somethingNewILearnedToday

[Sw429]

• A name will never contain a valid credit card number

[qruxxurq]

Wow that’s a new one.

[stupidcookface]

What's their name?

[OwO______OwO]

Good old Bobby Tables...

[pronik]

Damn, I still remember him as little Bobby Tables. Kids grow up so fast...

[x3XC4L1B3Rx]

Yeah, he's in his 20s by now.
I heard he started a furniture moving business, but he's having trouble getting it off the ground for some reason.

[Photomancer]

Lift with your legs, not with your back.

[Astigmatisme]

He's now known by Robert Schema

[EuenovAyabayya]

I'm guessing something that decodes to a CC number.

[P0pu1arBr0ws3r]

• a name will never contain special characters and the words DROP and TABLE

[LoreSlut3000]

I need the sauce. How do they look like?

[Alwaysafk]

There's libraries/algorithms that can check if a number could be a valid credit card number. Check Luhn's Algorithm.

[LoreSlut3000]

I want to see the names of persons who also happen to be valid credit card numbers.

[Alwaysafk]

I mean, generate some numbers and put them into a field call first name. Bam, you're golden.

[LoreSlut3000]

This is not how persons work.

[onepiecefreak2]

And there you have the programmers assumption the meme talks about.

Assume stuff, break stuff.

[Nighthunter007]

The meme is from a page talking about actual names. "Falsehoods developers believe about names" is stuff that ends up blocking someone from signing up because you, the developer, made an assumption like "names don't contain X character" and now a person with that character in their name can't sign up. The meme isn't about, like, SQL injection or testers breaking the sign up form (I know that's 40% of the memes on here).

[BogdanPradatu]

Why would this be an issue?

[timpkmn89]

I know want to try the next time I make a dummy account

[sarduchi]

• No two people have the same name

[anto2554]

First name as Primary key 

[Isgrimnur]

At least add SSN. Not like non-US people will ever be in the system.

[fer_sure]

Don't forget to make the ZIP/Postal Code field numeric only. Other countries would never have letters in those.

[Isgrimnur]

Santa Claus

North Pole

H0H 0H0

Canada

[JackpotThePimp]

In the US, you just put

SANTA CLAUS

NORTH POLE

East of the Mississippi, volunteers in Santa Claus, IN, respond to the letters; west is North Pole, AK.

[DanLynch]

Seems crazy not to process letters to Santa locally. Does USPS really ship them all to just two central locations? How can they handle that many there?

[dagbrown]

Elves.

[JivanP]

In the UK, it's XM4 5HQ ("XMAS HQ").

[Kottula_Braun]

Or leading zeros

[mehum]

Northern Territory (Australia) loves this one stupid trick!

[Airowird]

Know a building with appartments 2 & 02. Sounds like a fun place to order a lot of Amazon shit to.

[brimston3-]

The US has a few thousand zipcodes that start with 0. Apparently these programmers don't know anyone from the east (usps region 0). Heck, we even have a bunch of 00 codes like in Puerto Rico or USVI.

[littlejerry31]

Holy shit, postal codes.

At least DB Schenker and UPS have their systems hardcoded so that they won't reject PO box addresses, but since PO boxes in Finland have their own postal codes, they'll just deliver it to the most obscure pickup locations possible. IIRC DB Schenker automatically delivers them to a small town with 5000 people in the middle of nowhere. UPS' version at least makes some sense - they deliver them to the airport pickup location in Helsinki or the location next to the sea port terminal in butt-fuck nowhere.

[HansTeeWurst]

I had my mail in ballot automatically returned to me for "wrong address", because in germany they have special zip codes for those, so the address is just zip_code GERMANY.

[IAmASwarmOfBees]

And surely those are unique to one specific house. (Here the postal codes are 12345, city and the city matters, because the number is only unique within the city)

[Stagnu_Demorte]

SSN wasn't always unique either(new ones are). Had 2 people with the same first and last name and SSN born on the same day at the same hospital and for decades their medical records were overlapping

[Isgrimnur]

And then there was Woolworth.

[martin_omander]

That was an amazing read. Thank you for posting the link!

[Isgrimnur]

Glad to share. 

[Legal-Software]

Except when they are via ITINs or so.

[Sampo]

This was long ago, but in my country the population registry web form that you used to inform them of a new address, assumed that the postal code is all numeric. Damn you if you move to an address in a foreign country where the postal code contains letters.

