Your name is way too long for your ID
news.nationalpost.com
news.nationalpost.com
More on topic, why should official systems allow for names of arbitrary length? Obviously your 1800 character preference for last name is not going to fit on all standard forms of identification. A standards-compliant name should be issued and you can use your preferred name for personal matters.
I cannot adequately express my dislike for this kind of mockery. Seriously, fucking stop it.
Scribble: to cover with scribbles, doodles, or meaningless marks. Names aren't meaningless, and TMK names don't change depending on the time of month. By phrasing things the way you are, you are making generalized (and fictitious) blaming statements about something that is very personal. And you got called out on it.
Addressing all of the issues on the list pretty much boils down to accepting a scribble as a valid name. And if you are going to accept point 8 on the list that people's names change at any non enumerable event, then that is just as difficult as a name that changes based on the phase of the moon. Worse, actually. Moon phases are at least predictable. The point is, I'm creating a plausible scenario that fits the suggestions in the list. It is not necessarily fictitious, and it is absolutely in no way worse than the list's expectations.
Please identify how I made any type of "blaming statement". If you're going to call me out then go ahead and call me out. As far as I'm concerned I've been accused, not called out.
The real issue is that too many programmers apply their own cultural norms to the issue of naming, in ways which privilege their particular culture at the expense of others'.
(You want to be able to identify people uniquely? Fine: allocate them a globally unique ID string within your own system. Then let them link this to whatever the hell they want -- be it an Anglophone forename-middlename-surname string sequence, or something entirely different that fits their cultural requirements. Once you get into designing a procrustean name storage architecture and insisting that everyone uses their true name, then you are inflicting your own culture's naming requirements on them, which is offensive at best. Especially when it isn't necessary.)
Most systems aren't going to be built with infinite flexibility. Some might argue that wouldn't even be possible. And perhaps it has absolutely nothing to do with the programmer's own cultural norms, but the system they are programming on, the budget they are dealing with, and their level of competency. Not every action that is offensive to a particular group is done deliberately to offend that group or even with the knowledge that it could be offensive.
Irrelevant.
>or even with the knowledge that it could be offensive.
Irrelevant to your argument, which is that we should continue doing it even after we figure out that it's offensive, because fuck them.
The system was written to work for the 99.9% of users it serves, the other 0.01% will unfortunately have to deal with the problem of being outliers.
Where's that quote about lack of empathy masquerading as "brutal honesty/pragmatism/anti-PC-ness"...
What a relief that nobody is advocating infinite flexibility, but just pointing out where specific lack of flexibility is problematic.
There's no such thing as a free lunch. Optimize for the use cases you expect: if you're making a phone book for middle America, that's a different problem than a social network for Russia.
I would also venture to guess that not having a SSN or even an ITIN to use in place of the SNN is an automatic disqualification for attending school, getting a driver license, buying a house, or getting a job.
> People’s names are all mapped in Unicode code points.
At this point we've gotten into absurdity. Yes, supporting Chinese people and Hawaiian people with superlong names and people with first/last vs last/first or hyphenated or non-alphanumeric or whatever... all the stuff that can be supported with a single string of UTF-8? That's all reasonable, and there's a very real progrem with programs that don't support those kinds of names.
But going over the line into names that can't be expressed in any form of text known to a computer? At this point, the ludicrous exaggeration is only barely further than the silliness included in the "Falsehoods" list.
He's not mocking "you have to support a half-German half-Chinese person who was raised with an Inuit nickname". I'll happily support Prof. Dr. Ms. 陳 (ᒥᓂᔅᑕ) Wolfeschlegelsteinhausenberdorft III. That's fine.
But the "Falsehoods" article says that isn't enough, and is pretty much describing "seven different names, each consisting of some kind of personal scribble that changes depending on the phase of the moon".
Normally I'm the first to complain about racism and those kinds of insults, talking down to people who are just too much trouble to bother with. But that "scribbles" comment is literally outlining the lengths the article describes.
