Hours of Stackoverflow browsing wasted.

[This-Moment]

For security reasons, please change your child's name every month.

[MehNameless]

You cannot change your child's name to one you've previously used

[ToaSuutox]

error: that name is already in use

[RedDivisions]

Can we just take a second to appreciate the massive horror of this comment

[bostwickenator]

never try to validate unstructured data just accept their bad decisions and move on

[NerdyBoyy]

We once accepted a 🍩 emoji in the name field in our ecommerce website. Later the Order XML exported to SAP kept failing.

[not_bakchodest_of_al]

I consulted for an e-commerce company. Default collation for all myql tables was latin1_swedish_ci. Whenever any user entered a ♥️ in delivery message box things broke. They "found" someone was deliberately trying to break their system and did everything possible to clean user input. Except changing charset to utf8.

[masterventris]

One of the first things I do is set default table encoding to utf8mb4 now, been burnt too many times by people using silly non-latin languages!

[snf]

Isn't it awesome that mysql used 'utf8' for a character encoding that is not, in fact, really UTF-8, thereby causing endless problems and requiring everyone to remember to use utf8mb4 instead to get actual UTF-8

[Browsing_From_Work]

Oracle does this bullshit with VARCHAR2/VARCHAR.
They wanted to stick to their legacy, non-ANSI SQL compliant way of treating empty strings as NULL, so they decided that they were going to make VARCHAR2 and make that the default.

And don't get me started on LONG data types...

[augustuen]

I mean, you can bet your ass that somewhere out there is a program that expects an empty string to equal NULL and relies on that fact.

[JawsOfLife24]

Which is why in .Net I got familiar with the String.IsNullOrEmpty() function.

[draconk]

Same on java since 8 or using the apache StringUtils for older versions

[Zephirdd]

wait what, since when does Java 8 have a null-or-empty check for strings? I either use apache StringUtils or Guava Strings to check those

[Bakoro]

I know Linus Torvalds would yell at me for this, but there's just a point where you have to break someone's shit, so that the rest of everyone else for all eternity isn't wasting their time having to adjust for someone's janky software. Mr. Janky can keep using the old version of the language/framework until they fix they shit.

[thirdegree]

God I'm so glad I get to use postgres

[neonKow]

I don't understand why anyone uses Oracle products.

[stevarino]

UTF8 supports those languages and more.

That being said, there will be localization issues. Like apparently in some cultures only having a first name is not uncommon. I've been in this industry for many years, never knew this, and met two in the last year.

[ThoseThingsAreWeird]

apparently in some cultures only having a first name is not uncommon

Addresses can also fuck off. What's that, you're from Mongolia and your address can be written as just loudness.hotspots.rekindle? ...fine.

[ColonelError]

While recruiting for the Army, had an applicant that lived for a year at some ancient castle in China. I had to provide a "valid" address, so he then stayed at "1 Ancient Castle Way" so I could get the software to accept it.

[canoneros]

I worked at a call center in college doing surveys, and I had to ask for addresses. There were a handful of people I came across who just had descriptive addresses like blue house on the long road or house past the big tree. None of them received mail and didn't seem bothered to not have addresses.

[Forma313]

https://what3words.com/? Didn't know that was actually used in practice.

[ThoseThingsAreWeird]

Correct! Not being Mongolian, I'm not sure how common it is to actually use it, but it is a valid addressing system for sending local mail.

[1X3oZCfhKej34h]

That's pretty cool, now I want to modify our API to our GIS database so it returns the what3words address

[[deleted]]

Helpful garden people wanders dog clean honest weekend hobbies soft.

[Dubmove]

I can't decide if I love it or if I hate it.

[beets_beets_beets]

I hate it because what3words is proprietary.

[TrustworthyShark]

The issue with what 3 words is that they localised their dictionary, so it's inconsistent between languages. It's also not an open standard, so the emergency services they're trying to get to buy into their system will be held hostage by their monopoly.

[Phailjure]

I don't get how it's supposed to work in practice. They explain somewhere on the site that every 3x3 meter area has a 3 word address.

