When your last name is Null, nothing works
wsj.com
wsj.com
> Null was first programmed 60 years ago by a British computer scientist named Tony Hoare ... Hoare probably wasn’t thinking about people with the 4,910th most common surname. He later called it his billion-dollar mistake, given the amount of programmer time it has used up and the damage it has inflicted on the user experience.
Obviously Hoare's statement wasn't about this problem at all. She's also giving readers the impression Microsoft has some sort of policy against using null values:
> “It’s a difficult problem to solve because it’s so widespread,” said Daan Leijen, a researcher at Microsoft, who says the company avoids use of null values in its software.
Whatever Leijen said, I'm pretty sure it wasn't that.
I really don't get why journalists so rarely do basic fact checking of their own articles by asking an independent source for a final read-through. Many of them actually have policies against doing this, which leads to an endless stream of garbled articles that undermines their credibility without them even noticing.
> Whatever Leijen said, I'm pretty sure it wasn't that.
I had a good lol when I read that, imagining some top-level decree to NEVER use null values in any context in all of Microsoft
What makes you so sure? This is Hoare's apology for creating the null reference:
> I call it my billion-dollar mistake. It was the invention of the null reference in 1965. At that time, I was designing the first comprehensive type system for references in an object oriented language (ALGOL W). My goal was to ensure that all use of references should be absolutely safe, with checking performed automatically by the compiler. But I couldn't resist the temptation to put in a null reference, simply because it was so easy to implement. This has led to innumerable errors, vulnerabilities, and system crashes, which have probably caused a billion dollars of pain and damage in the last forty years.
Given that null references cause crashes, why would it be unreasonable for a researcher at Microsoft to say they try and avoid them? Is this journalist really so far off?
> I really don't get why journalists so rarely do basic fact checking of their own articles
If you compare journalism to our other sources of information - such as comments on Hacker News and posts on social media - I think it holds up quite well, especially when the outlet is a reputable organization. It's quite fashionable for technology people to be highly critical of what they (pejoratively?) call "legacy media", but the alternatives that the technology industry have brought forward, like social media, are far, far worse in terms of accuracy, and also do very little of the kind of investigative reporting that is crucial for holding powerful officials to account.
> Null was first programmed 60 years ago by a British computer scientist named Tony Hoare ... Hoare probably wasn’t thinking about people with the 4,910th most common surname.
It mentions null as a mistake and then ties it to the word 'null' by referencing that a significant number of people have that last name. As though if it were called something like xkcd that has no pronunciation and is unlikely to be a last name, that would be better.
I think overall journalism is worse because its perceived as being authoritative. Social media post might be similar level of information, but Wikipedia won't cite it and the laymen realize to take it with a grain of salt. There's also better feedback as the comment section is front and center. Also some person with no knowledge, experience or curiosity in a subject is less likely to comment on it. While a journalist's job is to churn out a wide variety of pieces on topics they're likely unfamiliar with.
We'll have to disagree about the accuracy of legacy vs other forms of media. Many of the best investigations I've ever read have been by independents on Substack, for instance.
It takes time and effort with no discernable upside. In fact, knowing the true facts would make it harder for journalists to bias the story in the way they want to without them feeling a bit bad for lying. It’s easier for them if they don’t know.
> that undermines their credibility without them even noticing.
Not really. Even the vanishingly small minority of readers who know the details of the story in question suffer from Gell-Mann amnesia, and continue to believe that all other stories (by the same paper, and even from the same reporter) are perfectly accurate.
The true answer is incentives, opportunity and aptitude. Incentives are skewed to writing something that will engage readers, the human version of the social media algorithm. Opportunities are short because reporting is done on deadline without the luxury of time to deeply ponder intermediate drafts. And reporters are writing around the edge of their expertise and training all the time. That specific reporter specializes in "personal finance" so it's a wonder the article even begins to make sense. And writers have to be good at two things at the same time, journalism and whatever they are trying to write about. It's hard to be excellent at multiple disciplines.