Really? Because a space is commonly used as the delimiter between first, middle and last names. Wouldn't you think that, at a minimum, there would be some ambiguity about whether Jones was (one of) her middle name(s) or the first part of her last name?
Seems easy enough, right? They don't have one big field for [ANN BETH SMITH JONES] and then try to guess what name is forename or surname.
Some systems don't like hyphens, or don't like spaces, or appear to accept them but silently drop them kludging the two names in SMITHJONES.
Add the 'scunthorpe problem' and things get even more frustrating.
One of the Google feedback pages declined my feedback because my (legitimate, linked to my Googlemail account) email address and name contains "Cocks".
http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b...
de la Chapelle
von Braun
zu Guttenberg
af Slestad
A computer system that assumes that Wernher von Braun's middle name was "von" is ridiculous.
Of course, apart from using the proper name/title when composing a letter (something like Freiherr von Braun), which is easy if you know the ‘last name’, the computer system in question would also have to sort this guy properly next to Werner Braun.
Names are complicated.
Take John von Neumann for example.
* Born 'Neumann János Lajos' (family name followed by given name order used in Hungary).
* His name changed to 'margittai Neumann János' when his father was elevated to nobility.
* He germanized his name to 'Johann Ludwig Neumann von Margitta'
* ... which got shortened to 'Johann von Neumann'
* He finally anglicized it to 'John von Neumann' when he moved to the US
I'm not at all sure I got that 100% correct...
The following mostly-identical names read very differently:
- Sarah Anne Jones Smith - Sarah Anne Jones-Smith - Sarah Jones Smith - Sarah Jones-Smith
Or how about Joran van der Sloot?
My example was meant to be "the final word and all preceeding lowercase words are considered the last name."
Also from French Canadian, some last names have a period in them, I know someone with the last name "St.-Germain".
(PS Not our actual names, but they follow that pattern).
That point being that I was surprised that it wouldn't even occur to someone that there would be some difficulties with this in the world in which we currently live.
Blaming the user whose name is too long for that field rather than the mistaken assumption in the design of the system is not.
Where? Everywhere in the world?
Anyway, I thought that the reasoning that a customer could not be served because address or name "does not fit into the system" were frowned upon since the time of COBOL mainframes, but seeing this whole thread with its resort to a hyperbole of "0.01%" cases is a welcome contrast to the otherwise high aiming goals plastering the homepage of this site.
1. Yes, this is sometimes known as discrimination.
2. Yes, you have no way of knowing the size of the market if you are excluding them - this may be disguising a group that's significantly larger than 0.01%.
3. Yes, if you cater to these people when your competitors cannot/do not, you have a captive market.
4. Yes, everyone is 0.01% in some fashion - if you continue to apply this reasoning, you will eventually exclude everyone other than yourself.
2. If you want to argue for an arbitrary budget increase to satisfy an unknown market size that may be larger than 0.01% whose requirements are drastically different than the others - go for it. I'm not going to do that.
3. Congratulations, you win the possibly larger than 0.01% market that I ignored. In the meantime I've iterated on several other useful bits that the vast majority of users care about.
4. The number of input fields in my dataset isn't infinite.
And bureaucracy always ends up annoying people.
Obviously you want to aim to be flexible, but I don't think there should be an obligation, for example, to support characters that aren't in unicode.
> A standards-compliant name should be issued
>More on topic, why should official systems allow for names of arbitrary length?
These are really incendiary statements (a local may accuse you of being insensitive[1]) that places the fault of the issue on the aboriginals of Hawai'i for observing their traditions rather than the programmers who should have known better. From what I understand DB's get re factored all the time and if the drivers license can fit her name I fail to see the issue.
[1]euphemism for racist
You just accepted a length limit. Congrats on being culturally insensitive.
