12 ms·

I have a hyphen in my last name that caused the California DMV to make one of my last names a middle name, and the Social Security Administration can’t verify m

I have a hyphen in my last name that caused the California DMV to make one of my last names a middle name, and the Social Security Administration can’t verify my name on their website also due to it. I feel like it’s time software needs to level up, ok 30 years ago sure mistakes were made, but now if you live on planet earth you have to know how names work after how many thousands of years our current systems have been in place.

lowercased 7y ago
"how names work" part of the issue is people writing software making decisions about 'how names work', and there being multiple interpretations of it. I've wanted - many times - to build in just 'name' in systems, vs "first name", "last name", "middle name", "suffix", etc. Because... inevitably, clients have to support someone that doesn't fit that mold. The end user probably has dealt with it dozens of times already, but it's still bad for them, and usually unnecessary. MOST of the time, we only ever take "first" and "last" and concat them on the screen anyway, then keep them separated for someone to sort via excel...
- sargram01 7y ago
  We used to have problems with non-ASCII chars in names, we fixed that with UTF, we had problems with currencies and numbers, we made libraries that understand locales and even directions of writing, time zones same thing. So it’s time for us to resolve names now with standard libraries that have been thought through like the above.
  - lowercased 7y ago
    While I'd probably run in to edge cases, it would be nice to actually point to a standard and say "the libraries all support standard XYZ. that's built in - doing it any other way is going to mean problems ABC and cost $$".
- bartread 7y ago
  It's actually interesting that frameworks provided by platforms such as .NET, Java, etc., don't include an abstraction for the representation of names. Such abstractions exist for dates, times, calendars, currencies, calculations with money, and so forth, but not names. On the one hand I can understand it, because names are so complicated, and how would you sit down and come up with something good enough to represent all of them? On the other hand they're prevalent in such a high percentage of line of business and consumer facing apps that it's almost ridiculous that every single developer on the face of the earth at one time or another has to come up with their own half-baked implementation. It's especially ridiculous when you consider that so many of these home-rolled implementations, if not all of them, are rife with terrible flaws that constantly cause frustration and inconvenience to a small but significant number of users.
  - maxander 7y ago
    A dedicated, well-maintained name abstraction is certainly something that needs to happen. More than interesting, it's a bit bizarre that this hasn't been done yet (AFAIK.) In terms of developer-facing complexity, this could be a laughably simple thing to use- just a type that supports equality, perhaps ordering, and conversion to string. Only the constructor would need to be complex. :) I guess the reason this hasn't been done is simply that the implementation would never be "correct"- there is no formal specification of human names out there, and there would always be cases where some poor individual with an unusual name falls afoul of the system. Strictly fewer cases than we have today, where everyone rolls their own name system, but still some; it's not a solvable problem the way timezone conversion is. But, on the other hand, that's the way the world is- messy. Developers are going to have to learn better best practices for communally doing our best in cases where there is no perfect answer, because there's only going to be more of such cases as tech continues to eat the world.
    - sargram01 7y ago
      I’m pretty sure it’s solvable, the main problem is that we break up names into first and last to identify the parts and we do bad data quality checks. Let’s say we did just have one field and a service that was trained on each counties’s variations that could return the parts of the name you wanted. So some database and detection system to understand the pattern. It’s definitely possible since we humans do read and understand names just fine in our own locales.
- munmaek 7y ago
  "First" and "last" is a wrong representation anyway, because it assumes people always write their names in that order. That breaks for chinese, japanese, korean, and probably multiple other types of names. s/first name/given name s/last name/surname But this has it own issues, like assuming people have either a given name or a surname in the first place.
  - packet_nerd 7y ago
    Myanmar is another one, almost everyone has just one given name unless they are specifically following the western or some other style (and that's rare in my experience). The last name field should always be optional at a minimum.
  - pmarreck 7y ago
    I know a Romanian online and his surname comes first... It’s a historic IT clusterfuck to assume all names are firstname, lastname
  - zajio1am 7y ago
    > "First" and "last" is a wrong representation anyway, because it assumes people always write their names in that order. I do not see this as a problem. If i know English so i can fill english-labeled form on english webpage, i would also have a bit of cultural knowledge to translate first name to given name and last name to surname. > But this has it own issues, like assuming people have either a given name or a surname in the first place. This is only a problem if the form validates that both fields must be non-NULL. Problem is not with the split itself but with the validation code.
  - flurdy 7y ago
