We have an employee whose last name is Null (2010)

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4456438/how-can-i-pass-the-string-null-through-wsdl-soap-from-actionscript-3-to-a-co?rq=1

by gojko • 13 years ago

72 35 13 years ago

stackoverflow.com

mseepgood• 13 years ago

old

gchokov• 13 years ago

Old, but golden.

jzwinck• 13 years ago

We 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).

huskyr• 13 years ago

The dong is also the currency unit of Vietnam, a minority group in China and lots other things:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dong

runarb3• 13 years ago

Internasional names are hard: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b...

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• 13 years ago

Know as the Scunthorpe problem. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem

runarb3• 13 years ago

Cool 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• 13 years ago

In Swedish, the word for the number 6 is the same as the word for sex.

bunderbunder• 13 years ago

The same is true of a word for the number 6 in English.

matt__rose• 13 years ago

A friend had a ball cap from pittsburgh university that said "Pitt" This was very funny to my swedish friends

lignuist• 13 years ago

Porn is a common name in Thailand.

CurtMonash• 13 years ago

A 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• 13 years ago

The 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• 13 years ago

It 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• 13 years ago

Mandatory somewhat related XKCD: http://xkcd.com/327/

runarb3• 13 years ago

Old, but good. Previous HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6140631

ctz• 13 years ago

We 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• 13 years ago

You're calling that a company now? Where the fuck are my options?

baldfat• 13 years ago

I "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• 13 years ago

Har, har, har.

fn2• 13 years ago

Is he a dev?

jsoo4• 13 years ago

Dev is a real first name. BRB, changing name to Dev Null.

fn2• 13 years ago

I'm beyond surprised it took this long for someone to get it... ;-)

flexy_man• 13 years ago

I remember this post, with a similar title being posted on HN in the beginning of August and got about 550 points in 20 hours. :)

myronbolitar• 13 years ago

I 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• 13 years ago

Could you give an example please? I love this stuff.

Pxtl• 13 years ago

We 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?

gamegoblin2• 13 years ago

Isn't that just the definition of "weak typing"? When you can do stuff like object + string + number and get an answer.

tel• 13 years ago

PHP typing

GhotiFish• 13 years ago

it's likely the manifistation of the anti pattern "stringly typed".

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?StringlyTyped

deathanatos• 13 years ago

Does 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• 13 years ago

Sounds about right to me. That's why I use JSON, it's much more sensible than SOAP.

wpietri• 13 years ago

Caterina 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• 13 years ago

we had a job applicant who's project was called drop table;

We have an employee whose last name is Null (2010)

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