If we can't expect the name to be in a character set, why can we expect it to even be two dimensional? What if it's an object? What if it's a sound that Western voices can't make without years of training, ala Tuvan throat singing, with no written form? What if it's a sound that needs to be played on an instrument known only to the person's tribe/nation/whatever, and the only one in existence is a family heirloom halfway around the world? What if it's something like a particular pattern of brainwaves created by meditating a certain way? Maybe a little extreme. There's an African language which is primarily location-based. People are raised from birth with an extremely accurate innate sense of spatial position through dead reckoning. Greeting someone and identifying yourself requires specifying your location and the direction you're facing. Fascinating stuff. There's a great Radiolab segment about it: http://www.radiolab.org/2011/jan/25/birds-eye-view/ So is it racist to choose a column type for holding names that isn't designed for GIS? If you did, isn't it racist to use a system based on Cartesian coordinates instead of the native way of representing locations?
My point is that you cannot possibly cover all the edge cases for the ways people identify themselves, and calling that offensive is just silly. Giving people identifiers that you created is also offensive - that's prison/Nazi crap. So what do you expect us to do?
A blank box in the character set of the primary language(s) where the application is used with zero validation and zero transformations is a reasonable demand. Calling it racist and offensive to fail to cover every edge case is a bit of a stretch.
Accommodating everybody is a pretty tall order (see: Prince). Where's the appropriate place to draw the line?
You can alway store name-elements as meta-fields as long as the original name is untouched.
You should have paid more attention in CS school!
Until then, can we agree that getting things right for 99.999% of people in your target market is good enough, and that, although unfortunate for people with culturally different names, the time and cost of getting all 40 points right would be too damn high?
1) Names are context-sensitive, so ask for a person's name by giving the context you intend to use it in. Something like, "How should we address you in an email?" or "How should we display your name to other people on the site?".
2) Do not apply any sort of transformation to a name. Don't parse it, don't truncate it, don't lowercase it. Treat it like an opaque string and use it verbatim.
3) Databases do need limits on the length of a column (unless you use a blob...) so be generous with the width of the columns. The longest recorded name is 746 letters long (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfe%2B585,_Senior), so make sure it's longer than that.
4) I think the no-name case (#40) and the not-in-unicode case (#14) are fairly obscure, but if you want to handle them then then make names optional but require an avatar if they do not provide one.
5) Allow a person to change their name at any time.
I don't know if it's still the case, but Facebook used to have this annoying bug where they'd not only capitalise the first letter of my surname (incorrect!), they would then not allow for me to correct it because it seemed to have been treated case insensitively. They don't seem to enforce the capitalisation now since I've created a new account though. I know it was just a bug, but it was so disrespectful somehow.
That's not very hard, and is in fact easier than trying to validate or restrict names. You don't have to learn about all the different cultures etc, just don't assume they are like yours.
And 2048-character limit on that field ought to be enough for everyone, right?
But that's exactly the issue here; there aren't many people with names as long as Janice's, but when these people have problems with computer systems, we get to hear about it.
Why do you need a fixed character limit at all?
Each row contains the same columns. For example: table Person: col1 label: name / type: text / size: 10 2 label: age / type: int / size: 3 3 label: address / type: text / size: 200
the type tells the database how to encode the data found in that column - an int takes less space than a string, so this is a space saving measure. The size refers to how many characters are allowed in that field, because that is how much space will be allocated when the row is created. If you don't need 200 characters of space, it's wasteful to allow it. But you kind of have to put a number in there, even if it's a big one.
Correct me if I'm wrong, all my knowledge comes from Dr. Marla Weston's 2nd year Databases Design course.
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.3/interactive/datatype-char...
A character with no representation in the latest Unicode standard.
Learn to fix the problems you can fix, and only the problems you can fix. Ignore the problems you cannot fix because, as per hypothesis, you cannot do anything about them.
In other words, what if you get hit by a micrometeorite on your way to the bathroom tomorrow?