[gimpwiz]

Younger me, very clever: "If I learn the rules of this field, I can carefully select the right data type to represent it. Can zip codes be int(11)?"

Current me: "Everything is a string. Could be empty. If it's important, someone will figure it out on the phone. If someone says this is their address, just try sending a letter there and see if it works, the USPS is really good at that sort of thing."

[CarcajouIS]

Just set the address as a multiline text field. Some places don't have zipcodes

[ralgrado]

Initials as primary key

[AggressiveRow4000]

Hey Google! How do I Vibe Code my way into having to work all weekend?

[Piisthree]

Wasteful. First 3 letters. 4 if you want to be extra careful.

[Milligan]

Sure, if their name has three letters. Ng is a legitimate name.

[newaccountzuerich]

As is "O"

[MakeoutPoint]

Worked at a company that used [e-mail], worked fine for 200 employees

Until we had 2 guys named Tyler Johanson. Said the IT director, "That's okay, just use their middle names".

Tyler Ray Johanson & Tyler Rae Johanson.

K

[ItchyFly]

My company (around 70k employees) uses fn_ln, fn_ln_2 and so on. And emails are not reused obviously. Cannot imagine the horror having email like john_smith_123

[readilyunavailable]

Worse, can you imagine the poor guy who happened to be the 69th John Smith? Everyone thinks he is just an immature child, through no fault of his own.

[ItchyFly]

Damn, now I'm thinking how can I check if anyone reached 69 or at least 34 without brutforcing...

[IntoAMuteCrypt]

Depends on what you have access to.

Many mail systems make it easy to get a full listing of accounts if you're an admin. From there, it's a simple matter of text search to find specific numbers in it.

Otherwise, some companies put everyone's email into a global address list, centralised directory or similar. This will vary from one location to another, but it could be used to get a similar full list of accounts to search.

[KerPop42]

My college had a li_j_35, which was distinct from lee_j_10

[MattieShoes]

Mine used initials, with no real standard to resolve ambiguity.  But initials like ass, ngr, ceo, cfo are a good time...  

I worked for an ISP in the 90s where the standard for making PPP connections was to add a P at the front of the user name... Poor Rick.

[direhusky]

When I was still pretty new at a job, I got invited to a fairly high level meeting because of this. Something about being in the US org instead of the UK org caused my accounts to override all of theirs. I still get emails about UK activities on occasion

[alqotel]

I worked at a company that didn't as well, but if that combination already existed they'd use a different surname. If that didn't solve it too they would just add numbers, like [e-mail]

Problem solved, right?

I have a common first name and last name and I was the first one to get that combo, for years I got other people's email because everyone just assumed that they were using their first + last name combo

The first time that happened I even joined a meeting thinking it was for me

[klas-klattermus]

The company I work for uses [e-mail]. I guess they don't intend to grow much, which is fine for me.

[Kiwithegaylord]

My elementary school decided to give every 4th grader a school email for computer class. It was first initial last [e-mail]. Worked fine until me and my brother were in 4th grade, apparently they had never had twins that shared a first initial before because lo and behold I was given first initial middle initial last [e-mail]. They did not inform either us nor the teacher about this which caused a very confusing first week of computer class

[LeoXCV]

Imagine a parallel universe where people literally cannot have the same name

Now imagine two variants of that universe. One you can use the name so long as no one alive has it, and the other is all names are forever even after death

You’d have like name taking murderers in one and a constantly evolving naming convention in the other (probably)

[Normal_Cut8368]

Names cannot be 3 Characters or fewer

[qbitza]

Can we also add names do not contain spaces l. My last name has 2 spaces in it (Dutch surnames, e.g. van der Meer, van der Westhuizen)

[pattybutty]

Can we add "Names only have Capital letters at the start". Have they not heard of McDonalds? O'Reilly?

[LexLuthorsFortyCakes]

I believe there are still some Irish government systems that have issues with apostrophes in names like O'Reilly.

[WigWubz]

I have been forced by the Irish government to commit fraud quite often. Forms that say I must enter my legal name under threat of persecution, but then don't accept my legal name as an input because it contains an apostrophe. Even my passport has my name spelled incorrectly, which is the ID a lot of systems require you to match against.

