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

Ironically, this article is full of the sort of semantic confusions that cause the problem in the first place. The reporter clearly hasn't run the article past an actual programmer as she seems to think this outcome is a deliberate design choice rather than a bug:

> Null was first programmed 60 years ago by a British computer scientist named Tony Hoare ... Hoare probably wasn’t thinking about people with the 4,910th most common surname. He later called it his billion-dollar mistake, given the amount of programmer time it has used up and the damage it has inflicted on the user experience.

Obviously Hoare's statement wasn't about this problem at all. She's also giving readers the impression Microsoft has some sort of policy against using null values:

> “It’s a difficult problem to solve because it’s so widespread,” said Daan Leijen, a researcher at Microsoft, who says the company avoids use of null values in its software.

Whatever Leijen said, I'm pretty sure it wasn't that.

I really don't get why journalists so rarely do basic fact checking of their own articles by asking an independent source for a final read-through. Many of them actually have policies against doing this, which leads to an endless stream of garbled articles that undermines their credibility without them even noticing.

Back at Caltech in the 1970s, every student got a free account on the PDP10. The account username consisted of 3 letters, and Caltech would assign them by the first letter of their first name, middle name, and last name.

Enter Tim Rentsh. He didn't have a middle name, so Caltech asked what letter would he prefer, so he said X.

TXR

That became his nickname, and stuck so hard he legally changed his name to Tim X Rentsh.

Eat your heart out, Elon! :-)

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

Wowrks where archive.ph is blocked:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/when-your-last-name-is-nul...

Text-only:

https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA1zqzoi

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

In case anyone else was wondering, the name Null seems to come from Ulster; the "ul" in "Null" seems to come from the "Ul" in "Ulster": https://www.houseofnames.com/uk/null-family-crest

(However, online information about the history of names is unreliable: there's a lot of spam and slop in that area.)

There is a great Radiolab podcast episode about the woes of null names: https://radiolab.org/podcast/null

I wonder if the worst possible name would be something like "Null van Hooten-O'Brien" ... there's probably room to make it more painful.

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?

The real mistake is Hoare not also offering a type for "na".

"No value" and "not applicable" are entirely different cases...

An ironic thought: if it became too cumbersome and you decided to change your name but the name change system has the same issue.

Almost 30 years ago, the nutritionist Gary Null published books, had a show on Pacifica and so on. His basic message, I think, was that we should eat a diet that was less heavy on meats and processed foods. This is probably not wrong, but I thought him a bad influence on the household menus. I did object to his Pacifica show--he or somebody he had on mentioned "the Twinkie defense" not as a farce but as a plausible judgment; and he had some AIDS quack on, whose advice could only have been dangerous to the HIV-positive.

Definitely not as bad, but I had problems with my name (Marcello) as well because it contains the name of a musical instrument. So I can only imagine what they are going through.

The latest was Swiss airlines website which was kind of shocking since it is a proper Italian name and one of the official languages of the confederation. Most annoying instance was with the ESTA online application many years ago (fixed last time I tried) that forced me to go to the a US embassy/consulate in person.

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!

Related. Others?

Names:

Hello, I'm Mr. Null. My Name Makes Me Invisible to Computers (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42922038 - Feb 2025 (35 comments)

We have an employee whose surname is Null (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41939162 - Oct 2024 (6 comments)

We have an employee whose surname is Null (2010) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34115623 - Dec 2022 (17 comments)

How to pass “Null” (a real surname) to a SOAP web service? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21492461 - Nov 2019 (10 comments)

My last name makes me invisible to Computers (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15046223 - Aug 2017 (135 comments)

Hello, I’m Mr. Null. My Name Makes Me Invisible to Computers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12426315 - Sept 2016 (208 comments)

If your name is 'Null,' you may have problems doing anything online - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11375282 - March 2016 (1 comment)

Hello, I’m Mr. Null. My Name Makes Me Invisible to Computers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10512811 - Nov 2015 (24 comments)

An actual guy named “Null” messes up people's databases - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9390569 - April 2015 (4 comments)

We have an employee whose last name is Null (2010) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6738743 - Nov 2013 (35 comments)

We have an employee whose last name is Null. He kills our employee lookup (2012) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6140631 - Aug 2013 (236 comments)

An employee, whose last name is Null, kills our employee lookup app - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3900224 - April 2012 (148 comments)

---

License plates:

A 'Null' License Plate Landed One Hacker in Ticket Hell (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31082288 - April 2022 (11 comments)

The 'NULL' License Plate (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29609924 - Dec 2021 (6 comments)

Guy got the license plate “NULL” and it was a total disaster - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23913507 - July 2020 (9 comments)

NULL license plate not such a bright idea - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20676904 - Aug 2019 (467 comments)

---

Islands:

The Many Lives of Null Island - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41073777 - July 2024 (21 comments)

Null Island Tourist Shirt - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38713055 - Dec 2023 (44 comments)

Null Island is one of the most visited places on Earth, and it doesn’t exist - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35651871 - April 2023 (87 comments)

Null Island, the most real of fictional places [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31080519 - April 2022 (37 comments)

Null Island - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21854780 - Dec 2019 (56 comments)

If You Can’t Follow Directions, You’ll End Up on Null Island - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12090980 - July 2016 (54 comments)

The Republic of NULL Island - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11734180 - May 2016 (15 comments)

The Geographical Oddity of Null Island - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11600396 - April 2016 (14 comments)

A Brief History of Null Island - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10949292 - Jan 2016 (7 comments)

Wait until you hear about the struggles my brother [object Object] has to endure.