When you put it together, it's sort of magical when a news room works at all.
It used to be indie publications, and now I find indie YouTubers tend to be generally superior (though you still have to do your own filtering and selection of course).
It became almost a ritual in the first term of the school year for us to make a visit to IT Support and request a second account... there was always a bit of contention between us about who got the 'proper' username and who got the disambiguated one!
There's probably a medical document somewhere with the exact time of birth, but no way of knowing who's it really is.
(1) Hypothetical John Smith and his siblings Jane Smith, James Smith, Janet Smith, Jack Smith, etc. It's a bit infuriating how many parents do this. Amusingly I've had O'Brien and other apostrophe-contsining names with no ill effects (because I sanitize my inputs). In the last couple years, though, I was forced to start dropping apostrophes because we had third-party apps/services we were syncing to that couldn't handle them.
Converting it to an HTML character entity is not really expected behaviour, but it was among the most amusing I’ve seen.
O'Brien was it? Bonus points if you edit the profile and those are expanded too. Hello Mr. O'Brien.
About 20 years ago, I was able to see a bit more than what I supposed to from the Ikea website. Nowadays, I see mostly encoding issues, especially in notification pop-ups.
Cue problems when two "Simon Smith" join in the same year. They were given 00simsmi and 00smisim I think.
I am pretty sure they spent 7 years at school forwarding each other email as various teachers assumed the default would work.
A very common one at one point was that the CFO shared a first letter of name with his daughter. As I recall, he actually had the email in the usual convention so it's not like his daughter was receiving lots of highly confidential financial info but there was regularly misdirected mail.
I once heard a story (possibly apocryphal) about a place which used a similar “first initial and truncated surname” convention for usernames, except theirs was first three letters of surname, followed by first initial, followed by some digits. And it all worked great until they hired a guy named Tom Cunningham
Despite having a rare last name and no twins, I was "AC".
Surprisingly this has never broken for me in either Indonesia or the Netherlands though, whenever I've put the ć in it just converted it to a regular C which is perfectly acceptable for me (for context, it's pretty easy to guess which C is actually a ć or č in Serbian, similarly for s/š or z/ž, so seeing text without the proper diacritics doesn't really matter in most cases). My Dutch ID even correctly has the ć!
I have a standard email I send to companies not honoring the only correct Dutch spelling of my name and/or initials.
The GDPR makes it mandatory for companies to correctly process your personal details so while it can take a while sometimes it's gotten a lot better over the years.
In your case (assuming you live in the EU) there's plenty of precedent to send a standard email like that too. Even banks have been forced kicking and screaming to fix it [1].
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IJ_(digraph) [1]: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2021/10/ebcdic-is-incompatible-with...
Did anyone ever ask that of you or your twin?
They were both named Jose. One went by, pronounced, Hose-A, and the other Hose-B.
Apparently the Jose's, coworkers, and HR were all fine with this because it was simply too confusing otherwise.
Her number had three digits.
I'm guessing it's the birthday that really messed the system up though?
But also I've started to drop the apostrophe in most of my online profiles and things. So I think we're starting to see the end of apostrophes in people's names, thanks to some fun oddities of the internet and common database technologies.
I can't find a reference anywhere, but I remember reading that when their child was born they couldn't process a birth certificate with the name containing a slash, so it was changed to a dash for the kid.
So I guess some cultural aspect of names will also disappear, I know I want I children to have a bit more "international" names.
This is a bugbear of mine! It's so frustrating that this is the easier path. Technology should make our lives better, not bend us to it's limitations!
No criticism on you of course, I'm as guilty.
Thankfully apparently this is common enough that I've had tickets including travel on both airlines (as Qantas cancelled a flight and ticketed me on Air New Zealand instead) traveling internationally work just fine. Even things like the automated customs gates work fine. I suspect under the hood their systems just strips out all non-alpha characters and compares that (i.e. 'onetwo' == 'onetwo').