Sorting is another area where it'll vary a lot depending on locale (perhaps you want to sort on last name for example, or not depending on your users) - it might be best to try to guess that from whatever they enter, rather than imposing a structure on them.
Personally I'd choose the simplest solution which works, so no last name/first name, just a name field for display, depending on the requirements, a website/app might need to collect more of course, but for most websites there's no reason to try to control user names or split them up into arbitrary first/last pairs.
Half the times it's "falsehoods a programmer back in the '80s believed about names and I have to operate with that goddamned system".
That and we have to support all the cavemen that want to sort by last-name. I'm perfectly happy to just use one 1000-length UTF-8 field for names and skip all the stupid abbreviations and worrying about firstname/lastname, but for some reason the BAs insist on supporting "Mr. So and so" and being able to write "Lasty, Firsty" as if that is in any way useful when you've got a searchable document.
I suppose you might occasionally need the Lasty, Firsty when printing into dead-tree-form, but when have programmers ever cared about that?
Sometimes when you live within a culture you will need to adjust to the way they do things.
Ignoring the more common issues of computer systems not accepting non-Japanese names, it has been a bureaucratic nightmare, struggling with applying for credit cards, opening banking and investment accounts, and linking things together, as each system has different lengths limits for names, and in some systems my name is input as Unicode "double width romaji", which in some systems will not match the otherwise identical ASCII version of the name.
I truly wish I was offered the ability during immigration to just drop the middle name, but even then my first name is longer than some systems' 5 character limit, where I am often put in as "Cortl".
The double-width latin characters are the bane of every data analysis using Asian data. It's a roll of the dice whether any given Latin character will be in typical ASCII form or double-width form.
I'm sure there's some "seriously insensitive character comparison" library out there, but it's not built into my SQL server's "LIKE" operator, that's for sure.
You would probably be able to normalize all your strings before putting them into your database. You'd lose no functionality unless at some point later you really did need to distinguish "C" from "Ｃ".
When I renewed my UK Passport they just decided to lose one of my names. I was furious, but it became clear I'd need to go through administrative hell to correct it, and I needed the passport at the time.
Some time later, I've just given up on having my full name. I prefer just to give out a firstname lastname and ignore my middlenames. Its just far too much hassle to go through. As far as I am concerned, I have an external name which fits in ASCII and complies with anglo-centric formulae and an internal name which doesn't.
Thats just my personal choice though. My sister is defiant and managed to get her full name on by demanding that it was an unhyphenated triple barreled surname.
It's my understanding that Brazilian (and Portuguese) "middle names" are usually if not always family names, are they not?
Insisting that they are part of your surname sounds like it might be the easiest way to get it accepted - it is common enough in Europe to have surnames with spaces. E.g. a Dutch surname like "Van der Vaart", or "Van Helsing", so it's quite likely various agencies etc. run into that often enough.
Additionally, it's also perfectly reasonable to have two or more "first names".
The consequence of all of this, and having four names myself, is that I'm always confused what I'm supposed to fill in as my first and last names. I end up using just my very first and very last, but i always feel like I'm being disrespectful towards my mother's family for the omission.
For example, My dad was Charles Marvin Gore. His mother's father was Charles Maltbie. His father's father was Marvin Gore.
I don't think I ever saw the two modes combined though, so no example of a Charles Marvin Maltbie Gore. Although that is just in my family. It might have happened in others.
<First name> <Middle name> <Grandmothers first name> <Grandfathers first name> <Surname>
So its kinda like a family name, but its not like everyone in our family will have the same family names. My cousins don't share any names with me as they are named after different people.
It causes trouble insisting they are all part of your surname. She recently had issues because the officials dealing with her medical exams assumed only the last name was a surname. So she had call and find someone with the necessary authority and present her birth certificate to get them to cancel the previous transcripts and issue new ones under the correct name.