    Also hard to decide which is the surname to use with some names/cultures. My native country, Norway, went through an assimilation period of standardising surnames a few hundred years ago. Before that your name often was in 3 parts: First names(s) - father's name - farm/manor/village. So names were something like "Ivar Ragnarsson of Torp" or "Sverre Haraldson Bjerkeli". (With the -son bit to say whether a son or daughter). With assimilation into standard more Continental Christian Danish society and most likely standard registration for tax - people dropped either the farm name or the father's name in their names. And froze the father's name in the surname in future generations. And changed the -son to a more Danish -sen for all genders. So, since the 1700s people have just 2 parts to their names. Unlike Iceland which has kept the naming tradition. However,... what is common again today is to have 2 surnames. One from each parent. Unhyphenated. Similar to the Spanish convention (first-name - father's surname - mother's surname) but not as standardised, and mostly opposite order with father's surname at the end being the official family surname. And that makes internationalised computer systems so complicated. My children have both our surnames, both by choice and necessity so either of us can get through passport control with them. (mother's surname - father's surname). But they had to have their surnames hyphenated to be able to register their births and British passports. Which still angers me today as my family convention of the latter surname being the main one is now mostly ignored.
- ljm 7y ago
  It sounds like all you really need to handle names reliably is to ask for the entire name in one field, then have another field for their preferred name (which could be the first name, or the middle name, and a diminutive). And if you need to do something more formal with a title (like Mrs Lastname), potentially have that as a third field. Sometimes the dumb solution is better than trying to be clever, and it saves some trouble with localisation.
  - DCoder 7y ago
    W3C recommends the same pattern: [0]. [0]: https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-personal-names https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-personal-names
  - tomjakubowski 7y ago
    > Sometimes the dumb solution is better than trying to be clever It's astonishing how often this turns out to be true, which has been probably the single most important lesson of my career. I think it's that clever solutions tend to depend on more assumptions, which rarely have P(true) = 1.
- kccqzy 7y ago
  The idea that a person's name should be parsed and managed by software is amusing to me. How about just getting rid of concepts like "last name" and "first name" (which already embed a lot of cultural assumptions), and only ask for a "full name"? In some countries people don't have both first and last names. In some countries the last name customarily comes before the first name. In some countries the structure of names is more complicated and the son's name includes a copy of his father's name. I don't think software will really handle all these oddities correctly, given that just a single parent can undermine all the system's rules by choosing an unconventional name for their children. For what it's worth, in Singapore, where there are significant Indian, Chinese, Malay ethnicities but also highly westernized, the government identity card provides just a single full name. Parents can choose their children's names in accordance with their culture—or not. You can put your first name before your last name, after it, or surrounding it. Or include your father's name if needed.
  - davidw 7y ago
    That's the W3's recommendation: https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-personal-names#singlefield https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-personal-names...
  - zajio1am 7y ago
    By ignoring the structure in data acquisition phase, you just postpone decisions about structure to data processing phase, now without necessary information about the structure (which could be obtained in data acquisition phase). For example, such basic functionality like changing sort order between given name and surname would be much more complicated.
    - zajio1am 7y ago
      Besides, the whole story is about the problem that name including title was in one field and later processing (title removal) misbehaves due to insufficient information.
    - jammygit 7y ago
      Is it important to parse names like that? You can just do a search by substring in most cases
- nitwit005 7y ago
  Worked on some business software previously, and customers insisted on first/last or first/middle/last, despite the fairly obvious issues. They also demanded address fields in a US style despite needing to support international addresses (I still have no idea how their staff handled that). People want to follow the conventions they know, even apparently if they're told it will cause issues.
- AstroJetson 7y ago
  I worked at a place that required a middle name. I don't have one, so at their instance, I picked a name, "Xavier" became my middle name.
- Piskvorrr 7y ago
  Yet in reality, nobody actually needs a name that's sorted by surname: that's a holdover from paper phone books. We have search, and we have stable sorting algos. Every requirement "sort by surname" I've ever seen turned out to mean "sort the names in a predictable way, btw this is the way we always did that, because we always did that." (Yes, familiarity is a part of UX; but do note that this one specifically is a historical, not intrinsic, motivation)
wonderwonder 7y ago
Credit cards forms handle this perfectly. There is just a name field. It seems odd that this is perfectly acceptable for financial companies that in essence loan billions a year but its not ok for anyone else.

