Now that we have the standard "Haha, you don't know shit about names, and your program sucks!" pitch, where's the library/framework that developers can use that will take care of ALL these name issues? As a developer, I just want to record a person in my system, I don't want to learn about all the different cultures, character sets, name orderings, etc. that exist in this world. So, Patrick of Kalzumeus Software and other HN commenters who are disgusted that names can be truncated and whatnot, show us your respect for the culture of all Earth people and release a project that will accept any name (or no name, #40) for anyone ever without a single fault.
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?
But should we really worry about the 0.01% outlier who has seven different names, each consisting of some kind of personal scribble that changes depending on the phase of the moon?
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.
To be fair, these often are coming from business requirements.
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?
Yes. My preferred name for example, is over a million million characters. You have to accomodate me. How is it my fault that you don't have O(ln) complexity on your string comparisons, or have trouble swapping out a gigabyte or two and are trying to keep it on the stack.
I am a U.S. citizen who recently moved to Japan. When I entered the country, my first and middle names were combined to create a 20 character given name that appears on my Japan-issued ID.
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.
I had a similar problem. I have a Brazilian name which means I have multiple middle names which normally means it can't fit in the required space.
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.
Is what your sister claimed sort-of correct anyway? An English middle name is generally a given name that can perfectly well be totally unrelated to family history.
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.
I have a similar but different problem--I have 3 names, but I go by my middle name. Every form that I have to fill out has a "First Name", "Middle Initial", and "Last name" section and I cringe. I eventually just dropped my first name completely and now fill things out with my middle name in the "first name" section and skip the initial as if I don't have a middle name.
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.
Brazilian here, and I repeatedly have the same problem. To complicate matters, my documents have my middle name as a first name, which means officially I have two first names. When I went to get a driver's license in WA, the system would generate a bad license ID because of that, and they had to do some manual patching or something to make it work.
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
Indeed. Brazilian names can be huuuge, with lots of parts. It's really rather amusing, when someone applies for a credit card or whatnot, to see what parts the credit-card company decides to include/initialize/exclude to fit. It's pretty much up to their bank's whim.
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.
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.
Sounds like something just got messed up when they renewed it. I'm from the UK, and have two middle names, both of which are on my passport and drivers license.
Let's for a minute assume that we as developers will be able to agree on some sort of best practice. The "Falsehoods" article and the W3C page mentioned in the comments are good, valuable resources and I really hope developers across the world will take them into consideration.
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.
I love the level of ignorance in the comments on that article. e.g.:
> 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.
I've tried to promote one of their suggestions -- having just one big name field, plus another for "How do acquaintances address you?" to let the user enter what they want to be called in an email greeting. So far, not one employer has gone for it. Just too radical an idea -- to let the user self-identify.
I've work with names and other demographic data darn near my entire career. I've also had name issues due to the length of one of my names.
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.)
As much as I want to agree, there needs to be some standardization. Whether its the supported character set or the name lengths, it's literally impossible to support everything. Personally I think every state should have a list of legal constraints for a name - maybe they already do.
For god's sake. It's just a piece of paper. If a name is too long for it, well, damn, spend some additional time and customize it and print this one special id.
It's the implementation of this that's the difficult part.
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
Hawaiian is one of Hawaii's official languages (the other being English). Drivers licences in Hawaii are issued by the state, so they should have to support the Hawaiian language. In effect, the state of Hawaii has already come up with standardization: English or Hawaiian.
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."
> 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.
My full name is "Fırat Batuhan İçöz", it is 17 characters (including the space between my first and middle name). And Twitter didn't have a problem with it, when I used my full name in the past.
And just tried adding my first name again, it works.
On most days start-up programmers think about carving out a solution for a large enough serviceable, available, market. Time to market matters. Mark it as an open issue and move on. Etc. On other days, programmers are advised that it is culturally insensitive to leave anyone behind. People are mock-scolded that if they don't allocate their efforts to the 0.01% subset of their name system, they are bad people, whatever start-up dream they had.
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."
She should live in India, all her identification cards will have shortened names automatically because the data entry operator names the citizen here and not parents. I have so much trouble with Isaac and Issac :(
That reminds me that SAP has yet to respond to my question "Is SAP Business One not sold in Sweden". For some reason it has been decided that 50 characters are enough for a field that contains first middle- and last- name. Normally you can just deal with the extremely long name when and if they occur, but 50 characters is pushing it a bit.
I've had arguments with people in the past about this sort of thing: names are overrated and not a unique identifier. If the UID on the identification card matches the info in the system, the card ID is valid and up-to-date, the face matches, and the name is close, it's a match.
[+] [-] cstross|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gnuvince|12 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] grannyg00se|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Pxtl|12 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] logicallee|12 years ago|reply
You should have paid more attention in CS school!
[+] [-] ohwp|12 years ago|reply
You can alway store name-elements as meta-fields as long as the original name is untouched.
[+] [-] pixelcort|12 years ago|reply
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".
[+] [-] Pxtl|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] polymatter|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] vidarh|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] __david__|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] cesarbs|12 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] crazygringo|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] pjmlp|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] lucaspiller|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lucian1900|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tilsammans|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] matthuggins|12 years ago|reply
> 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.
[+] [-] bpierre|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chiph|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xradionut|12 years ago|reply
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.)
[+] [-] randyrand|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] snitko|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] daxelrod|12 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] tsm|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CanSpice|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DanBC|12 years ago|reply
(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.
[+] [-] kbart|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mavhc|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] michalu|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] btilly|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Smirnoff|12 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] batuhanicoz|12 years ago|reply
And just tried adding my first name again, it works.
[+] [-] ck2|12 years ago|reply
I'm with her on this one but I am curious how a government would handle an ancestral name that has glyphs.
[+] [-] joshz|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wcfields|12 years ago|reply
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Aboriginal_syllabics
[+] [-] baddox|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cocoflunchy|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jjindev|12 years ago|reply
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."
[+] [-] isaacjohnwesley|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrweasel|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rocky1138|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notallama|12 years ago|reply
solution 2: hash function