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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 f
by pluies 1y ago
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-caterina-fake-360/ https://tim.blog/2019/02/21/the-tim-ferriss-show-transcripts...
- BurningFrog 1y agoPeople named Null are also having struggles in the modern world: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20160325-the-names-that-break-computer-systems https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20160325-the-names-that-b...
- MiddleEndian 1y agolol 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 1y agoThis 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-believe-about-names/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...
- fuzzer371 1y agoSee, the issue is a lot of people have stupid names.
- msla 1y agoI 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.
- varun_ch 1y ago> Try to make less of them
- zzo38computer 1y agoUnicode is not the only character set (or the best one); this is a falsehood programmers believe about character sets (I wrote a list of this too but I do not remember if I had published it). However, that is not the most severe issue, due to the other things mentioned, such as if people do not have names (or if there are multiple ways to enter them, or if people sometimes change their name, or have the same name as other people, etc).
- msla 1y ago> Unicode is not the only character set (or the best one); this is a falsehood programmers believe about character sets Unicode is the best if I want to communicate with other people. I lived through the 1990s; you won't convince me that playing "guess the encoding" with dozens of subtly-incompatible standards (and non-standards, and almost-standards) was a good time, or that having to override a web browser's helpful guess was fun.