lowercased 7y ago

"how names work" part of the issue is people writing software making decisions about 'how names work', and there being multiple interpretations of it. I've wanted - many times - to build in just 'name' in systems, vs "first name", "last name", "middle name", "suffix", etc. Because... inevitably, clients have to support someone that doesn't fit that mold. The end user probably has dealt with it dozens of times already, but it's still bad for them, and usually unnecessary. MOST of the time, we only ever take "first" and "last" and concat them on the screen anyway, then keep them separated for someone to sort via excel...

sargram01 7y ago
We used to have problems with non-ASCII chars in names, we fixed that with UTF, we had problems with currencies and numbers, we made libraries that understand locales and even directions of writing, time zones same thing. So it’s time for us to resolve names now with standard libraries that have been thought through like the above.
- lowercased 7y ago
  While I'd probably run in to edge cases, it would be nice to actually point to a standard and say "the libraries all support standard XYZ. that's built in - doing it any other way is going to mean problems ABC and cost $$".
bartread 7y ago
It's actually interesting that frameworks provided by platforms such as .NET, Java, etc., don't include an abstraction for the representation of names. Such abstractions exist for dates, times, calendars, currencies, calculations with money, and so forth, but not names. On the one hand I can understand it, because names are so complicated, and how would you sit down and come up with something good enough to represent all of them? On the other hand they're prevalent in such a high percentage of line of business and consumer facing apps that it's almost ridiculous that every single developer on the face of the earth at one time or another has to come up with their own half-baked implementation. It's especially ridiculous when you consider that so many of these home-rolled implementations, if not all of them, are rife with terrible flaws that constantly cause frustration and inconvenience to a small but significant number of users.
- maxander 7y ago
  A dedicated, well-maintained name abstraction is certainly something that needs to happen. More than interesting, it's a bit bizarre that this hasn't been done yet (AFAIK.) In terms of developer-facing complexity, this could be a laughably simple thing to use- just a type that supports equality, perhaps ordering, and conversion to string. Only the constructor would need to be complex. :) I guess the reason this hasn't been done is simply that the implementation would never be "correct"- there is no formal specification of human names out there, and there would always be cases where some poor individual with an unusual name falls afoul of the system. Strictly fewer cases than we have today, where everyone rolls their own name system, but still some; it's not a solvable problem the way timezone conversion is. But, on the other hand, that's the way the world is- messy. Developers are going to have to learn better best practices for communally doing our best in cases where there is no perfect answer, because there's only going to be more of such cases as tech continues to eat the world.
  - sargram01 7y ago
    I’m pretty sure it’s solvable, the main problem is that we break up names into first and last to identify the parts and we do bad data quality checks. Let’s say we did just have one field and a service that was trained on each counties’s variations that could return the parts of the name you wanted. So some database and detection system to understand the pattern. It’s definitely possible since we humans do read and understand names just fine in our own locales.
munmaek 7y ago
"First" and "last" is a wrong representation anyway, because it assumes people always write their names in that order. That breaks for chinese, japanese, korean, and probably multiple other types of names. s/first name/given name s/last name/surname But this has it own issues, like assuming people have either a given name or a surname in the first place.
- packet_nerd 7y ago
  Myanmar is another one, almost everyone has just one given name unless they are specifically following the western or some other style (and that's rare in my experience). The last name field should always be optional at a minimum.
- pmarreck 7y ago
  I know a Romanian online and his surname comes first... It’s a historic IT clusterfuck to assume all names are firstname, lastname
- zajio1am 7y ago
  > "First" and "last" is a wrong representation anyway, because it assumes people always write their names in that order. I do not see this as a problem. If i know English so i can fill english-labeled form on english webpage, i would also have a bit of cultural knowledge to translate first name to given name and last name to surname. > But this has it own issues, like assuming people have either a given name or a surname in the first place. This is only a problem if the form validates that both fields must be non-NULL. Problem is not with the split itself but with the validation code.
- flurdy 7y ago
