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Comment by thewebguyd | Hacker News Reader

> My favorite part is that we have to run an official notice ad in the local newspaper

For anyone else curious about the legal name change process in the US, this varies depending on state.

I legally changed my name doing it the court process way. My state didn't require the newspaper thing. Was just $83 to file and show up at the hearing, and it was done.

Where it gets really fun is I have an apostraphe in my last name, and in 2025 we still can't make web forms that handle it. Some allow it, some don't, and it causes mismatch issues all of the time.

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>Where it gets really fun is I have an apostraphe in my last name

I know this pain.

What's great is when some systems allow it, but other systems--that are connected to the first system and should work together--don't. Suddenly you go from John F. O'Malley to John O Malley. Or worse, you end up with backslash escape quotes showing up. Sometimes the ordinary ASCII single-quote gets auto-corrected by something, and now it's a proper single curly quote, and nobody knows how to type that in, so they can't find you.

I get this problem happening in 1968, but it still happens now, with things that were built a year ago.

Maybe we should have never computerized any of this and we should have stuck with ink and quill and professional scribes.

Yeah, it's a total patchwork of laws and processes. It's enough of a pain in the neck here to make you have to be pretty sure you want to bother with it.

I can only imagine the "fun" you're having dealing with that, Mr. O'DropTables.

Europe is much worse about that than the US.

Many countries don't let you change your name at all unless you have an extremely strong reason to do so. Others have strict requirements on what an acceptable name is, and foreign-sounding names are often not allowed. Denmark straight up gives you a whitelist of allowed names to choose from.

And then there's Ireland where your name is whatever you can prove people call you

That’s basically California about legal names.

My first name is an old family name. I’m the 8th to have it. My kid’s the 9th. I go by my middle name. My mom and dad and sisters call me that. My wife calls me that. My doctor calls me that. My first name would be an AKA, an alias. Literally no one calls me by that name.

And that’s why my credit union is one that would issue me a debit card in my legal name, which is to say my legal name. Other banks have strict rules to call me by my alias, so I don’t use them.

Side note: I’m way sympathetic to people who’ve changed their names and want to be called something else. Use my first name with me and I know you’re someone who doesn’t know the first thing about me. You’re a stranger. I don’t identify with it at all.

Just realized the modern equivalent of of little Johhny Drop Tables; would be some LLM prompt injection scheme.

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