm the only person in the UK with my sequence of names, they told me so when I was getting my covid jab and didn't have my NHS number on me so they had to find me by name and match to my photo ID.

French immigrant mother so French first name and middle name, and then an uncommon British (Welsh I think, dad's parents didn't learn English until they got to secondary school) second name.

Google, Facebook, Twitter are some indications. Not 100% guaranteed though.

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