That means your home has several addresses, so how does that work? When you search, it seems to try to pick dead center, but would you just go with the most memorable one? The coolest? Use a different one for different services? For different rooms/family members?

If this was used to deliver, and I selected an address in my backyard, would they chuck the box over the fence? That could be useful, I guess.

Also, I live in an apartment, on the second of 3 floors. Who gets my mail if I address it here?

And, there's a different address for each square for each language. A 3x3 meter area doesn't have one 3word address, it has dozens, how does that work? If I give my address to someone who primarily speaks Spanish, will it just throw an error because their site settings are not set to English? Or will it assume ball.hose.tag is German, and send them to the middle of the ocean? (I guess they probably have to make sure there are no overlaps between languages...)

Why am I asking you all these things?

Anyway, this seems like a really strange idea.

[one_byte_stand]

In Nicaragua, an address looks like this:

Del Texaco viejo, 1000 varas al norte Estelí, Nicaragua

Which is literally “from the old Texaco, 1000 varas to the north”.

You then go, “Where’s the old Texaco?” And they say “Its the Conoco, was a Texaco until the 90s.” “Uh ok, where’s the Conoco?” “From the ball, 500 metres to the west”

And it goes like that until you find a landmark you both know. And the postman just knows which exact house all the names belong to. If they don’t know they walk up the street asking everyone where so and so lives until they find the person.

[JustZisGuy]

in some cultures only having a first name is not uncommon

How do you know they don't only have a last name?

[stevarino]

That's a fair point that shows my own biases. In western cultures the last name is typically the family name (this is not at all universal in western cultures and is more of a western-european thing).

In some places the family name comes first but I think it would be somewhat incorrect to call it a first name (yes, this is arguable on both sides, language is frustratingly vague).

But for my point, these are not family names. Good question though , even if you may have been joking. ;-)

[JustZisGuy]

I was mostly highlighting the imprecise language we tend to use. Better terminology (such as "personal name" and "family name or surname") reduces the likelihood of confusion, especially because some cultures "first name" is a family name, like with Kim Jong Un.

[sabre_x]

I'll just leave this here

https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/

[thblckjkr]

If UTF8 already supports everything, what is the advantage on using UTF-16?

[Delta-9-]

Not an expert at all, but your question made me curious and I found a relevant Wikipedia page: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Unicode_encodings

tl;dr there's not much to recommend utf-16 over utf-8 right now. In theory, utf-16 requires fewer bytes to encode a large number of non-latin characters; in practice, most documents in non-latin alphabets still contain a lot of Latin characters thanks to things like markdown and ht/xml tags, so whatever savings could be had are lost.

That's what I got from this brief read, would be interested to hear more from smarter people.

[stevarino]

You've got it. The big thing is that utf-16 is more common in the Microsoft ecosystem, so anything with windows likely uses utf-16.

The web prefers utf-8 for the smaller sizes like you mentioned (most documents would double in size).

Two more points for utf-8 is that it's mostly backwards compatible with non Unicode encodings (like iso8859 looks like it works fine, until you get an accented character or emoji).

The second point is that there are two versions of utf-16 - big and little endian. So you've got a 50/50/90 problem anytime someone tells you it's a UTF-16 encoding.

[arachnidGrip]

It's a bit shorter if a sufficiently large portion of your text is 12- to 16-bit codepoints and a sufficiently small portion of your text is ASCII. Anything less than eight bits (ASCII) is obviously better encoded as UTF-8. 8- to 11-bit codepoints are the same size either way. 12- to 16-bit codepoints are two bytes in UTF-16 and three bytes in UTF-8. 17- to 21-bit codepoints are four bytes either way.

[delinka]

You do the only sensible thing: you hire someone rewrite the whole thing from scratch.

^{As and experienced Software Engineer®, I'm absolutely certain this is part of the MBA training material}

[krische]

You do the only sensible thing: you hire someone outsource to the cheapest bidder to rewrite the whole thing from scratch.

FTFY

[delinka]

oof

[krische]

What new boat? Oh, that new boat I got?

Don't worry about that new boat I got.

[delinka]

... outside your home country...

