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Comment by RoyalHenOil | Hacker News Reader

No joke, the mother of one of my friends changed her name to...just her first name. She eliminated her last name. This is also in Australia.

Not having a last name has caused her all kinds of problems. Australia may not officially require you to have a last name, but passports, driver's licenses, credit cards, utilities, etc., still require there to be something in that space. She kinda-sorta gets by using "[first name] [firstname]" or "[first name] NoLastName", but it is still a bureaucratic nightmare -- as I think anyone but her could have predicted.

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Many countries don’t allow name changes at all, so if you are a named- hanged foreigner living in that country, a lot of systems won’t be able to handle you, and you’ll be asking for exceptions for your entire stay (not to mention needing to carry around your birth certificate, proof of name change, and translations).

And I think changing your maiden name in marriage is still common in the west, so many foreigners run into this in a country like China.

Many Indonesians don’t have last names, I wonder how immigration is handled. Wiki has a whole section on how other countries handle this, since Indonesia isn’t a small country:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indonesian_names#:~:text=by%....

If she ever goes to the US, she will join the large and ever-growing Fnu clan.

https://uxdesign.cc/what-the-fnu-fa72cf4ad5bd

I've seen the LNU variant — "Last Name Unknown".

In southern India it's common for the last name to simply be the father's name (but I do know one guy whose last name is his mother's name).

Like, my name could be "Foo", my father's name could be "Baz" so the given name field of the passport could be "Foo Baz", and the last name would be blank.

But the visa form for certain countries don't accept that, so they put in "LNU".

Anyway, these days people are more aware, so when applying for passport they specify the given name as "Foo", and the surname as "Baz" (parent's name), even though that's really not the surname.

When I worked for State government, we had an employee: Crystalynn

One name, not first, not last. And it wreaked havoc with all of our IAM processes as a result.

Which brought up all the other issues with IAM...for a minute we had an issue with names like O'Malley

I changed one of my cards to have just my surname on it, 'cuz I thought it looked cool, and there are a _lot_ of CC forms on the internet that don't like it.

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