Online/moible forms can be an issue tho. Spark, the biggest mobile phone carrier in New Zealand, doesn't support hyphens in account names, just to name one silly example.
I ended up having to contact their support quite a few times for them to fix the error message. Still doesn't work, but at least the error message is reasonable now.
That would be the MRZ version. The identity page of your passport has a blob of monospace text at the bottom that's used as the 'canonical' version of names for most or all air travel systems.
I have mostly documents that include my full middle name, and the way half or more of air travel systems deal with that is to just crunch the first and middle into one name.
But: it all works fine.
I would like to think (Perhaps naively?) that these systems key off your passport number/ID (which is by construction, not subject to these problems) to deliberately side-step issues like this.
I have never been known by more than one name, but the spelling sure differs.
But it is also equally annoying that passports don't clearly spell out a "international and systems compatible" version of your name.
We've had Airlines for way over half a century, and visas for about as long as we have had passports and people still walk around with international identification documents that cannot be understood by travel and immigration agencies internationally.
The MRZ can only contain the characters A-Z (uppercase), 0-9 and <. ICAO document 9303-3 describes conventions for transliteration of other characters into this limited character set.
They do in the machine readable area. Maybe not "clearly".
I imagine apostrophes would be a complete nightmare for most countries to sanitize or validate.
Combine this with Anglocentric IT systems, and I'm sure Mr Lee (RIP) gets a lot of spam addressed to "Mr Yew".
Surprisingly, local systems outside of the SG government can still take a maddeningly Western approach to names (First name/last name, assumption that last name is a family name a not a patronymic, etc.). My wife is Singaporean Tamil, so her "last name" is actually her father's given name, and even when travelling around Southeast Asia she encounters issues with this.
Fortunately, the SG government does an admirable job of handling Chinese names (across a number of languages and cultures), Malay names, Indian names of various cultures (mostly Tamil, but also Punjabi, Malayalam, and several others) and of course many Western names. I wish the Western world would catch up.
Or handle single-digit month numbers in a date.
Or...
Now, for fun, no one noticed this for about 25 years. Her Social Security card says "Jane Smith Jones". Her driver's license says "Jones, Jane Smith". Her US passport says "Jones, Jane Smith". But another part of the federal government says "Smith Jones, Jane". We only found this out when she tried to renew her driver's license recently and the clerk was like, "hey, this isn't matching up right...". A month later, the TSA clerk at the airport stopped her to ask why her passport didn't match her federal records.
So now we're paying $400 to legally change her name from "Jane Smith Jones" to "Jane Smith Jones". That's what the notice they make you pay to run in the newspaper says, anyway.
End result: both father, uncle and all their offspring now have "Guzman y Gomez" as their last name.
(Yes, this is a pseudonym. No burrito for you.)
My youngest, when he was born, was unable to get a birth certificate, and was listed as some last name that isn't the mom's or mine (it's because we couldn't track down her 15 year estranged "husband" and louisiana law is... French.) I had to do a paternity test, but that's it, other than hiring a lawyer. The lawyer pushed everything through. I don't "rightfully" own my last name (and i was the last one in the world, damnit!), so we told the lawyer to tell the state we wanted the mom's last name. It has much more known history to her and grandma, etc. I'm the only one in my tree, except the kid.
anyhow the state said "NOPE, DAD'S LAST NAME" so now the kid, instead of being burdened with a last name that looks like a cat fell on your keyboard, has my last name, which is two words.
which is apparently not fixed after me being around for 45 years, and my dad for like 20 years before that in the US.
It seems like this is relatively critical stuff, you know? it can interfere with bank accounts, school financial support, taxes, retirement, and you won't know until you hit each obstacle.
I've gotten so tired of having this argument. Inevitably some clerk will insist on calling me by my first name, "you know, your legal name". No. My middle name is my legal name. It's what my mom, sisters, wife, friends, teachers, coworkers, doctors, and everyone else call me. My first name is an aka at best, except the only people who insist on using it are ones wrong about the law, so I'm not even really "known as" it.