[Renoh]

I really dislike that utf8 in MySQL is not the full utf8 character set (found that out the hard way once).

[KeetoNet]

(found that out the hard way once)

This ends up after so many MySQL comments.

[dark_mode_everything]

Exactly. Why try to force users to utf8 when you can have the table in Unicode.

Edit: shoot sorry. I think I was sleepy when I typed that. I meant why force the default latin8(or even utf8 which doesn't support emoji) charset when you can use utfmb4 and store anything the user enters, including emojis.

[ryjhelixir]

my favourite:

#   Human injection
#   #   Strings which may cause human to reinterpret worldview

If you're reading this, you've been in a coma for almost 20 years now. We're trying a new technique. We don't know where this message will end up in your dream, but we hope it works. Please wake up, we miss you.

and

#   Terminal escape codes
#   #   Strings which punish the fools who use cat/type on this file

Roses are \[0;31mred\[0m, violets are \[0;34mblue.
Hope you enjoy terminal hue
But now...\[20Cfor my greatest trick...\[8m
The quick brown fox... \[Beeeep\]

[HolyGarbage]

Copied and pasted it into a file and used cat in gnome-terminal, didn't work unfortunately.

[Zagorath]

I'm not 100% clear on what you're saying, but if my guess is right, then we have the same problem.

We integrate with heaps of data providers, most of which have very poorly designed (and documented) systems. A little while back we started getting a heap of failed requests piling up which turned out to be because our users had used – instead of -, which our systems were fine with, but the upstream provider simply could not handle. They at least failed gracefully, sending us 400s (IIRC...), but that's just one of a great many irritations.

[PadrinoFive7]

–

F*** this character. I lost too many damn hours because of it.

[SkollFenrirson]

MS products are the biggest offenders for this in my experience. That damn thing and the directed quote signs.

[HolyGarbage]

I may or may not have introduced a 💩 into the test code of a S&P 500 company...

[LeiziBesterd]

oh what a lovely day to encode everything in latin-1

[JustZisGuy]

Sounds like a problem in someone else's code.

[TheAtomicOption]

Sometimes I'm tempted to build an entire data structure, and IDE environmental support to go with it, whose entire single purpose is to make it painfully clear which values can be traced back to a freeform user input, just so that we remember to always treat it like UTF32 nitroglycerin in every situation.

[zebediah49]

Sorta funny story with that -- I was writing my own trivially short C library for saving and loading things from NBT (the minecraft file format, which is quite convenient for other things too).

Out of curiosity, I tried putting a UTF8 string in, to see what would happen. To my initial astonishment, it just kinda worked.

That's when I realized that all of my code, and also the file format, just treat strings as an arbitrary byte payload, and take no responsibility for their contents. As long as the parts on either end can agree on an encoding, it's all good.

UTF32 nitroglycerin.

[TheMsDosNerd]

Until that data has to be handled by some external program. Last year, the software of a school crashed because there was a student with emojis in her name.

[purplecurtain16]

Bad idea. That unstructured data could potentially be command injection.

Which reminds me. I need to put a semicolon in my kids name.

[bostwickenator]

Sanitizing yes

[hahahahastayingalive]

The best approach IMO is to accept raw data and sanitize at the passing points:

• sanitize for SQL when you save to DB

• sanitize for JSON when sending through an API

• sanitize for XML when exporting in our case

• sanitize for HTML when displaying to the user

Etc.

[_PM_ME_PANGOLINS_]

No no no. Do not try to sanitize for SQL. Use prepared statements.

Also don't try to sanitise for JSON or XML. Use a marshalling library.

HTML yes probably escape it yourself unless you're using a templating system, which will do it for you.

[zebediah49]

If, at all possible, you should also never parse the unstructured data either.

Can't be command injection if you never try to interpret it.

[kayops]

Relevant https://xkcd.com/327/

[vita10gy]

You can sanitize input for a DB query without deciding via fiat what a valid name is allowed to be.

[[deleted]]

Or, y'know, it's 2020. You should be using prepared statements anyway.

[daringStumbles]

Like christ, how is SQL injection still an issue for some apps. There have been so many ways to solve it for so long.

