
Hello, I’m Mr. Null. My Name Makes Me Invisible to Computers - devhxinc
http://www.wired.com/2015/11/null/
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coreyp_1
I was just talking to my students yesterday about making assumptions with user
data, and in this particular instance, assuming that a last name is only one
word.

Years ago, when I first started using Google AdSense on my website, they had
problems with my physical address. Specifically, they did not allow you to use
a PO Box address as your physical address. Makes sense. Well, I lived in a
rural area, so my physical address was "Route 1 Box 246" (back then there was
NO other designation for the house location that I could use, now commonly
known as a "911 address"). The website would not allow me to sign up because
"Box" appeared in the middle of the address line. I sent them an email and
they had it fixed remarkably fast, but I have used it over the years as a good
example of a case for not making assumptions on input.

~~~
cafard
Somebody once set up a report for us using Microsoft controls. When processing
some addresses in I forget what state, it encountered values that looked like
25E155 as scientific notation and blew up on floating point overflow. It was
not hard to tweak the input once we figured out what was going on.

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rossdavidh
I am reminded of those systems which cannot accept that a person (perhaps of
Indonesian origin) has only one name. Or that cannot accept that a last name
has an apostrophe in it. Or that cannot accept a name with a space in it.

Is there a resource of every weird case in people's names, that is publicly
available and of modest size, that could be used for software testing? It
would be nice if people like Mr. Null could add their name to such a list, and
it became generally known among software developers.

~~~
ccvannorman
Naturally, such lists have been compiled over the years--sadly, unexplained
database errors have mysteriously prevented the lists from being propagated
and maintained.

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DrScump
Already posted _five times_ this week... first here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10512811](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10512811)

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joshfraser
The name I use for all my test accounts is Null O'Reilly.