I once closed a bank account 10 minutes after opening it because they insisted that my debit card be printed as "Joe Smith", not "Frank Smith". I told them I'd absolutely refuse to touch it because that's not my name. I find it interesting that it's mostly local orgs who are a pain in the neck about being wrong about this. You'd think a small local bank would know local law better than a huge multi-national, but the giant bank I opened a business account with was totally fine putting Frank Smith on my accounts. Go figure.
(Somewhat related: That's made me super sympathetic to trans people who want to be known as something other than what's written on their birth certificate. Yeah, I get it. It's nails on a chalkboard when someone calls me Joe, so if you don't want people calling you Tammy anymore, I'm on your side.)
Since at some point everything official now routes back to either a passport, an immigration/naturalization document, a court-issued name change doc, or a marriage certificate, those are effectively the only ways your name can be changed.
The problem is that all the law can do is make it legal for you to use whatever without it being considered fraudulent to try. But if your law is like CA’s it doesn’t specify other institutions other than possibly state government ones have to honor that and, in particular, it can’t constrain the federal government at all.
So that leaves the DMV as the one possibly effective way to do common law change, on the off chance somewhere will just accept your license as proof of identity. But now that driver’s licenses are subordinate to passport info or equivalent via Real ID, that route is pretty much toast too.
You might still be able to get the alternative state-only DL / state ID with a common law name, and maybe open a bank account with that, but then the credit reporting companies (or Chexsystems) don’t have to honor it so you’re possibly screwed anyway. Plus without a Real ID you’ll have to show a passport to fly domestically, and that will have the name you don’t like.
And, of course, none of this helps with your paycheck because you can’t satisfy an I-9 with a DL. It requires a federal document, too, which—if your state info doesn’t match your federal info—needs to be a fully identifying federal passport/equivalent. So even if you get the bank account with your chosen name, you might run into issues with your checks being to a different one.
At this point, it’s just not worth trying common law name change anymore. You either flip a few hundred for the official change or you accept the fact that you’ll have a public name and a private name.
(And I say this as a “Geo” who strongly dislikes seeing “George Jr” on stuff so I feel your pain. I just tell my employers that my given name only goes on paychecks, benefits, and tax forms, and is to never be used publicly. That has always worked.)
Not all systems use that piece of information, but most do.
Then you can be Frank Smith all the time.
It's sad people get collateral damage and it should be fixed, but the world turns around with millions of these workarounds everywhere.
The most interesting I remember is stock management software: at 3 different places I had the employees dealing with stock explain how they set outrageous prices (like 9999999.99 EUR for a toothbrush) to keep an item in the inventory system but mark it as unavailable for a day or less until it gets restocked again.
I'm sure there is an official way to put something out of stock and restock it again, but it's just painful for an operation that happens basically everyday, for dozens of items.
And I wouldn't be surprised if there is no official way.
Again: no computer system should ever interpret anything in the "last name" field. It should always be handled "in gloves", as an opaque value. It's not about typing, it's not about "paying for clear code", it's not about HTTP, I guess it might be about "best practices", but come on — this should be obvious!
I'm thinking about my systems now and I'm having a hard time coming up with a scenario where interpreting something inside a string value is even POSSIBLE (I use Clojure), unless you explicitly try to read from the string and interpret the results, and even then it's not easy.
I know that in the olden days we used to just feed user-supplied values into shells, with no regard for in-band vs out-of-band distinction. I also know that the HN-beloved SQL makes no distinction of in-band vs out-of-band, which causes a load of problems with proper escaping, hence Little Bobby Tables. But aren't we past that? Does anybody still construct SQL queries by concatenating user-supplied and app-supplied strings?
But is a smart comment buried in there about ETL systems and data exchange where it's pretty easy, and arguably correctly in some cases, to get "null" in an exported field. Then the importing system, again arguable correctly, needs to handle the null case as a true null, not "null." I'm not sure there is a very easy fix for this or an obvious best practice.