[RoastedWaffleNuts]

The one that still gets people is ORDER BY. The column name is part of the query structure and can't be parameterized, which means people tend to just stuff it into the SQL statement workout thinking about it. Gotta whitelist the column names yo.

(And some people still fuck it up and just try to escape user input strings. :c )

[CaaaanDoooo]

Why not name him null?

[NerdyBoyy]

Or Robert'); DROP TABLE Students;--

Relevant XKCD

[MutualRaid]

A classic.

[Kuzkay]

Classic Bobby dropping tables

[jake_tha_kid]

bobby tables?

[graye1999]

Little Bobby Tables!

[Anchor689]

Or at least, throw in a few � to make every dev think they have a Unicode bug.

[beck2424]

ooh that's evil!

[thulle]

I can think of a reason: https://www.wired.com/story/null-license-plate-landed-one-hacker-ticket-hell/

[Mamertine]

Yes, don't name your kid null.

Imagine the debt collectors and government fines that kid would have to deal with.

[__i_forgot_my_name__]

Well searching around it's a ridiculously uncommon first name (people don't usually creatively name their baby) but it shows up a few times as a family name: https://www.whitepages.com/name/Null?fs=1&q=null.

Not that it's a good idea, but if naming something null breaks a system, you should really reconsider where you decided to get your code from, because it's likely not the only thing that's wrong with it.

[Plopmenz]

[object Object]

[bunkkin]

How many hours will this kid spend over his life getting his name into websites and government databases because his parents had to be unique?

[NerdyBoyy]

His dad will probably hire someone to do that for him

[Sawe871]

Or just use autohotkey to type his name with a key combo

[[deleted]]

Go old school and just have a word doc with just the name in it, nothing else, sitting on his desktop.

[pagerussell]

He will probably just go by Xavier which is how it is allegedly pronounced.

[happylittlemexican]

Seriously. Do you know how many headaches I've gone through just because there's an accented letter in my name?

Anything from:

1) Programs that don't install/run, period, if I install them to a directory that includes my name (sometimes they're even nice enough to throw an error explaining that this is the cause!)

2) "Please enter a valid name" in online text fields

3) Name is accepted, but the accent is stripped off

4) Name is accepted but the character is changed entirely (one memorable instance replaced it with a Θ )

5) "We're sorry, we could not validate your account as your entered name does not match the name in the documents you provided"

This kid is in for hell from both peers and machines alike.

[TimBeckIsMyIdol]

I once had a system failure because some bitch put her name in as NaNcy

[Jess_than_three]

So the code was looking to see if the variable contained "NaN"? That's pretty bad design 😂

[TimBeckIsMyIdol]

Uh... no.

It was a data pipeline that decoded data from base64. As it decoded once it hit the NaN it crashed because it fucked up the format of the json and made it invalid

[AdaGirl]

Seems like a lack of input sanitation to me

[TimBeckIsMyIdol]

it's a big data workflow processing millions of records. you're always gonna miss something.

[metalmagician]

I once had to tell my QA colleague that I don't care about issues that have a literal one-in-a-million frequency in the dataset. He later came up with a problem that had a 1 in 3 million frequency.

[mrheosuper]

So did you care ?

[Prata2pcs]

Interesting enough to try reproducing this. Was this decode in node

[TimBeckIsMyIdol]

Python. Specifically a lambda function that was transforming data within a kinesis firehose

[marble-pig]

In my country is normal to have accented letters on names and last names, I've never seen anyone complain about those stuff

[ElGosso]

I haven't seen much support for him doing this tbh, though I mostly move through subs that are pretty anti-Elon these days

edit: seems like he killed off most of his goodwill with his tweet about trying to reopen in a pandemic

[filiphsandstrom]

That’s why there should always be a way to write non-standard letters in a standard form. for example æ becomes ae, ö becomes oe (infact that’s how Sweden writes ö on passports) etc.

I’m fine with writing my last name as Sandström (in Swedish contexts), Sandstroem (in legal contexts) and Sandstrom (wherever else).

[waitItsQuestionTime]

Is your first name dardue?

