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I have my own mildly amusing story of breaking systems with my name. I have a twin with the same first initial. Any time we had to use a system at school which constructed usernames from some combination of first initial, surname, and date of birth, only one account would be provisioned between the two of us.

It became almost a ritual in the first term of the school year for us to make a visit to IT Support and request a second account... there was always a bit of contention between us about who got the 'proper' username and who got the disambiguated one!

My name, Ĝonatano, contains a ĝ, which is an uncommon letter outside of my language, Esperanto. But when I go to set my username to "ĝonatano," I'm often told that usernames "may only contain letters or underscores," as if ĝ weren't a letter. (You can see that I've approximated it in my HN username, but I don't need to do that on web services that correctly understand that letters exist outside of ASCII and Latin-1.)

For many years, my mother's proper legal name on her birth certificate was the empty string. This wasn't usually a problem before computers as she'd go by a given name instead, even on government paperwork. She started having issues with systems being unable to process her information in the late 90s and early 2000s. Background checks would fail, passports couldn't be issued, and so on. She eventually had it changed, but I imagine it'd be even worse now.

I knew a person who's full name was `Mai Null`.

It always made me laugh because "Mai Null" means "never null" in Italian and because he's had plenty of issues due to his family name.

Gift link: https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/null-last-name-computer-scient...

Related: Null Island [1]

> Null Island is the location at zero degrees latitude and zero degrees longitude (0°N 0°E), i.e., where the prime meridian and the equator intersect. Since there is no landmass located at these coordinates, it is not an actual island. The name is often used in mapping software as a placeholder to help find and correct database entries that have erroneously been assigned the coordinates 0,0.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_Island

The number of times that a website rejects my first name because it has a hyphen in it, even in 2025, is astounding. I get told all manner of things by support staff, like "just leave it out" as if it's just not an important part of my name or anything.

This happened to a kid in my high school. Last name null, broke the system they used to print report cards.

my have a ç and during first 10-15 years all system broken and my "vat" first letter is 0 same problem, if the dba genius use integer random bugs happen :(

Who's checking if a string matches "null" rather than is null!?

I have 4 names (two first names and two surnames), pretty common thing in my country. But I've had issues several times when flying because they assume it's two different people? How stupid is that?

That should be part of every test suite

I think we should all embrace a future where legal names are just straight up binary streams.

I can finally realize my true potential and be recognized as Mr. “:100 emoji:(Unicode zero-width joiner):fire emoji:(null character)(base64 encoding of a QR code that links to a website with a photo of my face),(vcard data, recursively referencing this last name somehow)”

E. Musk son’s name will be fun. Hyphen, number and uncommon unicode character.