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Comment by detourdog | Hacker News Reader

I set-up a directory system for a small school. The students logins were a combination or initials and date of birth. When I created the scheme I knew that a set of twins would break the system. Somewhere between 3 and 5 years we finally got a set of twins that needed to modify the system. I called them to my office and found out which one came out first and appended 1 their usernames and 2.

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I’m a twin and my parents never told us who was ‘first’.

You posted first, so you are 1 here

You mean 0?

They not told it to you.

They probably don't know. If you're identical, babies are mixed-up for sure during the stressful first couple of days.

There's probably a medical document somewhere with the exact time of birth, but no way of knowing who's it really is.

Do you think it was an equality thing?

I anticipated twins with The school directory sync system I made for a small District (sub-5000 enrollment). I appended a random two digit number to first initial, last name (EAnderson96). So far none of the parents who have "weaponized"(1) the naming of their children have managed to break it since we brought it up in '99.

(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.

I love seeing what the apostrophe in my last name breaks when I sign up for services.

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&apos;Brien.

I have an apostrophe too and it broke many websites. It was also a natural source of SQL injection detection.

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.

Apostrophe names were always my go-to for plausibly deniable checks for SQL injection.

I wonder if developers have a different naming convention for their children... Even on a subconscious level

I joked with my wife about using numbers in our daughter's name (k-rad 31337 style, with the first "letter" being a 3). I thought it would probably shake-out crappy software. In the end I knew it would be a mean thing to saddle the child with. It sounded like fun, though.

Named after WOW characters.

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