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Comment by freddie_mercury | Hacker News Reader

Don't do this.

In Vietnam names like Nguyen Thi Anh Mai are common.

The family name is "Nguyen" is the family name. "Anh Mai" is the "first name". But they should be called "Mai". And reversing the order "Mai Anh Thi Nguyen" is just wrong.

And Catholic families in Vietnam often have names "Nguyen Thi To but everybody calls me by my baptismal name of Mary". Or you have a "house name" (i.e. your real name) and an outside name (so that ghosts can't follow you home). Or you have your real name and an unofficial English name (for reasons both good & bad) that literally everyone at work calls you.

In the Philippines people have names Anna Katrina Gomez. But you don't call them Anna. You call them Katrina because that's how it often works in the Philippines.

The solution is simple:

One field is "what is your full name?"

One field is "what would you like to be called?"

You don't need to try to infer one from the other.

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Interesting. Indeed, why not just ask “what would you like to be called?” and maybe for administrative(?) purposes ask the full name.

Naming is a tar pit and even Westerners might like to be called John when their name is Winstonshire. Let’s not even bother.

What is the downside? I’m not seeing it. I see people here recommending to implement logic to handle this fully and I’m not seeing why this would be preferable.

Heck, I just saw on Reddit some guy just discovered his girlfriend's "real name" is "Lawr'ryn" due to dumb parents. She preferred to go by Lauren. And her brother Pur'see went by Percy.

Why, as a system designer, would you force your user to see "Lawy'ryn" every day just because that's on some government document somewhere?

This is the most sensible answer here.

My name is Ritobrata Ghosh (Given Family). But my friends, teachers, colleagues always called me Rito. I have a different short name that is used by immediate family and close relatives.

Rito is also easier for western people's tongues. So, that is what I almost always use. I use my full name only in legal and financial documents. In every other place, I am just Rito. I like to be addressed as "Rito" and appear as "Rito Ghosh" in badges, documentation, slack, any non-legal/non-financial documents.

So, the best way to go, in my opinion, is having two fields- one for full name, another for preferred name. Do not _assume_ anything.

This is also consistent with western names, like: William Henry Gates III as Bill Gates.

There is also another field in many places where there are badges and such. "This field will appear as is in your badge" is wise in such cases.

Yes please! My wife and I constantly struggle with this kind of thing. When there's just a "name" field that permits some high number of characters, it's fine.

Which name is my "first name" or "last name" also depends on what identity document I'm using. I immigrated to Asia and switched to the family-name-first convention, but my birth certificate and so on are the opposite. So it's conceivable that a system requiring two forms of identification has both name orders, and both are correct.

Names are awful.

Not to mention you always have to second guess the designer.

Does "last name" mean "family name" even though it is my first name?

And what counts as "middle name"? Is it "Thi"? But my "first name" isn't Anh Mai. It is just Mai. But "Thi Anh" isn't my middle name, either, that's just nonsense.

And, yes, we have the "multiple documents with different name order" depending on whether it is the Vietnamese birth certificate, the US Consular Record of Birth Abroad, the Vietnamese passport, or the Australian passport....

No.

Either the name serves some legal purpose and they need to write it in full and 2 fields supports that.

Or the name serves no purpose and they can write what they want in those 2 fields.

> In Vietnam names like Nguyen Thi Anh Mai are common.

Which reminds me of this problem: she might have sisters called, say, Nguyen Thi Anh May and Nguyen Thi Anh Minh, and in quite a few countries this will result in them having identical names on their identity cards and most communication, either "Nguyen Thi", "Nguyen Thi Anh" or even "Nguyen Thi Anh M."

Are you missing a name from your PH example perhaps?

Everyone I've known there has their mother's maiden name as a middle name, and father's last as last name. Then on marriage sliding the original last name to the middle name.

But one thing I did notice is that very few go by any given name, usually a play on it or a nickname instead.

And maybe you don't need the full name.

And don't limit it to Asia either, it's relevant everywhere.

Born in the Philippines, you forgot the middle name or mother’s last name is also important.

> You don't need to try to infer one from the other.

So you should make your system more cumbersome for 95%+ of users just for the sake of doing the right thing in occasional edge cases?

By all means make it possible to override, but you should absolutely default "what would you like to be called?" rather than making everyone enter their name twice.

> So you should make your system more cumbersome for 95%+ of users just for the sake of doing the right thing in occasional edge cases?

As the app is apparently developed for use in Asia-Pacific, no, it isn't.