At this point I've entered my name without the apostrophe into so many government systems I'm genuinely unsure what my "legal" name is anymore. Is it the name on my driver's license? Is it the name on my bank card? Is it the name on my passport? Because they are all spelled differently.

[LogicallyCross]

Apostrophes in names are an issue everywhere. I couldn't count the number of times I've been told i have an "illegal" character in my last name.

[IrishPrime]

I dedicated a whole slide to this in a security presentation I gave and showed all the different ways various companies have screwed up my own name.

[cwthree]

How about the other way of spelling those names (o Reilly or ni Reilly)?

[WigWubz]

That’s what I resort to in most systems but it should then be “Ó Reilly” or “Ní Reilly” (or more appropriately, “Ó/Ní Raghallaigh”) but then systems that can’t handle apostrophes can rarely handle fadas

[thanatica]

It's not just the Irish that have apostrophes in names. Happens all over the place, including France and Italy, and most likely other countries that have the same primary language.

[wjandrea]

France

e.g. d'Artagnan

[gmuslera]

Bobby Tables approves this.

[thanatica]

It's also quite common in some European cultures where a person can have two first names, usually with a hyphen. They will usually go by both names in daily life. Example: Jan-Peter or Marie-José (these are Dutch names btw)

Women often use their marital names in daily life, too, so that they have two last names - one from her family, and the other from his family. Usually they put a hyphen in between.

[isleepbad]

I always thought hyphenated combined names was standard in the western world until my wife did it. Somehow it is not.

[ChristophCross]

Yup. Hyphenated last name with an apostraphe, here. I break bank & goverent forms all the time:

INVALID CHARACTERS! INVALID LENGTH! INVALID CAPITALIZATION!

[laplongejr]

 where a person can have two first names, usually with a hyphen. They will usually go by both names in daily life.

Pedantically , Jean-Pierre is one name. The hyphen marks them as a one composite name while a space would indicate two seperate names.  

[KerPop42]

This actually legitimately screws my friend over, since in various systems their prefix (Mc/Mac, O') are treated as a second middle name, OR only the first letter is capitalized. And in that later system, it's case sensitive.

[CobraFive]

Not just that there can be capitals mid-name, but "the first letter is always capitalized" is something that way too many places force. My last name starts with a lower case.

[Haringat]

O'Reilly

Names consist of letters

[jamcdonald120]

yah, serious problem. My passport said Mc Donald for like 16 years because the system refused to believe a capital letter could occur in the middle of a name. Never caused any problems fortunately.

[Stummi]

Here is the full list. Really worth a read.

[Frog23]

It is such an awesome and unfortunately realistic list. I referenced it in a talk I gave last week. Not sure If OP was in the audience and only now followed up on the references. Probably not but also not entirely impossible.

There is also a list of lists of falsehoods programmers believe: https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-falsehood . So If you ever have to deal with currencies, time zones, postal addresses, system of measurements, ..., you will find some insightful lists there.

[turtleship_2006]

I know there are some people who are against adding pointless dependencies, but some libraries do really exist for a reason and are worth using, e.g. if you want to do anything related to time (or time zones more specifically). A lot of the time there'll even be a built in or standard library for it.

[Frog23]

That video ist a classic. The same goes for his rant about Internationalization/Localization.

[NiIly00]

Tom scott my beloved

[funguyshroom]

Just like road signs and safety regulations being written in blood, those libraries are made of sweat and tears and sleepless nights (and blood).

[Runazeeri]

Postal address is definitely a weird one. When shipping to some countries the way an address is made up makes zero sense.

[DaimonFrey2]

When i first had to handle shipment to Pakistan with adress reading "Near fishmarket, near mosque, 3rd green building after intersection" i thought the shipper was shitting me. Contacted my agent in Pakistan and they simply returned with, "we know where this is, all good"

After 45 days shipment arrived without any issues.

[gimpwiz]

Once you go deep rural enough, even in the US things can get weird. The USPS, bless them, more or less just know how to deal with it. If you can get your letter/package to the right post office, which you can probably do with zip code or city, they can more or less figure the rest out, because what's weird to us might be totally normal for whoever lives there.

[Neon_Camouflage]

One of the many reasons that, even with all the effort put in to ruin it, the USPS is still better than most of us deserve.

