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Comment by davedx | Hacker News Reader

Why is it absurd? Either you accept customers or users with foreign names or you don't. If you don't, fine! If you do, then you should be able to store those names correctly.

I find it laughable that airlines are given as a shining example of operational excellence.

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> Why is it absurd? Either you accept customers or users with foreign names or you don't. If you don't, fine! If you do, then you should be able to store those names correctly.

I think parent makes a point about employees. You can argue all you want that it is reasonable to accept and store any unicode character, but it is in no way reasonable to expect that the person on the other side of the glass to know every single script in the world, and every single unicode character.

Your position is reasonable for those people entering their own name, on their own device, which is configured to their own language - a system should not fall over on that - but that is not the use-case presented by the parent.

> I find it laughable that airlines are given as a shining example of operational excellence.

They're certainly doing it better than anyone else, IME.

The use-case is "employee has to enter the name, on their device, with their keyboard". What's your better alternative, the one that makes you use words like "absurd" and "laughable"?

After all, this use-case is not going away anytime soon.

Whether we like it or not, having a name with uncommon characters is going to make your life difficult in those cases where your name has to be entered on a device and keyboard that is non-native to you.

From a pragmatic perspective, they do a great job.

The point of identification is to identify people to some level of trust. In the vast majority of cases, that means that I should know that you’re the same person that I did business with yesterday.

Airlines need to tie you to an official document, which is much more complex. They do a pretty decent job at it considering all of the stakeholders who make that happen.

The hang-wringing about American hegemony is a projection of some other nationalist feeling. The constraints of Hollerith cards made it difficult to accommodate different character sets and the accommodations are codified in international treaties and business process. It will improve over time, probably first in the more cosmetic CRM side.

Accepting customers and accepting character sets or glyphs are two very different things. Accommodation is a two way street - if your name on the Starbucks cup is in Arabic or Greek, the barista in the US isn't going to be able to call it out. That not because the barista is some ignorant rube, they just don’t speak Greek.

The magic is we have a global system where many people have the ability to step in a plane and go almost anywhere and immediately conduct their business or pleasure with minimal friction. One of the friction points are issues like character sets, or poor accommodation of long names, etc.

I can't read Greek. I think it reasonable to demand that transcribed Greek names are ok in my hypothetical restaurant, but not reasonable to demand alfa omega to be ok, for your dinner reservation. You don't have to support any script.

It is not a technical issue but a social one.

Why is it reasonable to you to demand that people write their own names differently?

Also, let's not forget the context here, we're talking about a bank not a restaurant

> Why is it reasonable to you to demand that people write their own names differently?

Because sometimes other people have to read it. Do you actually expect your bank has someone who can read Νίκος Καζαντζάκης and 刘慈欣 and ᠲᠠᠲᠠᠲᠤᠩᠭ ᠠ and משה ברבי מימון הספרדי and ᐱᔭᐃ ᐊᕿᐊᕈᖅ? (Or even notice which one Chrome doesn't render correctly? — Edit: I probably shouldn't blame Chrome; it's fine on his Wikipedia page.)

Reading characters is just half the story. Good luck for the clerk behind the desk to write it on their keyboard.

> Either you accept customers or users with foreign names or you don't.

That's even more absurd. So now, just because I don't speak Thai, I should reject all Thai customers, since I can't read their names?

Who says you need to be able to speak Thai? I'm saying you should let people store their names in your system the same way they were given them at birth.

I really don't see what's absurd about that. This website is so English language biased it's hilarious.

Btw we're talking about banks not Starbucks or mom and pop shops

> This website is so English language biased it's hilarious.

As is most international websites. And systems. And content, in general.

It's a sad fact of life that, as we sail into a globally-connected future, the world is going to consolidate on a small number of languages, and the majority of languages are going to be left behind, discarded, and eventually die out.

People want content. They will learn whatever language gets them the most content. Right now almost all content is produced in a small handful of languages, with (in the west) English being dominant.

At this point it looks like English[1] is going to be in that small set of surviving languages.

It's inevitable. Railing against it is a pointless waste of energy.

[1] My home country has 11 languages, all official. Until widespread internet arrived it was common to find locals who could not speak English. Now, I'd be hard-pressed to find non-english speakers, even in the very outlying areas.

So what exactly do you expect the bank employees to do when they see a name in a script that looks like gibberish to them? They can't say the name aloud, they can't verify the customer's name matches any documents (if you don't know the language, you're not competent to verify names in the script), the name won't match any official government documents, so what's the point?

If a Thai bank only used Thai script, I would roughly transcribe my Latin script name into Thai script. When in Rome ...

So every person needs to be able to read every single script? Cyrillic? Greek? All the variants of CJK characters' reading in people's names? Practically ASCII is enough for information interchange and I say this as someone from a country that doesn't use Latin script. By all means record "name as spelled by person in native script" as a completely freeform string, but in practise we also need "name as spelled using ASCII so everyone can read it".