On my Passport they lost my last middle name. On my Drivers Licence they intialised two of my middle names but kept the first one. One bank dropped all my middle names and another decided to initial them all. I think its up to the particular admin on the day how to deal with it. I'd much rather it was consistent across everything, because that way "What is the name on your credit card?" doesn't end up being a trick question.
I'll just have to continue correcting documents :)
As Portuguese that lived in a few European countries, I already had my share of having to choose names to leave out of cards due to lack of space.
Additionally it is always fun (not) when you need to use one of those cards together with the ID card, while trying to convince the clerk or police that although some names are missing it is your card.
I also have two last names, which makes it a pain every time someone asks for my last name. I always have to explain I have two of them and sometimes people are puzzled by that.
If I stay in the US indefinitely and eventually get citizenship, I think I'll change my name and drop one of the first names and one of the last names :P
But in Brazil, I've never once heard anybody complaining that it offended their heritage, or that their "name means everything" -- it's obvious and common sense there's only so much space on the card.
Except for my driver's license which the government insists match my birth certificate. Which hasn't been too much of a problem except always having to tell cops my name is "David" when I get pulled over. Recently, though, the TSA has been getting all stressy if you don't have your exact name on the boarding pass. I've still been obstinately refusing to do that–They just keep telling me "next time use your real name". Yeah, ok.
I do wish the world accommodated me better, but I know I'm an outlier and don't expect it to.
Then it is time to show your form to the client and he/she goes nuts!
"People must enter their full name". Okay they can just write their full name into this text input. "No they must enter both first and last name". But not everyone in the world has a first and last name. Icelandic people? "Just require a space in the name". Like nobody in China has? "Don't argue with me, I am the client, require a space!!!ONE!"
It's discussions like these I feel I can't really win. Most clients aren't technical, they are chock full of assumptions and they are not paying me to argue with them, they are paying me to require first name and last name and quick!
I understand that education needs to happen but there are limits as to how much education your client accepts from you before he goes to a different shop.
Of course, that means I have to be judicious. I am NOT going to tell the US bank that I work for that they should support people without a separate first and last name when that is FAR more rare among their customers than people who type wrong and SHOULD have entered a space, so checking for a space will annoy 2 customers while protecting 1000 from stupid typing errors.
> I doubt she can even pronounce it.
or:
> I am surprised her first name is Janice? She should change it to IamsofullofmyselfbecauseIamsospecialbecauseImarriedahawainman.
...and the list goes on. Just because your heritage has shorter names or names that don't sound anything like hers doesn't mean your culture is "right" or something. People need to learn to be more open-minded.
* What is your full name, including title? (e.g. Mr John Jules Smith, Señor José Hernández Fernádéz, Kim Ban-Moon)
* How do you wish to be referred to? (e.g. Mr Smith, John, Sñr Hernández, Mr Kim)
* How should we address you? (e.g. Mr Smith or John)
Which covers the Icelandic given-name first scenario, as well as the matronymic vs patronymic issue. This puts the person in control of what to sort on, while how to sort it would be controlled by the active user's culture settings.
Things are better and more accommodating than twenty years ago when every byte was precious. But some cultures and individuals get ridiculous. I'm not allocating 400 characters of space in a standard name field just because you want to include your family tree, PGP key, DNA sequence and homeland geology in your name. (I will put this in another table, and link it relationally so the software and the people can access your true name.)
Software can be made to be very accommodating. Most systems I work on allocate a 50 character nvarchar for a full name, various fields for prefix, first, last, multiple middles, suffix, maiden, titles, informal salutation, aliases, nick names, gender change issues, etc. And various flags and other fields/tables for exceptions, notes and warnings, etc...
But you wouldn't believe the bad data and crap people put in name fields unless you've worked with a huge number of sources over the years. I've seen every bad variation possible. And that's not including address fields. Or combined name/address fields with multiple names and multiple addresses in the same record with a complexity that would vex a dyslexic Talmudic scholar.