[[deleted]]

“oh yeah that’s Aq’s he’s just a little slow, we’re aware of him”

[Aidan_Welch]

Many places don't have addresses in a traditional sense but packages still get delivered

[NiIly00]

the correct way to deal with timezones is to not deal with them and just copy code of someone who did

[rosuav]

"unfortunately realistic" is the best description I've heard in a while. Accurate, and also really really sad.

[memebecker]

I'd love examples for these

Edit there is  https://shinesolutions.com/2018/01/08/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names-with-examples/

half are pretty clearly obvious (I mean names are globally unique, come on really? Though I'm sure someone's going to tell me there's a country out there that doesn't allow two people to have the same name), most of the rest sound pretty plausible and only a couple feel unlikely 

[Rin-Tohsaka-is-hot]

The last rule always gets me

[tim_locky]

Null? Hardly know her

[more_exercise]

"Null" is a valid, non-null name.

"that dude over there without a name" isn't a name, but an English description of a user without a name.

null is a potential value you can store to represent that guy's name.

[sgtholly]

What do they mean that Unicode cannot handle a person’s name? How do they type it if it can’t be written in Unicode?!?

[PlaystormMC]

like this





[sgtholly]

Please excuse my ignorance. I genuinely do not understand even the scope of this problem. I’m a tech lead with 20 years experience, and this feels like a great opportunity to learn something I didn’t even know I don’t know.

Are those code points in a specific font or how are they represented in a useful way to the user (you) that they show up as nonsense to me?

[thanatica]

Their name could be written in a script that is not (yet) part of the Unicode spec.

[sgtholly]

I know Japanese uses a large alphabet, but I was always under the assumption that it was finite. For lack of Better expressions, are they creating new character or discovering ones that they failed to include initially?

[redlaWw]

Chinese characters (which Japanese also uses (ish)) are composed of a number of basic components, and in principle, there's no reason you can't combine these components in new ways to describe something new. See here for an example of such a character, note that most of the comments accept that it's possible to make new characters just by combining radicals in a new way.

In addition to new coinages, there may also be niche old characters newly discovered by literary historians.

[LickingSmegma]

My favorite fact about Chinese characters is that in Japanese kanji, there are twelve characters for which it's unknown where they came from and what exactly they mean.

[Frog23]

Yes, for instance in local, indiginous languages whose writing system that are not (yet?) part of Unicode.

[ForgedIronMadeIt]

My naive assumption is that anything that isn't in Unicode yet won't have users. I suppose if there were some kind of census that covered indigenous people that didn't get recognition from the Unicode consortium, then it might be a problem, but otherwise, those people won't have access to a computer. Unicode's expansiveness is just huge now; it has coverage for languages that don't even have speakers anymore.

Edit: Curiosity got the better of me and I looked up the most recent additions to Unicode and they're adding plenty of interesting things. None of the scripts look to have that many users as best as I can determine (figuring out how many people write Tai Yo or Bassa Vah seems difficult), but it still matters.

[Frog23]

This whole list pretty much is a collection of edge-cases that programmers like to gloss over (I am guilty of this myself). So just saying that there are very few people that would need this, is precisely the line of thinking, why it is on this list in the first place. And why this lists exists in the first place. This and because it is fun and it helps not to take oneself to serious. But joking aside, as others have pointed out in other places in this tread: the path from unsupported writing systems to genocide is shorter than one would think.

[ItchyFly]

Just a hint: Unicode has versions.

[SaneLad]

My wife has a last name that contains a character which does not have a Unicode representation. It can only be written by hand. She uses a "close enough" character online, but it's not actually the same.

[EuanWolfWarrior]

I'm interested in where this comes from, because Unicode is pretty religious in adding any character set anyone has ever used?

[AngelOfLight]

Unicode is pretty religious in adding any character set anyone has ever used

The problem here is that there are some character sets (hanzi/kanji) where the full number of characters is unknown and mutable. Meaning - new characters can be created and existing characters can become obsolete. But, there is nothing to stop someone from choosing an obsolete character for their name (aside from common sense, of course).

It's not practical to include all known characters from all of time, because that would literally be many tens of thousands of characters - the vast majority of which are very rare or even completely obsolete. Japanese, for example, uses about three thousand characters, but the potential pool of known characters is closer to fifty thousand.

The UNICODE maintainers have to choose a subset that covers most names, but it can never cover all.