> Either you accept customers or users with foreign names or you don't. If you don't, fine!

Sure, as long as you are prepared to be sued for discrimination.

The good thing with ASCII is that everyone, everywhere can type it in using a standard keyboard. Everyone can read, write, speak and hear the basic Latin alphabet.

Not even an English/US thing, this is the Latin script from Roman times.

You do know that the "standard" keyboard you're referring to is specifically the US keyboard?

It's not even standard for English: there's a UK keyboard that is organised differently and has different characters.

OK, we can do away with the currency symbols and brackets, and limit it to Base64. Little Bobby Tables, and perhaps a few musical artists, may need to find an alternate spelling.

That seriously underestimates how common it is for European names to have diacritics.

I assure that billions of users can't. Even if they have ASCII letters printed on their key board, which is not a given, they will be unable to find that 'f' anywhere, just like you won't find most lower case Cyrillic letters on a Russian keyboard.

And even if they know how to type in all 52 letters, it's absolutely not a given that they are able to transliterate from their native script to the English alphabet.

"Everyone, everywhere" does not have a "Latin" alphabet as the basis.

You really underestimate how widespread use of Latin script is, especially in computers. People cope just fine with domain names (IDN is generally still rare), foreign brands, names of famous people etc. Sure your central chinese rice farmer living in a remote village might only be exposed to chinese script but once to get to someone familiar with a computer they likely will be able to cope with ASCII text just fine even if they don't understand the meaning.

Not sure if this is still the case or only some legacy stuff, but at least for a while chinese websites used numbers instead of names, China Railway for example uses 12306.cn as their domain name.

Where do you find these computers with keyboards that do not have the full set of ASCII letters printed on them? ASCII and Latin script are the lingua franca, they're not hard to learn and it's not unreasonable to ask that everyone who wants to use computers learn them.

Most Keyboards only have uppercase printed on them

That's the most Ameri-centric thing I've read all day. I assure you that:

- There is no such thing as a "standard keyboard"

- Not everyone can type Latin alphabet

- Almost nobody can read, speak, hear or write latin, and it makes no sense to "hear latin alphabet". How do you pronounce "Bordeaux" using only your knowledge of the Latin alphabet? How do you pronounce "Queue" using only your knowledge of the Latin alphabet? You realise native speakers of various languages will pronounce words (for example "pain") and even letters (for example "w", "j", "y") very differently? Etc. My name is pure ASCII and every foreigner pronounces it very incorrectly (even though all the sounds exist in the English language already, just mapped to different letters).

- Not every country is related to the Roman culture.

Anyone can listen and understand when a person spells "Q U E U E", even if they don't speak English, so long as they share a common (spoken) language. Not so with "列"

Wait, so anyone can understand written English even if they don't speak English? So if I type in German you can understand it even if you don't speak German? Wie funktioniert das?

People can spell out words in a language they don't understand, as long as they understand the letters. This is good for names. People can only do this if they understand the letters.

How do you pronounce "Mebd"? Can you work out how to pronounce that name from how it's spelled? Or "Siobhan"?

Your statement isn't even remotely true.

They don't have to pronounce those: they can just spell out the letters: M-E-B-D. It's not that hard. But if the customer's name is "坂本", how exactly is the bank employee supposed to say that?

> Everyone can read, write, speak and hear the basic Latin alphabet.

Let’s set aside everyone which is illiterate. There isn’t even a single way to speak the Latin alphabet, as pronunciation depends on the language. I have a hard time believing there aren’t people who can only read and write in their native non-Latin alphabet.

I don’t know what you mean when you say everyone can hear the Latin alphabet. Listening to sounds has no relation to the language spoken. I can hear Korean just fine, doesn’t mean I understand the meaning of the words or understand their alphabet.

> Not even an English/US thing

It is common for languages which use the Latin alphabet to have diacritics and characters not present in ASCII.

Blame Jean-Maurice-Émile Baudot for not including diacritics in his teleprinter code. Dude couldn't even send his own name.

Just nitpicking: Latin script from Roman times lacked W and U, among other things.

Also lower case and most typography, including spaces.

Funny! But you should put the /s in there to indicate it is satire :)

It's funny because it's true.

Edit: what do you suggest as a universal alternative for bit-perfect verbal communication... Spelling out Base64 Unicode over the phone?

> speak and hear the basic Latin alphabet.

The Latin alphabet does not have a single pronunciation. And the vowels are ambiguous across the most common languages so you can't even make an argument that they are intelligible.

You've really lost the plot on this one.

I'm only assuming the two people speaking on the phone share a common language, I think that's a fair assumption.

I instantly conjure up an image of a Roman citizen, a retired soldier now, speaking Vulgar Latin picking up the phone and dialling Comitia Centuriata to lodge a complaint about a unpaid engagement in Punic Wars.

The clerk answers in and speaks Classical Latin.

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