"null" is not the same as null. One is an opaque string, the other is a language value. One should NEVER build systems that confuse the two, or allow one to be interpreted as the other.
If you export data, export nulls as nulls, not "nulls". If you import data, NEVER interpret what's inside strings.
string name = null; $"INSERT INTO users (name) VALUES ('{name}')";
Basically an involuntary SQL Injection
[1]: SQL injection: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL_injection
[2]: Cross-site scripting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-site_scripting
[3]: Exploits of a Mom (Bobby Tables) XKCD: https://xkcd.com/327/
[4]: https://www.tomlinsons-online.com/p-16381221-scriptalertmedi...
It went about as well as you would expect using it for fraud. Which is to say, not well at all (；´Д｀)
(setting aside the very relevant question of why would anyone ever want to use YAML at all)
One russian, one spanish. Both had like 20 individual names.
The problem is well meaning parents used all of them on early paperwork, and as things digitised, name fields gained field limits etc.
I believe one had his name changed formally, and the other had to register an alias, and had to dig out the OG paperwork regularly.
My mother started filling out her own paperwork around elementary school because my grandmother created so many problems that school staff would simply give up.
My mom told me about a time they had someone with that situation at work, and people would call the person FNU until they were corrected.
https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...
Enter Tim Rentsh. He didn't have a middle name, so Caltech asked what letter would he prefer, so he said X.
TXR
That became his nickname, and stuck so hard he legally changed his name to Tim X Rentsh.
Eat your heart out, Elon! :-)
> Null Island is the location at zero degrees latitude and zero degrees longitude (0°N 0°E), i.e., where the prime meridian and the equator intersect. Since there is no landmass located at these coordinates, it is not an actual island. The name is often used in mapping software as a placeholder to help find and correct database entries that have erroneously been assigned the coordinates 0,0.
I think he was a Java guy too. I’m sure that just made it worse.
Was he from DROP TABLE?
I'm sure there are plenty of people who share your frustration with accented letters, ñ, umlauts, etc, though. I'd hope that most systems can handle those letters, although I wouldn't hold out hope that Ĝ/ĝ would be high on the priority list.
Well, it's the most widely spoken international language, spoken in over a hundred countries, by an estimated 2-5M people. There's a rich literature (probably 30-50K books), vibrant music scene, and support in open source software (Linux, Firefox, Google products) is usually pretty good.
But the issue is not how widely Esperanto, or any other language, is spoken. If you assume that languages should only be supported according to their number of speakers, you leave no room for useful languages, bridge languages, auxiliary languages, or growing languages. Even if Esperanto had only 100 speakers, it'd be worthwhile to support, if it's easy to learn, and easy for non-speakers to understand.
It's not a "severe burden" to consider non-ASCII letters as letters. Unicode is pretty straightforward to work with, and if you want to support more than just English, it's a necessity. There's no need to have a "priority list" of letters you consider more or less important than others. That attitude comes across as very Anglocentric.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_auxiliary_langua...
It's an official language in many countries, such as South Africa, India, and Ireland, each of which has other official languages.
That still is going to be a quite small number against English, Spanish, French &c. in terms of being a lingua franca.
Maybe I didn't communicate my thoughts clearly - the reason I call it a "severe burden" is because people won't know how to type it or how to pronounce it. I doubt many people have the ability to type the letter, and would have to copy-paste it. Even on Mac, where most diacritical characters are an opt+key away, the "ˆ" does not apply to the letter "g", resulting in "ˆg". "ĝ" would need to be treated the same as, for example, "¯\_(ツ)_/¯" - where users generally google it and then copy-paste it. Sure, there are ways to allow for easier retrieval (ex. I have "@shrug" set up to make the shrug), but most people will very rarely encounter "ĝ" or similar, and won't have a shortcut set up.