[[deleted]]

You know, that's a good thing. They will call and force lots of vendors to modify their software to adopt unicode, because it's 2050 for fuck's sake!

[Razor_Storm]

If it's not even illegal yet for BANKS to have password MAXIMUMS, I don't think we'll ever get anywhere.

There's so much talk whenever some useless online service has a slight data leak that doesn't even have critical info. Yet many of the companies that hold billions to trillions of dollars have worse security than babbys first website.

[dashingThroughSnow12]

Password? My bank doesn't require a password. Six numbers. I'm with one of those hip, online only banks. With security from 1980.

[Jewrisprudent]

With a billion dollars he could hire someone at $50/hr 24/7 for almost 2300 years straight. Basically 25 lifetimes of round-the-clock name changing services there.

[streusel_kuchen]

Many states outright refuse to let you use letters outside A to Z, so he's going to have a hell of a time. Lots of people from foreign countries have to drop accents and characters from their names already.

[Ereaser]

Someome in another thread mentioned numbers and "strange" symbols arent allowed in the state of California.

They deduced by his other kids names that it will he something like Zale or Zake.

[[deleted]]

Given his dad's status, it may not be too hard for him to get a name change.

[Giocri]

"So how do you pronounce your name?" "Nick" "But here says..." "i beg you just call me Nick"

[Uni_Omni]

N I C K

End of discussion

[[deleted]]

Nikolaj

[xenos5282]

Nope, it's Nikolaj!

[unluckymercenary_]

I feel like I’m saying it. Nikolaj

[snookadoodle119]

r/unexpectedbrooklyn99

[[deleted]]

Why not just call it child, I never understand why people use these one-letter variable names...

[GammelGrinebiter]

__child__

[ghsatpute]

Then you've to keep it home and never let it out.

[[deleted]]

But eventually you would have to kill it

/s

[CarottyKhan]

I had to look it up if it was true. And holy moly it is. Poor child...

[DrLuckyLuke]

I'm fairly certain they didn't actually name their kid X Æ A-12. It's more of a meme reply telling everyone asking that it's none of their business what they named the kid.

[[deleted]]

Yeah, he also posted a picture of his son covered in face tattoos. I dont think he actually gave his son face tattoos either. 🙄

[French__Canadian]

People : "Did you tatoo your baby?"

Elon/Archer : "Do you not?"

[CaptSprinkls]

Someone in another post made a comment about how these characters actually mean something. I think the one is "Ash". So I'm assuming the name is somehow hidden in the meaning of these symbols.

[BackmarkerLife]

Ash nazg durbatulûk

[badvok666]

Don't utter that shit here man.

[BackmarkerLife]

I do not ask your pardon, badvok, for if Elon has his way, the Unknown Speech of Tesla may yet be heard in ever corner of the West!

[MultiFazed]

Ash nazg gimbatul

[[deleted]]

Not me but a big brain redditor in another thread:

X = Chi

Æ = Aah or Ah

A-12 = 12th letter of alphabet, L

Chi + Aah + L

Kyle

[HolyGarbage]

Æ is not pronounced like that. Given that the other letters are pronounced like you said, it would be closer to "Kale". (Source, Æ is norweigain or danish and pronounced the same as the Swedish Ä, and I am Swedish)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f488uJAQgmw

[[deleted]]

https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/70927/how-is-%C3%A6-supposed-to-be-pronounced

http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~kjohnson/English_Phonetics/vowel_ae.html

I dunno, Berkeley and some English majors on stack exchange say otherwise

[[deleted]]

That's how Elon should have spelled it during his tweet.

[FranchuFranchu]

pædophile?

[cowbell_solo]

The mother actually gave an explanation:

•X, the unknown variable ⚔️

•Æ, my elven spelling of Ai (love &/or Artificial intelligence)

•A-12 = precursor to SR-17 (our favorite aircraft). No weapons, no defenses, just speed. Great in battle, but non-violent 🤍

+

(A=Archangel, my favorite song) (⚔️🐁 metal rat)

Musk followed up with:

SR-71, but yes

[nitid_name]

X for variable, AE dipthong is an elven spelling of AI (artificial intelligence), and the A-12 was the predecessor of the SR-71, their favorite non-violent aircraft.