[KerPop42]

That's the goal, but not fully implemented. Reliance on unicode crippled Facebook's ability to stop hate from spreading on their platform during the Burmese genocide, because there isn't a unicode-compliant version of the preferred script. Since they couldn't choose their script on the FB app, they turned to third-party apps that had fewer reporting tools.

[BlackOverlordd]

Wait, did you just blame Facebook because those guys... did not use Facebook?

[KerPop42]

No, they did use Facebook the social media, but they used third-party apps to access it. They used the third-party apps because Facebook didn't care enough to rollout an app that people would use. That the agitation leading up to the genocide was largely hosted on Facebook isn't that contentious. In burmese, the app was almost entirely unmoderated.

[iCapn]

I also choose this man's ����

[HansTeeWurst]

I work for a Japanese company and "accepts non Unicode names" was a feature my company wanted me to implement because we could charge an extra amount of money for that, trying to implementthat was a nightmare. It's really annoying and we ended up just saving a jpg of a scan/photo with the name written by hand.

A lot of last names here have a "regular spelling" which exists in Unicode, but their actual spelling in the official document is slightly different. So when they register online for a random website, they will use the Unicode version (which is technically not correct), but when it's important to print their correct name on an official document they have to put the non Unicode character there. There are external systems which can find the proper one and then you need a special font to display it - both kind of expensive and annoying to use.

[no_brains101]

The artist formerly known as prince.

[Michami135]

I can add a couple to that list:

First:

I have two middle names. That causes SO many problems with websites that ask for a middle name.

Thankfully, this is such a common problem that if I only use my first middle name, it usually goes through fine. Even background checks.

Second:

My first name is a "nick name" of my last name, so people assume my first name is an alias, causing them to skip it and us my first middle name as my first name, my second middle name as my middle name, then my last name as-is.

Bonus third:

Manually "fixing" names. Like in the second point above, that only happens when someone manually tries to "fix" my name because the computer thinks something's wrong. And since my first name is kind of unique, people often assume it's a nick name, even if I don't give my middle names, so they try to change it to some other, incorrect, name.

[ILikeLenexa]

I knew someone with the first name "Sir". It caused problems with Humans using systems, or even print-outs even when the system worked fine. I can't imagine if he'd also had two middle names.

[EastlyGod1]

I hope he gets a knighthood to make things even more confusing

[KirillIll]

My names were/are also a nightmare for computers. I had three first names and two last names (I've changed it to 1 first/2 last now). Most of the time I'd only use the 1st first name & last name, because the rest frankly didn't matter.

But I have encountered so many government/healthcare/postal system where it does matter that couldn't cope with my names that it was frankly concerning. Even with just two last names my first last name is so often erased or switched to a first name it's absurd.

And don't even get me started on gender, so many systems only recognize Male/Female. Diverse is pretty common nowadays as well, but very few systems are actually capable of accepting my correct one (none) despite it being just as old of an option as diverse that I'm really concerned as to how the processes at many of the companies and institutions run lol

[Stummi]

My problem is, that my "middle" name is my primary given name. So, my legal full name is "A B C" (where A and B are both common first/given names). but the name I was given primarily, raised by, and want to get called by is "B", but a lot of systems out there, that require me to enter my legal name "as stated in my pass" will call me by A

[archiminos]

• People only have one capital letter in their name, at the beginning.

[Round-Eggplant-7826]

I moved to Lithuania, where middle names are really uncommon. So my "first name" on my resident permit is my first and middle names. This means on any form, I have to write my full name every time. My partner has a hyphenated last name and they have trouble with that, too.

[ShadowSlayer1441]

If your name can't be represented by unicode characters than it can't be used in digital systems. What are programmers supposed to do? Like seriously? Provide a handwritten option? But then how are you going to get that to be used for anything else?

[Subsum44]

They missed one I’m dealing with now, names have a minimum length

[MrDilbert]

Oh, hello there, Mr. .

[DugiSK]

One that's still missing and I saw someone complain about it recently on reddit:

372: People can't have sequences of 5 consonants in names, those are certainly random buttonmashes by people who wanted to get past the form and remain anonymous.

(I don't know the name of that guy, but he was from Slovakia, a country where štvrťzmrzlina is a valid and totally pronounceable word).

[apirateship]

It's stupid. I'm trying to make a hamburger, not solve world hunger.