Also not all database systems would think the non-circumflex version is equivalent to the circumflex version. Does anyone have thoughts or ideas about how or why they should be treated equivalently?
I also recognize this can get kind of political. There was a push in California recently to let people have accented letters in their name. Apparently it is legally not allowed. And yet some people claim their California birth certificate does contain accented letters.
Dove deep on this years ago when implementing a filter for wines and wine regions.
Assuming you have a "standard" keyboard, it's not weird at all for your browser to match the diacritic when you type the non-diacritic character since presumably the diacritic would be difficult to type. Firefox's search feature even has a [_] Match Diacritics checkbox which you can enable or disable.
Firefox has a "Match Diacritics" checkbox right next to the "Match Case" box when you ctrl+F so you can configure as desired.
So... very often.
Note that when interpolated into SQL, the contents of $var must be surrounded by single quotes, so you end up with `insert into Table (Name) values ('Null')`, which correctly inserts the string "Null" into the table.
If you were to leave off the quotes, you'd get a SQL syntax error for all other people, so that code would never make it into production. E.g. `insert into Table (Name) values (Smith)` is a syntax error.
> $db.exec($req)
Now you have "null" as strings in the DB in any language that interpolates null as "null".
> select * from people where name is not null
"Why do we see nulls in testing? Damn, the DB has dirty data. Go through the trouble of fixing it, or...
> select * from people where name is not null and name != "null"
The end. Sorry Mr Null.
I think you underestimate how many systems are stringly-typed, not just in terms of problematic programming languages, but data traveling between different APIs or through literal dead-tree paperwork.
They don't have to all fail at null handling, just one or two can gum up the works.
For example, some will prefer to use `null` to mean that a value is _intentionally_ missing (for example, the db explicitly returned a null value), while `undefined` does not have any such connotation. These exist for frontend engineers to navigate decisions often far removed from their influence.
Anyway, `null != ''` and `null != 'null'`, but `null == undefined`. However, `null !== undefined`.
A lot has been made of js Truthy/Falsy equality operator, but most js programmers will take steps to actively avoid it coming into play. Probably the `void` operator is still under-used though in frontend code, though, since there's some pretty surprising legacy things that can happen when interacting with DOM APIs (like `checkbox.onclick = () => doSomething()` resulting in different checkbox behavior depending on whether or not `doSomething` returns a boolean or undefined).
I wonder if I could legally define my middle name as starting with a lowercase letter.
<?php
if ("null" == null) { echo "true"; } else { echo "false"; }
prints "false"
Well... it does, but that would just be an empty string.
20 years later and multiple systems depending on each others, random hidden CRONs in the middle and now people called Null have a problem.
It always made me laugh because "Mai Null" means "never null" in Italian and because he's had plenty of issues due to his family name.
I can finally realize my true potential and be recognized as Mr. “:100 emoji:(Unicode zero-width joiner):fire emoji:(null character)(base64 encoding of a QR code that links to a website with a photo of my face),(vcard data, recursively referencing this last name somehow)”
The latest was Swiss airlines website which was kind of shocking since it is a proper Italian name and one of the official languages of the confederation. Most annoying instance was with the ESTA online application many years ago (fixed last time I tried) that forced me to go to the a US embassy/consulate in person.
Even those without the last name Null are finding themselves caught in the void. Joseph Tartaro got a license plate with the word “NULL” on it nearly 10 years ago. The 36-year-old security auditor thought it would be funny to drive around with the symbol for an empty value. Maybe a police officer who tried to give him a ticket would end up writing null into the system and not be able to process it, he joked to himself.
In 2018 he paid a $35 parking ticket. Soon afterward, he said, his mailbox was flooded with hundreds of traffic tickets for incidents he hadn’t been involved in. Tickets were from other counties and cities for vehicles of different colors, makes and models. A database had associated the word “null” with his personal information and citations were sent to Tartaro, who lives in Los Angeles.I'm not the biggest expert on databases, although I've worked with them a bit, but how does this occur in the first place? Usually, associations are done with primary/foreign keys. What database would allow null in that case?
