https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/
Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names
read it, it's worth it.
this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2026
420 points (99.5% liked)
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types in "a valid first name"
There's a lot of whitespace before the name. Any chance they hit the space bar before talking the screen shot?
User first name 'Kristen' already taken.
Invalid password. Already in use by Dicska.
I don't know what the problem is for this person, but my name is Christopher. Super white, Christian, and "normal". My bank thinks my name is Christophe because apparently 10 characters is enough for the first name column.
ah yes, the famous 2-syllabe american names. ever been to italy?
Thank Christ the name limit is not 6.
Christ never had a problem with it
(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻
Well done, web form. One less of these damn fakers to wade through. KRISTEN. 👏 ISN'T. 👏 A NAME. 👏
Fck Kristen! lol
Ok "Kristen" if that is even your name 🙄
Welcome to my world, where a first name with two words cannot exist, and every single credit card I own has a different name printed on them.
People’s names do not contain numbers.
There are really names with numbers? (others than Roman numerals)
romanized arabic uses numbers as certain letters iirc
yep, for example ع is transcribed as 3
Nothing on that list would have saved Mr.& Mrs. Null from their constant hassle with systems.
So many systems just cannot comprehend that names change. Or they make name changes weirdly inconvenient (if I can't just email the paperwork it's too inconvenient). It's not that big of a problem but it is a random pain in the ass every once in a while
This is the only reason I didn't change my name when I got married. (I'm a guy, but her last name is much better than mine)
Yeah that's fair. I think they're better about marriage based name changes (social security absolutely is). I'm just glad I didn't try on multiple names before picking one while transitioning.
Ooh, there's dozens of us!
I'm a guy who did change his last name to hers. I regret everything years later still (paperwork wise, marriage and name wise no regrets)
The one thing that I mildly object to on that list is number 11 (Unicode). Since we are taking about software, it's basically equivalent to number 40 (having a name at all).
It's also fun buying tickets from the Belgian airline, when they tell me that my family name contains illegal characters. Really? Tell me they're invalid or better yet unacceptable, but not that.
Programmers making ui/ux decisions haha. You'll pry 'undefined' from my cold, dead hands
Yea, that's not a real name. You need to put in a real name, like Swaglynn.
My mother-in-law worked at a preschool, and there was actually a little girl named Sexianna.
Ok, that's straight up child abuse.
Absolutely. I probably wouldn't believe her, but my wife confirmed it. She used to go in to help out. The little girl also had a brother named Sir King.
Auto fill likes to put a space after the name that often will make these forms freak out.
Not always. My mortgage company uses a software where it treats the password as invalid if it’s autofilled. I have to copy and paste the password into the box to remove the error.
Why people and companies need to make things purposefully difficult is beyond me. This shit is decades old and solved. Yet, they’re still constantly broken.
From my experience, I think this also happens because of badly written code, where it tries to detect user input to do validation, but it handles events incorrectly and sees autofill as invalid.
I found that a lot of banks reject it unless both of the fields have been active inputs.
So do the auto fill, then click each field so it thinks they were both used, then click login.
Dumb, but two of my financial institutions require it.
What usually works is adding a character at the end of the autofilled password and then removing it
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