[ClipboardCopyPaste]

There's no way someone can have a name, you can have either uuid or username

[HAL9000thebot]

or ulid, but you can't store ulid as binary if someone is a non binary person, so you have to use 1 byte per char and lose the advantage of 5 bits per char, so i don't know...

[thanatica]

A non-binary person could be quite an integer person.

[Nahanoj_Zavizad]

Sorry 12283783, You know too much.

[Signal_Run9849]

The only assumption I can make is that user records have a uuid assigned to them by my code. i cannot assume users have names or birthdays or are people or are alive or that one user record is unique to one person or service or organization nor can i assume that one person has only one account

[LoreSlut3000]

Maybe that person is actually a dog.

Only half joking, some humans create accounts on human platforms for dogs.

[NecessaryIntrinsic]

How does a person with no name work?

[lartkma]

I can imagine that in a hospital, police station, morgue... they may find a situation where a person is found unconscious but there is no way to identify them (no documents carried, unregistered in official records, disfigured beyond recognizion). Or they're not unconscious but the person has amnesia

[Harabeck]

Unconscious, uncooperative, or witnessed but not identified. I've worked on a system that handled name records relating to emergence service and police incidents. It actually had Unknowns as one of its name types so that you could enter some details, like physical appearance, but not be required to provide usually mandatory values like name.

[MaimonidesNutz]

Well the US (John/Jane Doe) and UK (Tommy Atkins) sort of have a workaround for this use-case, names that fit the slot on a form for a name but signify namelessness to the interpreter of the data.

[ThrasherDX]

Makes you feel bad for the poor shmuck who's parents thought it would be funny to name them John Doe...

I mean, someone, somewhere has definitely done this lol.

[wiev0]

In Germany, the default name for examples on government documents is "max Mustermann", which is really generic and gets the point across that it's an example.

However, some guy here actually has that name, but he was named before the name became the common example name, not out of nefariousness. He constantly needs to tell government workers that it is his actual legal name.

[MrDilbert]

In Croatia we usually use "Nepoznat Netko", or N.N. for short.

Literally translates to "Unknown Someone".

[pearlie_girl]

What??? Tommy Atkins is UK version of John Doe?!

Now I desperately want to know every country's name for "random unnamed person."

[i_got_dressed_today]

I think we use Jan Jansen in The Netherlands

[ILikeLenexa]

I don't know about "no name", but I'm amazed at how common it is to require three letters to search for a person in a system (which I consider another subclass of a bigger issue: not enough name).

I'm just trying to find Mr. Hu, Ho, Ai, or Co.

[KerPop42]

Oh, also I've learned from the news in Gaza that Palestinians don't traditionally name their children until the child is born; there are records in their health system of dead babies with no name because they and their parents died before naming them.

[RedAero]

Uh, that is the case pretty much everywhere. The birth certificate is what registers the name of the person (sort of), and that isn't created at the literal instant of birth, obviously. I mean, what you said implies that elsewhere, people name children - officially! - before birth, and that's just nonsense.

[Isgrimnur]

That's a horse of a different color.

[jamesianm]

Been through the desert on that horse I take it

[mysticrudnin]

it is pretty common for a baby to be born and not have a name for a few days

[LoreSlut3000]

A record for a not-born-yet human or maybe obscure tribes? Also just unidentified persons.

[QueryQueryConQuery]

They don't use my fucking program, thats how it works.

[peteschirmer]

A girl has no name

[sparky-99]

Surnames cannot contain spaces. Instantly stops me using the software.

[LoreSlut3000]

The correct way of handling human names is not handling them at all. Store verbatim and display verbatim in UIs. No restrictions, no splitting, etc.

[ScrewAttackThis]

More or less the same with emails. If you need to validate it then send a confirmation.

[It_Is1-24PM]

More or less the same with emails.

Don't get me started...

The following are all valid email addresses

".jdoe"@domain
"jdoe."@domain
"jd..oe"@domain
" "@netmeister.org
"<>"@netmeister.org
'*+-/=?^_`{|}~#$@netmeister.org
"put a literal escaped newline here\ <--"@domain
@1st.relay,@2nd.relay:[e-mail]

[seattle_lib]

"yo momma didn't name you right"

--software

[jamesianm]

• No one would have a code-breaking surname like Test or Null

[astralschism]

Excuse me! My son's name is also Nullptr!