Robert'); DROP TABLE Students;--
'Robert DROP TABLE Students'
NULL
'NULL' final String myNullString = "" + null;
System.out.println(myNullString);CREATE TABLE orders ( id INT PRIMARY KEY, customer_id INT NULL, FOREIGN KEY (customer_id) REFERENCES customers(id) );
vs
CREATE TABLE orders ( id INT PRIMARY KEY, customer_id INT NOT NULL, FOREIGN KEY (customer_id) REFERENCES customers(id) );
I had this problem a few years ago when I got a similar license plate — every time somebody wrote NOPLATE in the license field, I received their citation.
My state eventually "fixed" this by blocking all citations written NOPLATE... which means I don't even get legitimate [i.e. my vehicle illegally parked] fines anymore =P
I love inside jokes. I hope to be a part of one someday.
I did
Maybe xkcd needs its own url scheme, something like: xkcd://327
Edit: Written 8 years ago: https://github.com/biappi/XKCDUrlScheme
I eventually got an email from an engineer asking if I could remove it. They apparently had been working for a few days to try to add unicode support to their internal database and it wasn't going so well.
When treating Mc/Mac names, the first letter after the prefix is always capitalised.. e.g McDonald's, McCarthy, McCain, McCoy, McConnell etc but you're more likely to see mcdonalds, mccoy, mcconnell.
Orthographic case preservation reports were like the biggest complaints that no one was interested in fixing during a short stint in the airline industry.
That and hyphenated names.
I then moved to Scotland, where exactly zero people have defaulted to Mc instead of Mac. However, the computer systems of both the NHS and the University of Edinburgh apparently don't store the case of strings and reconstruct the capitalization after the fact. Both systems list me as MacDonald and there's nothing I can do about it.
I'm relatively okay with this—before computers McDonald, MacDonald, Macdonald, and M'Donald were all functionally equivalent. But now I do worry about the implications of having official documents with variant spellings
I've had great fun with my surname, which contains of two words and just a space in between. Lots of systems thought my "maiden name" was the first word and adressed me as Mrs. My wife has three first names, adopted my surname when we married and her own surname. Nobody gets it right. We don't care and have fun with it.
I've also had great stress with my surname, when some algorithm at the tax authorities decided it sounds a bit like coming from a Slavish country and along with other parameters decided to tag me as a fraud. Still an ongoing problem.
You should come to Taiwan! They've never considered non-Chinese names.
If you something online and pay by card, you can choose to ship it to a 7-Eleven or other convenience store, so you can pick it up at your own convenience. They'll ask for the name on your ID card/Passport, which the store will check before handing the parcel to you.
The problem? Many online stores do not accept names longer than a handful of characters. Chinese names are almost always two or three characters long, rarely four. Five or more characters exist according to a quick Google search, but I've never seen them myself. Good luck with western names, where even a short name like "John Doe" will be considered too long (The space counts as a character).
If you're a foreign resident, you can choose to get a Chinese name to deal with the parcel issue. Now you have two legal names: The name on your passport and the Chinese name. If you deal with public institutions, they'll prefer to use your Chinese name. Private companies have their own policies: Banks, for example, prefer to use the name on your passport. I've had issues with my insurance claims being rejected because the name on the government-provided documents did not match the name they had on file.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/when-your-last-name-is-nul...
Text-only:
https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA1zqzoi
Second, this was before the government (and businesses) were so picky about everything matching perfectly, and you could get away with mismatches more frequently because you had more human eyes looking at things. Those humans would easily realize that when the customer they've known for years as "Jane Smith" shows up with a birth certificate reading "Jayne Smith," it's the same person.
It gets me hassled every time a cop looks at it.
So that was the Null hypothesis?
(However, online information about the history of names is unreliable: there's a lot of spam and slop in that area.)