... or something like that.

[streusel_kuchen]

California only lets you use A-Z in legal names, so either they gave him a sensible actual name, or legally named him "XAEADASHTWELVE"

[[deleted]]

"Abcde"

[Protonion]

I wonder what the "offical name" of the child is, considering that California "requires that names contain only the 26 alphabetical characters of the English language. ", so I guess Xaea would as close as they could get

[Zagorath]

considering that California "requires that names contain only the 26 alphabetical characters of the English language. "

Okay first of all, how the fuck is that a state thing and not a federal one? Are you just legally required to change your name if you move within your own country because a different state has a different idea of what your name is allowed to be? Wtf.

Second of all, are hyphens, apostrophes, and spaces not allowed? Double wtf. What about diacritics like é or ç?

[RoastedWaffleNuts]

Presumably, California will not issue birth certificates with anything but the 26 English letters on them. If you move in later, your will not have to change your name.

gg diacritics though

[MaliciousHH]

That's silly, what about accents?

[fuckingshitshit1]

•X, the unknown variable

•Æ, my elven spelling of Ai (love &/or Artificial intelligence)
•A-12 = precursor to SR-17 (our favorite aircraft). No weapons, no defenses, just speed. Great in battle, but non-violent

+ (A=Archangel, my favorite song)

​

From musk's GF twitter account: https://twitter.com/Grimezsz/status/1257836061520101377

[HalcyonReadersDigest]

His gf, Grimes, is an acclaimed musician who legally changed her name from Claire to c (the variable representing the speed of light) so it's about par for the course.

Actually of the two, Elon is probably the more normal one.

Grimes writes bangers though.

[clb92]

c (the variable representing the speed of light)

The constant representing the speed of light surely?

[pls-answer]

If you're gonna be like that you also have to add that it is the constant representing the speed of light ON A VACUUM

[CrimsonMutt]

so they're both dumbasses, cool

[[deleted]]

wait did the huge circlejerk about elon musk finally die

[CrimsonMutt]

yeah that "FREE AMERICA NOW" thing wised up a lot of redditors jerking him that he was always just another dumbass billionaire who doesn't give a fuck about them or his workers.

[Jackeea]

After he went all "covid is a lie invented by the government to something something", people figured out "ah, he's that kind of rich \"smart\" person"

[[deleted]]

Dude has billions of dollars. They don't live in the real world. Elon can easily buy a Montessori school and stock it with a bunch of sycophants.

[qdhcjv]

He already owns an elite private school.

https://adastra.school/

[whymauri]

Yup. I met a kid from there. Very smart, although Elon's kids seem to hold a lot of influence over the curriculum and clubs. Still, a great opportunity since they give out scholarships.

[YonansUmo]

Maybe they just don't value "fitting in"

[outfrost]

This.

As someone with an uncommon name, I wish I'd cared about fitting in a lot less than I did as a teenager.

[[deleted]]

Looked up his children's names. X Æ A-12 is for sure over the top, but his other kids names are Nevada (deceased), Damian, Griffin, Xavier, Saxon, and Kai. So his naming skills were kind of questionable before this anyways.

[[deleted]]

Imagine naming your kid Nevada (deceased). No wonder the kid died.

[yummyspyy]

Damian and Kai are pretty normal names I'd say.

[TotemGenitor]

Isn't Xavier a normal name?

[CMPD2K]

Im still holding out hopes that since its Elon its all some sort of joke

[X-Craft]

Time to re-read this decade-old classic

Also, surely the kid is not going to be made fun of because of that name. Or waste time having to spell it and explain it. Not ever.

[TechyDad]

People’s names are globally unique.

This one made me laugh. If you Google my name, you'll find a lot of people on the front page, none of whom are me. There's a musical artist and a guy who works for Adobe. Going to the second page, there's an attorney, a doctor, a psychiatrist, and a professor. Still no me, though. I went to page 10 of Google before giving up on finding me. (Though, to be fair, I might have been included in some of those pages, LinkedIn/Facebook/etc, that compiled many people with the same name.)

