[pluies]

Caterina Fake, co-founder of Flickr, famously had issues with IT systems:

  Tim: There’re so many places we could start, but in the process of doing homework for this, I found mentioned, and I wanted to do a fact check on this, of you having plane tickets automatically cancelled, and other issues related to your last name. Is that accurate? Did those things actually happen?

  Caterina Fake: This has happened to me many times, in fact. And I discovered that it was actually the systems at KLM and Northwest that would throw my ticket out, my last name being “Fake.” And I have missed flights and have spent way too many hours with customer service trying to fix this problem. Here’s another thing too, is that I was unable for the first two years of Facebook to make an account there also. And probably  all of my relatives.

https://tim.blog/2019/02/21/the-tim-ferriss-show-transcripts...

[BurningFrog]

People named Null are also having struggles in the modern world:

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20160325-the-names-that-b...

[MiddleEndian]

lol so much data gets converted into strings at some point when passed around. Definitely encountered systems where you have to check for both null and "null"

[adolph]

This seems like a good spot for the link to @patio11's "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names"

  So, as a public service, I’m going to list assumptions your systems probably 
  make about names.  All of these assumptions are wrong.  Try to make less of 
  them next time you write a system which touches names.

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

[msla]

I get what he's doing, but some of these are not actionable:

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

So... what? What do I do with this? My program has to use something to represent text, and since I fail to be a large multinational consortium, I can't invent my own character set and expect it to work.

Also:

> Confound your cultural relativism! People in my society, at least, agree on one commonly accepted standard for names.

This is pretty much true in countries with naming laws, yes.

> People have names.

People in a database will have certain records which will not be NULL. Whether you call one of those records a 'name' outside the context of that database really isn't my concern.

[fuzzer371]

See, the issue is a lot of people have stupid names.