Middle: "van Hooten-O'Brien"
Last: "NULL"
Mr. Mister Dave van Hooten-O'Brien NULL
Names:
Hello, I'm Mr. Null. My Name Makes Me Invisible to Computers (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42922038 - Feb 2025 (35 comments)
We have an employee whose surname is Null (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41939162 - Oct 2024 (6 comments)
We have an employee whose surname is Null (2010) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34115623 - Dec 2022 (17 comments)
How to pass “Null” (a real surname) to a SOAP web service? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21492461 - Nov 2019 (10 comments)
My last name makes me invisible to Computers (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15046223 - Aug 2017 (135 comments)
Hello, I’m Mr. Null. My Name Makes Me Invisible to Computers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12426315 - Sept 2016 (208 comments)
If your name is 'Null,' you may have problems doing anything online - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11375282 - March 2016 (1 comment)
Hello, I’m Mr. Null. My Name Makes Me Invisible to Computers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10512811 - Nov 2015 (24 comments)
An actual guy named “Null” messes up people's databases - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9390569 - April 2015 (4 comments)
We have an employee whose last name is Null (2010) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6738743 - Nov 2013 (35 comments)
We have an employee whose last name is Null. He kills our employee lookup (2012) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6140631 - Aug 2013 (236 comments)
An employee, whose last name is Null, kills our employee lookup app - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3900224 - April 2012 (148 comments)
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License plates:
A 'Null' License Plate Landed One Hacker in Ticket Hell (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31082288 - April 2022 (11 comments)
The 'NULL' License Plate (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29609924 - Dec 2021 (6 comments)
Guy got the license plate “NULL” and it was a total disaster - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23913507 - July 2020 (9 comments)
NULL license plate not such a bright idea - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20676904 - Aug 2019 (467 comments)
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Islands:
The Many Lives of Null Island - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41073777 - July 2024 (21 comments)
Null Island Tourist Shirt - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38713055 - Dec 2023 (44 comments)
Null Island is one of the most visited places on Earth, and it doesn’t exist - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35651871 - April 2023 (87 comments)
Null Island, the most real of fictional places [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31080519 - April 2022 (37 comments)
Null Island - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21854780 - Dec 2019 (56 comments)
If You Can’t Follow Directions, You’ll End Up on Null Island - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12090980 - July 2016 (54 comments)
The Republic of NULL Island - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11734180 - May 2016 (15 comments)
The Geographical Oddity of Null Island - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11600396 - April 2016 (14 comments)
A Brief History of Null Island - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10949292 - Jan 2016 (7 comments)
Bring me the head of Adam Croot - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1501799
The funny thing is, the real thing that's caused me problems is that I changed from a name with a middle name to one without. Some systems did not handle this transition well. PATCH instead of PUT, or something.
I don't think there is such a thing as a "government name". There is a concept of "legal name" which seems to be just whatever name is on your ID. Anyone can change their name on a whim, the only issue is getting that changed on important/vital documents (as well as companies to recognize the name change, for which they have policies of requiring legal documents). There is a public interest in not letting people "change" their names too easily/often as that is a common way for criminals to evade.
Searches for names almost always have to have a fuzzy search fallback anyway because of spelling mistakes and variant spellings.
What about last names like "da Silva"?
"No value" and "not applicable" are entirely different cases...
My email is root@... (thank you Neil Stephenson for the idea) that is rejected sometimes.
So if we assume everyone is born in a room with an address everyone could have a uuid like xxxx-yyyy-zzzz where xxxx is the postcode/zip code of the address, yyyy is the room number (only needs to be unique at the address) and zzzz is the time (only needs to be unique in the room, so local time is fine). This is similar to the uuid v1 scheme.
And yet we screw up, collectively and individually, over and over again on the fundamentals of making good software that serves people, by making not-very-well-thought-out decisions.
Your surname is a word we decided should mean nothing/empty/unknown? Oh, we didn’t think about that. Um, can you just change it?