8 ms·
We have an employee whose last name is Null (2010)
- mseepgood 13y agoold
- gchokov 13y agoOld, but golden.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- jzwinck 13y agoWe had a system to censor users' IMs. Customers could configure a forbidden word list, or use a default one that had some seemingly obvious swear words. That was fine, until you realize that a global customer base has at least one person with almost any imaginable word in their names. The North Koreans even made a phallic missile called No-dong. There is just no way to apply English assumptions about what words are across names. Oh, and the South Koreans have a town called Nodong-dong (http://www.agoda.com/city/nodong-dong-kr.html http://www.agoda.com/city/nodong-dong-kr.html).
- huskyr 13y agoThe dong is also the currency unit of Vietnam, a minority group in China and lots other things: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dong https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dong
- runarb 13y agoInternasional names are hard: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mononymous_person https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mononymous_person In Norway we have a man named "Jo Å" that lives in a city named Å. I often uses that combinations for testing it-systems and gets a lot of odd results.
- Angostura 13y agoKnow as the Scunthorpe problem. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem
- runarb 13y agoCool link. There are some real gems there. Especially translating dirty words to "clean" ones seams especially dangerous. Apparently if the sprinter Tyson Gay had been assassinated in 2008 the American Family Association filtered would have translated it to "Tyson Homosexual has been buttbuttinated" (replacing gay->homosexual and ass->butt).
- kalleboo 13y agoIn Swedish, the word for the number 6 is the same as the word for sex.
- bunderbunder 13y agoThe same is true of a word for the number 6 in English.
- matt__rose 13y agoA friend had a ball cap from pittsburgh university that said "Pitt" This was very funny to my swedish friends
- lignuist 13y agoPorn is a common name in Thailand.
- CurtMonash 13y agoA story from my wife's first marriage, specifically from when she went back with her Harvard PhD husband to his homeland of Turkey: Harvard diplomas are of course signed by the university president, who for many years was Derek Curtis Bok. "Bok", in Turkish, means "shit". Turkish bureaucracy evidently requires (or used to require) showing your diploma more often than one might think. Hilarity ensued.
- andrewaylett 13y agoThe issue is that actual null values are stringified as "Null". It doesn't take much for someone to decide to just convert all string instances of "Null" back to the null value, despite that leading to issues.
- iMark 13y agoIt didn't affect any code, but once I upon a time I worked with a programmer called Rem. On his last day at the company I wore a t-shirt which said "No comment"
- Daviey 13y agoMandatory somewhat related XKCD: http://xkcd.com/327/ http://xkcd.com/327/
- runarb 13y agoOld, but good. Previous HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6140631 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6140631
- ctz 13y agoWe had a similar problem with an old internal IRC bot written in TCL. Someone joined the company with the initials 'nan' (which was never equal to 'nan' because NaN != NaN). The bot never worked for them.
- gnu8 13y agoYou're calling that a company now? Where the fuck are my options?
- baldfat 13y agoI "almost", AKA thought of it but didn't tell my wife, made my son's middle name Null. It even entered my mind when I was handed the Birth Information card. I knew it was funny but not worth the eventual price I would pay when I got caught.
- tempodox 13y agoHar, har, har.
- flexy_man 13y agoI remember this post, with a similar title being posted on HN in the beginning of August and got about 550 points in 20 hours. :)
- fn 13y agoIs he a dev?
- myronbolitar 13y agoI graduated high school with a kid whose last name was Null. It would occasionally cause issues with the school's computers. He learned to use it to his advantage.
- lostlogin 13y agoCould you give an example please? I love this stuff.
- Pxtl 13y agoWe have static typing and dynamic typing and duck typing... is there a name for this crap where stuff gets converted willy-nilly without your say-so? Drunk typing?
- gamegoblin 13y agoIsn't that just the definition of "weak typing"? When you can do stuff like object + string + number and get an answer.
- tel 13y agoPHP typing
- gamegoblin 13y agoJavaScript and Perl, too.
- GhotiFish 13y agoit's likely the manifistation of the anti pattern "stringly typed". http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?StringlyTyped http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?StringlyTyped
- deathanatos 13y agoDoes SOAP (or WSDL?) or whatever he is using not store type information with the value? Take JSON, which has null (the actual value) and "Null" (a string) - it isn't ambiguous which you mean. I feel like if my serialization format couldn't differentiate between those, that'd be a deal-breaker.
- jonny_eh 13y agoSounds about right to me. That's why I use JSON, it's much more sensible than SOAP.
- wpietri 13y agoCaterina Fake, founder of Flickr, tells a story about one particular airline she just can't fly on. The system lets her buy tickets just fine, but when she shows up to fly, they've never heard of her. I guess that's one way to solve the test data vs real data problem.
- antonwinter 13y agowe had a job applicant who's project was called drop table;