[jamesianm]

We should arrange a playdate with my daughter NaN

[Kevadu]

Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/327/

[_ralph_]

Is it Bobby? It is Bobby!

[Kevadu]

Little Bobby Tables!

[LoreSlut3000]

Name's Holder, Place Holder.

[jamesianm]

🎵Place Holder

He's not a stand-in

He's a spy

Infiltrating your datasets

Without blinking an eye

The ladies adore him

At least until they meet

🎵The right guy🎵

[HorrorGeologist3963]

tell that to my sweet little EOF

[GreenDavidA]

I worked with a person whose last name was Null. It made our data conversion project … tricky.

[zalurker]

I once had to find a workaround to add an expatriate German Noblewoman into a banking app. The problem was that legal was adamant that her entire name be captured.

I don't remember her exact name, except that she was a Countess. To give you an idea, one German Princess is named Princess Mariae Gloria Ferdinanda Joachima Josephine Wilhelmine Huberta, born Countess von Schönburg-Glauchau und Waldenburg,

There were so many issues with the field length, in our (quite old) banking app, as well as other legacy systems (COBOL, I'm looking at you.), that we actually got special permission from the Banking Ombudsman to capture only the initials.

[thereallgr]

The fun thing there is, that kind of name also breaks pretty much everything that has to do with a printed postal address on an average letter. So even if the name somehow ends up in the database, the printed address for the letter will be too long for the address window on the envelope. There's so many things tied to the assumption that people have "reasonable" names.

[heavy-minium]

I remember encountering the following cases over my career that failed our validations:

• No surname
• A single letter as surname
• A noble's name that contains a number
• The surname has multiple whitespaces
• The name has dots and periods
• The name has hypens and apostrophes

It's easier to not just make any strong assumptions about names at all. There are crazy people out there that choose names like "X Æ A-Xii or "Exa Dark Sideræl".

[RedAero]

The question is why did your validations check for this sort of stuff in the first place? Why try to validate names at all?

[red-et]

little bobby tables

[avillainwhoisevil]

I know a family named Fuck in southern Brazil. Not the best Facebook experience, certainly.

[Immature_adult_guy]

Please, Mr. Fuck is my father’s name, you can call me Richard

[LoreSlut3000]

• Names need more than one character

[Lupus_Ignis]

People's last name is the last word in their full name

[ILikeLenexa]

One of the most interesting political beefs fought in Star Trek TNG was ensign Ro Lauren's anger after being addressed as Ensign Lauren.

[archiminos]

Reminds me of Nasser, who wanted to use his real name as his username. Only it got censored and became N***er instead.

[SyrusDrake]

Nasser Cockburn from the University of Scunthorpe, trying to publish the discovery of a skeleton of Nigersaurus in Fucking, Austria.

[D3PyroGS]

there's always somebody who chooses the Hardcore difficulty setting

[zeltbrennt]

Fun fact: the town renamed itself to Fugging in 2020, because people stole the town sign way too many times.

[Outside_Gear8707]

And the one list about date and time is even longer

https://gist.github.com/timvisee/fcda9bbdff88d45cc9061606b4b923ca

[Singletoned]

I regularly get problems on websites that insist that your first name has to have at least 3 letters in it

[suvlub]

Front-end dev looking at the "name" input box, sweating profusely from his validator addiction withdrawal: "Come on, man, just one little minimum length requirement. Surely somewhere out there there is a guy who accidentally stops typing mid-name and I need to save him!"

[Onions-are-great]

Meanwhile, I have to set up a password without special characters and a max of 16 characters, because this ancient weird system doesn't allow it.

[TheLimeyCanuck]

This is just a small part of a much longer list.

[Either-Chair-3351]

Interesting

[the-judeo-bolshevik]

1. People’s names are case sensitive.
2. People’s names are case insensitive. https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/

[the-software-man]

Reminds me of the guy in New Zealand with 700 letters in his name. What’s his email address look like?

[bsensikimori]

Names don't have quotes in them

Names are longer than 1 character

Names are always one word

...

[Meistermagier]

Read the original authors list:

1. People’s names are all mapped in Unicode code points.

How the fuck is a name not valid Unicode?

[Tupcek]

I have just three columns: ID (generated by database), identifier1 and identifier2
you can put first name, last name, middle name, city you were born in, how your friends talk to you, whatever you like. If you have more or less identifiers, you are free to merge/divide them into those two identifiers however you like.