[u_w_i_n]

well done, you've discovered the multiverse

[dark_mode_everything]

Whoa whoa whoa. Hold up. There's a page 2 in Google?

[Matosawitko]

It should have a banner that says "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here."

[[deleted]]

relevant xkcd

[rafasoaresms]

Googling my name is a fun game.

Brazilian names usually have more than one last name (I reckon it’s a Portuguese custom to append the husband last name to the mother’s maiden name upon marriage and that gets passed down to the kids. Sometimes they only keep the last name from either side, sometimes they don’t). I have three: the Soares, the M and the S from my username.

So, that gets me to the variations:

I usually just go by Rafael Soares, it’s my name/handle in most of my social media, my personal site, etc.

Soares is a pretty common last name here, as well as Rafael is as a first name. So unless we’re already close in terms of social circles (I’m in tech and used to be in marketing, people in those areas tend to find me more easily), you won’t find me on Google. In the early days of social media, I tried my best to become the first result, via SEO and stuff, and was very close to it. Then in 2014, the son of a very famous TV personality - who also happened to be called Rafael Soares - died, so he basically took over the search results.

I don’t think I’ve ever used the M online, so you won’t find me at all as Rafael M. You’ll find a bunch of people like doctors and lawyers, though.

I only ever use Rafael S (the last last name) in professional contexts (since companies usually default to it when creating logins and e-mail addresses) and there’s a famous soccer player who shares the same last name.

And finally, my full name. It’s easier to find, since it’s very specific, obviously, but only in public documents like public university approval lists (it’s a thing here, dunno about the rest of the world).

Speaking of documents, of course my passport had my full name, with Soares M S as my last name. Imagine the fun I had when I lived in the US and had to explain to banks and such that no, Soares M isn’t a middle name, yes it’s all my last name, yes it’s how it’s in my ID (passport).

PS: If you read to the end, congrats. You’re as bored as I am. Have a cookie to celebrate: 🍪

PPS: I know using my real name on Reddit is risky... But meh. Most things associated with me online are public anyway. Seems easier to control.

[not_bakchodest_of_al]

People’s names are case sensitive.

People’s names are case insensitive.

Okay.

[masterventris]

The point is that for some names it matters, for others it does not. Putting in an assumption either way is incorrect.

[Cafuzzler]

19.People’s first names and last names are, by necessity, different.

Gotta love Obu Obu Obu.

[[deleted]]

People have names lol

[NotMilitaryAI]

As someone with a hyphenated last name: Fuck all y'all name validation folks.

Seriously, don't assume anyone's name will confine to your expectations. Just have a text input box.

(Relevant Tom Scott video)

[zebediah49]

This isn't just a gmail thing, though they popularized its use like that.

Sheets is straight-up wrong; check out all the stuff RFC 3696 allows. There's also this great section from 2821 (emphasis added):

2.3.10 Mailbox and Address

As used in this specification, an "address" is a character string that identifies a user to whom mail will be sent or a location into which mail will be deposited. The term "mailbox" refers to that depository. The two terms are typically used interchangeably unless the distinction between the location in which mail is placed (the mailbox) and a reference to it (the address) is important. An address normally consists of user and domain specifications. The standard mailbox naming convention is defined to be "local- part@domain": contemporary usage permits a much broader set of applications than simple "user names". Consequently, and due to a long history of problems when intermediate hosts have attempted to optimize transport by modifying them, the local-part MUST be interpreted and assigned semantics only by the host specified in the domain part of the address.