This attitude boils down to "I write software that is easy for me to write, not easy for you to use." Why should any user want to use the software a developer that is hostile to their existence?
That said, I’d love to have my PGP fingerprint on my ID :)
You deal with questionable quality data that comes from hundreds of different systems running software that may be decades old with demographics from around the world that may have no common conventions. And you fight for the extra disc space and processors to handle an extra hundred characters per record, because with a huge number of records, even that may cause issue with storage, backups and time to process.
And yes, I have to write code to deal with all of the "Little Bobby Tables", too.
For a community that routinely cries out against national ID laws and champions the right to anonymity, many of the comments on this thread surprise me.
Standardization makes finding frauds easier
You also need to standardize how names are canonified into these legal constraints for when someone moves into the state.
Worse, there are lots of expectations that your state and federal IDs will have matching names (or at least, names that match in the ways people expect: First and Last, with some leeway for a middle to not be there at all or be truncated to an initial).
See also this discussion of naming in Japan for the difficulties people run into when there is a system with both Nicknames and Legal Names: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6145768
The length is the issue, and that's more a cultural issue than a language one. (English names could also be very long.)
If Hawaiian names are typically very long, then this could be interpreted as a cultural bias against traditional Hawaiian names. However, in looking around for Hawaiian names, it does not seem that they are typically so long.
There is not enough information for me to get a sense if this is discrimination on the basis of cultural, or a one-off case.
Hawaiian is partially written in the Latin alphabet, but it also includes five vowels with macrons (the kahako) and the 'okina for glottal stops.
(http://edition.cnn.com/2013/05/01/world/asia/new-zealand-sta...)
I thought that some people were just sending comedy names because, well, that's what some people do.
But some parents aren't joking around:
> Four years ago, a 9-year-old girl was taken away from her parents by the state so that her name could be changed from "Talula Does the Hula From Hawaii."
(http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2008/jul/24/familyan...)
> A family court judge, Rob Murfitt, gave the order after hearing that the child was embarrassed about her name and had refused to reveal it to friends. "She told people her name was K because she feared being mocked and teased," the child's lawyer, Colleen MacLeod, told the court.
> The judge criticised parents who give their offspring bizarre names, saying it exposed children to ridicule among their peers.
> "The court is profoundly concerned about the very poor judgment that this child's parents have shown in choosing this name. It makes a fool of the child and sets her up with a social disability and handicap, unnecessarily," he said.
I am foreigner living in UK and local council and government constantly screw up foreigners names, we always have a good laugh about it with friends.
The locals in this case still resent the way that the USA took over in a coup. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overthrow_of_the_Kingdom_of_Haw... for the history.
She's not actually Hawaiian, but she married a native Hawaiian and took his name. He passed away and she wants to keep the name to remember him by.
In Hawaii right now there seem to be two prevailing schools of thought.
1) It's the state's responsibility to respect everyone's name.
2) She shouldn't have to change her name, but they don't have to put the whole thing on her ID
I have a typical Russian name (Vladislav) and a last name that consists of 11 letters. Is that really too long for Twitter to handle?
And just tried adding my first name again, it works.
I'm with her on this one but I am curious how a government would handle an ancestral name that has glyphs.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Aboriginal_syllabics
BTW, my family used the Scandinavian "-sen" system of naming, until the government told everyone they had to stop, that heritable names made tracking easier. I'm one of the thousands/millions of people worldwide locked in as "son of Jens."
solution 2: hash function
Edit: in fact, as they've included two images with the same info, pixellated differently, you could almost certainly heuristically solve without brute-forcing. Eigenvectors, baby.
I wonder if you did reverse out her name if it would have all the right characters in it, and if it didn't, what sort of changes to would make her family heritage in the process? :)
I can just picture it now: function convertThisDecimalDeclaredByMyCoworkerTimToBackWhenWeStartedThisCompanyThreeYearsAgoAnInteger() {}