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Comment by godelski | Hacker News Reader

Johnson Smith

The son of John who is a smith

I'm only joking a little. Funny thing, surnames aren't actually that old for Europeans. Most of history there'd be maybe two people with the same name. They solved it back then very much the same way we solve it now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Occupational_surnames

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patronymic

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Even worse in other languages. The three surnames Kim, Lee, and Park cover about 50% of Koreans.

You should see Vietnamese! It's decreasing, but it used to be ~40%! Now it's closer to 30[0].

And don't forget that there's Lee[1], Lee[2], Lee[3], Lee[4], and Lee[5]! Which are all different

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_name

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_(English_surname)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%BD_(Vietnamese_surname)

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_(Korean_surname)

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_(surname_%E6%9D%8E)

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_(surname_%E5%88%A9)

Besides the two you mention, there are ten other Chinese surnames that could be anglicized as Lee, namely 力, 勵, 厲, 栗, 澧, 禮, 立, 酈, 離, and 黎.

To be fair, that's probably still "good enough" these days.

"Abel Davidson Carpenter of Helsinki born in the year 2020" is probably good enough an identifier.

Obviously has some issues, but it's interesting to see that this "ancient" scheme would still hold up these days.

Funnily enough, my "full id" (full name, city, profession plus year) isn't unique to me unless you add a date of birth. Maybe it's not unique with a date of birth either, but statistically it should be.

It's a regional thing, but roughly translates to "John Smith, programmer from NY, born 1995"

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