  Also hard to decide which is the surname to use with some names/cultures. My native country, Norway, went through an assimilation period of standardising surnames a few hundred years ago. Before that your name often was in 3 parts: First names(s) - father's name - farm/manor/village. So names were something like "Ivar Ragnarsson of Torp" or "Sverre Haraldson Bjerkeli". (With the -son bit to say whether a son or daughter). With assimilation into standard more Continental Christian Danish society and most likely standard registration for tax - people dropped either the farm name or the father's name in their names. And froze the father's name in the surname in future generations. And changed the -son to a more Danish -sen for all genders. So, since the 1700s people have just 2 parts to their names. Unlike Iceland which has kept the naming tradition. However,... what is common again today is to have 2 surnames. One from each parent. Unhyphenated. Similar to the Spanish convention (first-name - father's surname - mother's surname) but not as standardised, and mostly opposite order with father's surname at the end being the official family surname. And that makes internationalised computer systems so complicated. My children have both our surnames, both by choice and necessity so either of us can get through passport control with them. (mother's surname - father's surname). But they had to have their surnames hyphenated to be able to register their births and British passports. Which still angers me today as my family convention of the latter surname being the main one is now mostly ignored.
ljm 7y ago
It sounds like all you really need to handle names reliably is to ask for the entire name in one field, then have another field for their preferred name (which could be the first name, or the middle name, and a diminutive). And if you need to do something more formal with a title (like Mrs Lastname), potentially have that as a third field. Sometimes the dumb solution is better than trying to be clever, and it saves some trouble with localisation.
- DCoder 7y ago
  W3C recommends the same pattern: [0]. [0]: https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-personal-names https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-personal-names
- tomjakubowski 7y ago
  > Sometimes the dumb solution is better than trying to be clever It's astonishing how often this turns out to be true, which has been probably the single most important lesson of my career. I think it's that clever solutions tend to depend on more assumptions, which rarely have P(true) = 1.
kccqzy 7y ago
The idea that a person's name should be parsed and managed by software is amusing to me. How about just getting rid of concepts like "last name" and "first name" (which already embed a lot of cultural assumptions), and only ask for a "full name"? In some countries people don't have both first and last names. In some countries the last name customarily comes before the first name. In some countries the structure of names is more complicated and the son's name includes a copy of his father's name. I don't think software will really handle all these oddities correctly, given that just a single parent can undermine all the system's rules by choosing an unconventional name for their children. For what it's worth, in Singapore, where there are significant Indian, Chinese, Malay ethnicities but also highly westernized, the government identity card provides just a single full name. Parents can choose their children's names in accordance with their culture—or not. You can put your first name before your last name, after it, or surrounding it. Or include your father's name if needed.
- davidw 7y ago
  That's the W3's recommendation: https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-personal-names#singlefield https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-personal-names...
- zajio1am 7y ago
  By ignoring the structure in data acquisition phase, you just postpone decisions about structure to data processing phase, now without necessary information about the structure (which could be obtained in data acquisition phase). For example, such basic functionality like changing sort order between given name and surname would be much more complicated.
  - zajio1am 7y ago
    Besides, the whole story is about the problem that name including title was in one field and later processing (title removal) misbehaves due to insufficient information.
  - jammygit 7y ago
    Is it important to parse names like that? You can just do a search by substring in most cases
nitwit005 7y ago
Worked on some business software previously, and customers insisted on first/last or first/middle/last, despite the fairly obvious issues. They also demanded address fields in a US style despite needing to support international addresses (I still have no idea how their staff handled that). People want to follow the conventions they know, even apparently if they're told it will cause issues.
AstroJetson 7y ago
I worked at a place that required a middle name. I don't have one, so at their instance, I picked a name, "Xavier" became my middle name.
Piskvorrr 7y ago
Yet in reality, nobody actually needs a name that's sorted by surname: that's a holdover from paper phone books. We have search, and we have stable sorting algos. Every requirement "sort by surname" I've ever seen turned out to mean "sort the names in a predictable way, btw this is the way we always did that, because we always did that." (Yes, familiarity is a part of UX; but do note that this one specifically is a historical, not intrinsic, motivation)

wonderwonder 7y ago

Credit cards forms handle this perfectly. There is just a name field. It seems odd that this is perfectly acceptable for financial companies that in essence loan billions a year but its not ok for anyone else.