In most cases name fields in databases need not be divided into separate given and family names. There should instead simply be one field in which one enters one's full name.

Searches for names almost always have to have a fuzzy search fallback anyway because of spelling mistakes and variant spellings.

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 :(

One place I worked, customers (usually merchants) sent product data through an API my team managed. I was working on a data validation project and ran across an item that was getting rejected. One of the fields customers can set is tags. The item was a t-shirt with a joke about null pointer exceptions, so someone set tags to include ["null", "pointer", "exception"]. Our parser coerced it to null, then returned an error because that array can't contain nulls.

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.

Ha I'm surprised no one mentioned one of the most common name maltreatment complaints. The Gaelic patronymic prefix Mc/Mac.

When treating Mc/Mac names, the first letter after the prefix is always capitalised.. e.g McDonald's, McCarthy, McCain, McCoy, McConnell etc but you're more likely to see mcdonalds, mccoy, mcconnell.

Orthographic case preservation reports were like the biggest complaints that no one was interested in fixing during a short stint in the airline industry.

That and hyphenated names.

My last name is a popular Irish name with an apostrophe in it. I have tons of issues with my name in forms. I'm basically a walking SQL injection detector.

But also I've started to drop the apostrophe in most of my online profiles and things. So I think we're starting to see the end of apostrophes in people's names, thanks to some fun oddities of the internet and common database technologies.

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.

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

FWIW, Null is the German word for zero.

This is terrifying, because it implies that so many computer systems interpret user-supplied data as what should be out-of-band values. No computer system should ever interpret what is in the "last name" field, it should be a sequence of characters only. Every attempt at interpretation is an exploit waiting to happen.

humans should come with a big UUID that is generated at a central database to keep out duplicate and then just a name without any last name for social connections. this would also solve discrimination on many levels. would be a nightmare for privacy and tracking but we are all being tracked anyway.

This is a great watermark if the company's backend developers are awful or not. I work with this type of stuff and you have to be pretty awful to screw up a string variable "null" as an actual null value...

Reminds me of the time I figured out how to put an emoji into my name at work

I eventually got an email from an engineer asking if I could remove it. They apparently had been working for a few days to try to add unicode support to their internal database and it wasn't going so well.

TLDR: using typed languages has benefits.

That should be part of every test suite

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 have a space in my last name - no problems so far.

My email is root@... (thank you Neil Stephenson for the idea) that is rejected sometimes.

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)”

I had a relative named Null, who worked in tech in the 80s, 90s, and 00s. Apparently it caused him so many issues that he finally gave up and changed his name to the name of the town where our family came from.

I think he was a Java guy too. I’m sure that just made it worse.

It's amazing to watch systems do things as humans initially have intended, then see those system fail in the most spectacular ways, because the humans didn't think of every possible failure scenario.

I've had great fun with my surname, which contains of two words and just a space in between. Lots of systems thought my "maiden name" was the first word and adressed me as Mrs. My wife has three first names, adopted my surname when we married and her own surname. Nobody gets it right. We don't care and have fun with it.

I've also had great stress with my surname, when some algorithm at the tax authorities decided it sounds a bit like coming from a Slavish country and along with other parameters decided to tag me as a fraud. Still an ongoing problem.

It's rather fun that computers have these magic words in them.

my legal last name has been "Null" for a bit over half a year, and I've had no problems. before changing it, I asked a friend whose legal last name had been "Null" for a couple years. it hadn't had any issues. this article (and the one about the British guy) is overblown.

Us computer scientists (or developers or coders or whatever we are called at the moment) typically think we are really smart. We can be unbearable know-it-alls, really.

And yet we screw up, collectively and individually, over and over again on the fundamentals of making good software that serves people, by making not-very-well-thought-out decisions.

Your surname is a word we decided should mean nothing/empty/unknown? Oh, we didn’t think about that. Um, can you just change it?

This is hilarious:

  Even those without the last name Null are finding themselves caught in the void. Joseph Tartaro got a license plate with the word “NULL” on it nearly 10 years ago. The 36-year-old security auditor thought it would be funny to drive around with the symbol for an empty value. Maybe a police officer who tried to give him a ticket would end up writing null into the system and not be able to process it, he joked to himself.

  In 2018 he paid a $35 parking ticket. Soon afterward, he said, his mailbox was flooded with hundreds of traffic tickets for incidents he hadn’t been involved in. Tickets were from other counties and cities for vehicles of different colors, makes and models. A database had associated the word “null” with his personal information and citations were sent to Tartaro, who lives in Los Angeles.

I have two middle names, and it amazes me how many digital systems cannot handle this in 2025. I have yet to find a bank that supports spaces in your middle name, and multiple airlines have decided to just concatenate my middle names together.

I knew a girl, her last name was just “E”. Amount of misunderstandings and problems from any type of legal entities was astonishing.

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