I guarantee that if someone vaguely familiar with the countries they operate in spends half an hour actually trying, they'll come up with heuristics that are correct for 95%+ of the target population.

So use the heuristics to set the initial value for the second field based on the first. Just let the user edit it as they wish.

That's exactly what I'm advocating!

I guarantee you half an hour is at least an order of magnitude too low of a time estimate to implement such heuristics.

You’re talking about literally billions of people, not “occasional edge cases”.

How do you figure that? Billions of people would mean over 10% of the world population having exceptional names, which seems very implausible.

They aren’t exceptional names, that’s my whole point. They are just unfamiliar to you.

I don't know what you imagine I'm unfamiliar with (and you're probably wrong, but never mind that), but familiar or not, it's quite easy to handle the unexceptional cases, almost by definition.

It's not implausible if you consider that you're taking a rule that usually but not always works in the US and try to apply it to the whole world.

In way you are right.

From the global point of view the exceptional case is the American one, Name Middle Family. It's about 330 M people vs 8 billions, 4%, which is less than 10%.

But then you add the exceptional cases for every country or culture. From the other comments we already know that even in Western Europe there are many differences. So if you sum all those exceptional cases you get the 100% of the world population.

Edit: 330 M, typo was 353 M.

> From the global point of view the exceptional case is the American one, Name Middle Family.

That’s not really “American”. Most other Anglophone countries are mostly the same. Maybe it should be called “Anglophone” not “American”? To a certain extent, even “West European”

There are some subtle differences - my impression is the US is more accepting of generational suffixes (Jr, III, etc) than Australia is, for instance. But the overall structure “Given [Middle…] Surname” is shared

> Most other Anglophone countries are mostly the same.

I don't have any French or German or Polish friends to verify but this is so demonstably false just by reading some of comments here. Name Middle Family is clearly at most American.

France, Germany and Poland would not normally be considered Anglophone.

> Name Middle Family is clearly at most American.

It isn't "at most American" because UK, Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand also mostly use "Name Middle Family", just like the US does. There are still some differences in their naming practices, but those differences generally relate to subtler issues, not the big picture issue of name order.

Is it really true that most Anglophone countries are the same? Is that how they do it in India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Kenya, the Philippines, Jamaica, Singapore, Trinidad and Tobago, Botswana, Ghana, South Africa, and Fiji?

There are a lot more Anglophone countries than just the US, Canada, UK, and Australia.

I think we should distinguish between (1) traditional English naming practices, and Anglophone countries which have inherited those from England, and (2) countries with a majority non-European cultural background which have adopted the English language, but some or many of whose naming practices derive from that non-European cultural background. When I said "Anglophone", I was really talking about (1) not (2). Maybe I should have said "Anglosphere". But, I don't actually know to what extent majority non-European Anglophone countries ("Anglophone but not Anglosphere") take their naming practices from England vs from their non-European culture(s); quite possibly, for some of them, much of their naming practices are derived from English/British culture not their non-European culture(s), and hence in terms of "First Middle Last" may be indistinguishable from (1).

...yes? Have you looked at Indian names? Or Indonesian names? Or Ethiopian names

Yes. The vast majority of them follow a small number of simple patterns, and it's really not that hard to find a heuristic that interprets them with high accuracy.

The prime minister of Ethiopia is Abiy Ahmed. When he won the Nobel Peace Prize, he was referred to as Mr Abiy, which is his given name. Ahmed is his father's name, and it would be incorrect to refer to him as Mr Ahmed. Likewise, many Tamil people often have a first name and a patronymic, which may just be referred to with an initial. Example: S. Ramanujan. Ramanujan is his given name, Srinivasa is his father's name. In Indonesia, the government doesn't have a notion of first and last names. If you have a surname it's interpreted by the government as your family having a tradition of adding the family name to the end (or beginning) of your name. Similarly in India you can have surnames, clan names, caste names, patronymics, or mononyms. Trying to divide a name up into its parts is a fool's errand: Much easier to simply ask, what is your full name and what is your preferred name.

What everyone is saying is that you do less work, use 0 heuristics and guess absolutely nothing, to get 100% accuracy.

100% accuracy but a substantially worse UX for the overwhelming majority of users. A heuristic doesn't have to be perfect to be useful.

You say the heuristic is simple. Would you mind writing out the heuristic you have in mind for deriving "name you'd want to be called" from "official name for administrative purposes"/"full name"?

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