Hello, I'm Mr. Null. My Name Makes Me Invisible to Computers (2015) | Hacker News Reader

Hello, I'm Mr. Null. My Name Makes Me Invisible to Computers (2015)

wired.com

35 pointsLorenDB35 comments

Related: How a 'NULL' License Plate Landed One Hacker in Ticket Hell https://www.wired.com/story/null-license-plate-landed-one-ha...

And: What Happens When Your License Plate Says 'NO PLATE'? https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/auto-no-plate/ (including a mention of a "VOID" plate)

A bit of a tangent: I know someone whose last name is "Tester" whose medical records were always getting filled with wild diseases and eventually they figured out that the doctors-in-training were practicing entering medical records using her account.

Which systems use the string "null" to represent a null value? That seems like a bad idea...

I could see it happening with clumsy JSON parsing. in javascript, JSON.parse("null") would return null, and the string null would have to be JSON.parse('"null"').

A common source of "NULL" strings are CSVs. I personally had to deal with a database that only understood NULLs correctly when using QUOTE_NOTNULL, which was added to Python just last year: https://github.com/python/cpython/issues/113732

I've also heard of a fun database where the user "Geoffrey" was truncated to "G". I wonder why? (Hint: End of file)

> I've also heard of a fun database where the user "Geoffrey" was truncated to "G". I wonder why? (Hint: End of file)

Sorry, I don't buy that one. There's no way the ascii string "eof" - especially lower-cased - would be interpreted as the C macro EOF, which is typically represented as the int -1. Sounds like a tall tale unless you've got proof.

I could see a poorly coded stringly parsed interface (think sql) triggering on a mid span character sequence. but I agree, it would have to be a real mess of an interface. For example the client uses "eof" to separate or end queries.

I first had to figure out why the G stayed put if it was being treated as last line... I've seen some terrible things and wouldn't doubt that a lot of pages in say the travel industry have a 2%+ failure rate at recording a signup.

There are more than a few legacy databases where a person's first name wouldn't be lowercased. I worked for a university awhile back, this is post-2010, and names were stored uppercase.

Sorry, I don't have first-hand proof. But it seems that this issue is not rare: https://old.reddit.com/r/programminghorror/comments/4g70lj/s...

CSV will go down as one of the greatest mistakes in computer programming.

ColdFusion, if I remember correctly.

Never underestimate the amount of bad ideas in code produced by the lowest bidder.

My Glassdoor dummy account is something like Mr Null at 001 null drive. I’m amazed the feedback from the null corporation I get. There are a lot of other employees who appear to work there. Work seems pointless. Dead end. A clear lack of direction. Lots of dead ends.

https://archive.ph/PX3Lx

We had a patient with a single letter as surname. Didn't go well with our patient web portal. She'll probably never be able to see her MRIs online since development is slow, and it seems to be an edge case.

Why would the length of the surname matter?

At a guess, the system mandates a minimum length.

O-muhgawdthisisstupid would be my next attempt

Well, challenge question "secret answers" also have similar stupids. Mandating five-letter answers mean that first pet Fido, favorite teacher Zak, honeymoon destination Fiji, etc all cannot be used. Though honest answers to those questions are the worst idea.

This is a really good example of how limits on name fields are entirely arbitrary.

Is the name "O"? That's a common Korean surname, though many Korean Americans spell it "Oh" to avoid the problems computers and bureaucrats have with it.

We had a minister of digital affairs in France who is named O (Cédric O, early investor in Mistral too)

I have several Indian coworkers who have a single name. Our company systems insist on first and last names, so they either end up with '.' as a last name, or the same name twice.

would just make one up at that point.

This works until someone asks you to produce identity documents matching the computer records.

I've seen people put a single period (".") instead of a last name.

first real job was at a 2-year rural college.

We had 2 systems, one for students, one for staff. Sometimes people would forget to properly reference the 'other' account when a teacher took a class, or a student taught a community education class, etc. We were in the process of consolidating into a single DB, and didn't want a bunch of duplicates.

We had a person Leslie that kept getting duplicated in the systems. Same address same age, same birthdate. Only difference was different gender, and last 2 digits of social was 21 instead of 12.

So our dba deleted one, and linked them.

Month later, same thing. So our DBA fixed it. Shaking his head at the people up front not following data entry procedures.

Next week, both Leslie's were in our office. They were born on same day, but hospitals in nearby towns. Back then socials were handed out sequentially by region. They had different last names until they married 40 years before.

They were laughing and said this happens more often then most people would think.

I lived in a 2 letter town. For the longest time I couldn't order stuff off of websites as they required a 3 letter city.

Ah-well, I saved some money because of this.

Sometimes you can call 1-800-dev-null to get this fixed.

i now know the phone number that i will use whenever some form wants a number and i don't think they really need it. 555-1212 is my go to, but 338-6855 is so less obvious.

Who's at the other end of that number. No one who had the number appreciated the pop song's 867-5309 but at least one day with the radio on told them why they were getting all these crank calls.

> Who's at the other end of that number.

Does it matter?

Well, they may get some calls or texts, so ethically I'd hope you choose to minimize harm.

I doubt any of the people collecting phone numbers as an identifier are actually making any calls. They use it as the ID to link all of your data collected by them by anyone else that buys that data to other data they've bought from other suppliers.

In fact, if that is a legit number, then all I'm doing is increasing their rewards points or whatever. Sure, maybe messing with their recommendations like when you share your Spotify account, but that's a whole lot of meh from me on that.

obligatory mention of Little Bobby Tables

He should have an advice blog called Null's pointers.

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