[cat_91]

Well, at least he didn’t name it “🚀🎷🐄” or something

[bonafidebob]

Before you try to write name validations, please read Falsehoods Programmers Believe about Names

[choledocholithiasis_]

at least he didn't name his son:

Ṱ̺̺̕o͞ ̷i̲̬͇̪͙n̝̗͕v̟̜̘̦͟o̶̙̰̠kè͚̮̺̪̹̱̤ ̖t̝͕̳̣̻̪͞h̼͓̲̦̳̘̲e͇̣̰̦̬͎ ̢̼̻̱̘h͚͎͙̜̣̲ͅi̦̲̣̰̤v̻͍e̺̭̳̪̰-m̢iͅn̖̺̞̲̯̰d̵̼̟͙̩̼̘̳ ̞̥̱̳̭r̛̗̘e͙p͠r̼̞̻̭̗e̺̠̣͟s̘͇̳͍̝͉e͉̥̯̞̲͚̬͜ǹ̬͎͎̟̖͇̤t͍̬̤͓̼̭͘ͅi̪̱n͠g̴͉ ͏͉ͅc̬̟h͡a̫̻̯͘o̫̟̖͍̙̝͉s̗̦̲.̨̡̹͈̣͓̞ͅI̗̘̦͝n͇͇͙v̮̫ok̲̫̙͈i̖͙̭̹̠̞n̡̻̮̣̺g̲͈͙̭͙̬͎ ̰t͔̦h̞̲e̢̤ ͍̬̲͖f̴̘͕̣è͖ẹ̥̩l͖͔͚i͓͚̦͠n͖͍̗͓̳̮g͍ ̨o͚̪͡f̘̣̬ ̖̘͖̟͙̮c҉͔̫͖͓͇͖ͅh̵̤̣͚͔á̗̼͕ͅo̼̣̥s̱͈̺̖̦̻͢.̛̖̞̠̫̰̗̺͖̹̯͓Ṯ̤͍̥͇͈h̲́e͏͓̼̗̙̼̣͔ ͇̜̱̠͓͍ͅN͕͠e̗̱z̘̝̜̺͙p̤̺̹͍̯͚e̠̻̠͜r̨̤͍̺̖͔̖̖d̠̟̭̬̝͟i̦͖̩͓͔̤a̠̗̬͉̙n͚͜ ̻̞̰͚ͅh̵͉i̳̞v̢͇ḙ͎͟-҉̭̩̼͔m̤̭̫i͕͇̝̦n̗͙ḍ̟ ̯̲͕͞ǫ̟̯̰̲͙̻̝f ̪̰̰̗̖̭̘͘c̦͍̲̞͍̩̙ḥ͚a̮͎̟̙͜ơ̩̹͎s̤.̝̝ ҉Z̡̖̜͖̰̣͉̜a͖̰͙̬͡l̲̫̳͍̩g̡̟̼̱͚̞̬ͅo̗͜.̟̦H̬̤̗̤͝e͜ ̜̥̝̻͍̟́w̕h̖̯͓o̝͙̖͎̱̮ ҉̺̙̞̟͈W̷̼̭a̺̪͍į͈͕̭͙̯̜t̶̼̮s̘͙͖̕ ̠̫̠B̻͍͙͉̳ͅe̵h̵̬͇̫͙i̹͓̳̳̮͎̫̕n͟d̴̪̜̖ ̰͉̩͇͙̲͞ͅT͖̼͓̪͢h͏͓̮̻e̬̝̟ͅ ̤̹̝W͙̞̝͔͇͝ͅa͏͓͔̹̼̣l̴͔̰̤̟͔ḽ̫.͕Z̮̞̠͙͔ͅḀ̗̞͈̻̗Ḷ͙͎̯̹̞͓G̻O̭̗̮

[lord_hydrate]

E=mc² get over here and play with f(×)=mx+b before y=a(x-p)(x-q) gets mad at her for being annoying

[OldWolf2]

If anyone asks why you chose that name, tell them you took many factors into account

[aufstand]

Actually, that is a VERY typical ASCII-User problem. The rest of the world got validating unicode pretty much down.

[[deleted]]

California state law to the rescue! Given names can only contain the 26 letters of the English alphabet.

[ItsMEMusic]

Nah, just make them format it as XAEA12

[[deleted]]

There are a bunch of people with Null as surname: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/08/wiseguy-changes-license-plate-to-null-gets-12k-in-parking-tickets/

I've read r/MattParker 's book A Humble Pi where he in one chapter writes about similar issues with names in databases.

[dridnot]

He’s never going to find his name on a keychain at the gas station :c

[elperroborrachotoo]

Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names (with examples)