Termination of Mozilla CEO Likely Violated California Law - <AUTHOR> http://www.vtzlawblog.com/2014/04/articles/discrimination/termination-of-mozilla-ceo-likely-violated-california-law/ <comment><USER2> He resigned - he was not terminated. He says so right on his personal blog:

[https://brendaneich.com/2014/04/the-next- mission/](https://brendaneich.com/2014/04/the-next-mission/)

More details: [https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/04/05/faq-on-ceo- resignat...](https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/04/05/faq-on-ceo-resignation/)

</comment><comment><USER3> He was involved in Mozilla from the beginning. My gut tells me he did what he thought was right to allow Mozilla to move forward once he realized the bad PR was not going away no matter how hard he tried to fix or assure folks they had nothing to worry about. Obviously this is conjecture on my part.

<comment><USER4> That is in line with what I've read from people closer to the matter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> To the people who say he resigned and was not fired: there is such a thing as "constructive dismissal", which basically means "forced to resign".

<comment><USER6> Wiki says California's definition of that is:

> "In order to establish a constructive discharge, an employee must plead and > prove, by the usual preponderance of the evidence standard, that the > employer either intentionally created or knowingly permitted working > conditions that were so intolerable or aggravated at the time of the > employee's resignation that a reasonable employer would realize that a > reasonable person in the employee's position would be compelled to resign."

I'd imagine that's somewhat hard to argue as the CEO.

<comment><USER7> _Van Vleck Turner & Zaller LLP specializes in all aspects of California labor and employment law._

It would be surpising for a law firm to publish something blatantly obtuse on the subject.

More likely, the departure was negotiated with a non-disparagement clause and a payout.

A legal action by the disgruntled employee would be terminal for mozilla's mission and brand. The could not risk a trial--it would be worse publicity--so they would settle. But this should have been anticipated and already settled, however. This is why HR people are employed and why executive failures are typically quiet.

On the merits, there is public evidence that The Mozilla Foundation chief executive was publicly hostile to the departed executive of MoCo.Due to the corporate structure of mozilla, the Foundation executive can be hostile to MoCo ceo without being in a position of legal unsubordination.[+] Which basically render's your point moot.

_________

[+] The foundation is the 100% owner (and thus in a Parent-child relation) of MoCo.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> He wasn't terminated, he resigned.

Anyway, can you imagine the ruckus that would ensue if Eich took Mozilla to court?!

<comment><USER9> How would that damage him/his reputation any more than it's already damaged?

<comment><USER8> Well, at the moment, Eich is unpopular with some people because he supported a cause they really didn't agree with, and because his failure to deal with the fallout risked causing harm to Mozilla.

If he actively took steps which caused more damage in the respect, I think it's fair to say that he wouldn't come out of it well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Both Mozilla and Eich publicly claim it was a true resignation and not a constructive dismissal: [https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/04/05/faq-on-ceo- resignat...](https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/04/05/faq-on-ceo-resignation/) [https://brendaneich.com/2014/04/the-next- mission/](https://brendaneich.com/2014/04/the-next-mission/)

</comment><comment><USER11> The article assumes he was terminated. Is there good evidence to think this?

<comment><USER12> In such situations, it's impossible to tell whether it's a forced resignation or not, unless the people who really know (the board and CEO) want to talk about it.

Note that labor law sometimes treats even explicit resignations as equivalent to dismissal - "constructive termination" \- when pressured by a intolerable situation:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructive_dismissal#United_S...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructive_dismissal#United_States_law)

However, the relationship between a board and CEO, and the power and discretion of the CEO, is quite different than the situation of most employees, so a lot of the same worker-protection logic would not likely apply.

So I find this an interesting item about how California law is so explicitly protective of political participation by general employees... but not likely a cause for action in the Eich situation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The beginning of this blog post screams that the author doesn't care about facts.

"Mozilla (the maker of the Firefox search engine)"

Really?

</comment><comment><USER14> The article itself says he resigned. Probably with a nice fat golden parachute in return for waiving any rights to litigation.

<comment><USER15> > a nice fat golden parachute

best ROI on a 1K spent 5 years ago :)

In serious, it sounds and looks like a witch hunt, which i happily have added my [anonymous] voice to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Didn't he resign though?

<comment><USER17> It is also possible they told him that if he didn't resign, he would be terminated.

From the article, "No employer shall coerce or influence or attempt to coerce or influence his employees through or by means of threat of discharge or loss of employment to adopt or follow or refrain from adopting or following any particular course or line of political action or political activity."

Unless he wants to make a mess for Mozilla (and I don't think it sounds like he does), we'll probably never know what really happened.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> In that case where are all the successful court cases for the Union members sacked for trying to organize in walmart etc?

</comment><comment><USER19> Personally it would be interesting to sue OKCupid for promting the boycott to compel Mozilla to violate employment laws.</comment>


Arrested Aussie journalist: privacy, news and the long arm of the law - <AUTHOR> http://m.brisbanetimes.com.au/technology/technology-news/grubbs-story-privacy-news-and-the-strong-arm-of-the-law-20110518-1esn9.html

<comment><AUTHOR> If someone can moderate or provide the proper non-mobile link I'll change it.

<comment><USER2> We (aussies) tend to provide the mobile links because the full browser links on that network of sites have auto playing flash videos with sound.

In this case it's the actual recording of the moment after they tell him the interview is over, turn off the police tape and then turn around and tell him they'll be taking his iPad... when he fights it saying he's a reporter and he'll need to contact his paper's lawyers they place him under arrest. Hilarious if it wasn't so sad.

The transcript is available at [http://m.smh.com.au/technology/technology- news/journalists-f...](http://m.smh.com.au/technology/technology- news/journalists-facebook-arrest-transcript-of-police- interview-20110518-1esrr.html?from=smh_sb) or [http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology- news/journalists...](http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology- news/journalists-facebook-arrest-transcript-of-police- interview-20110518-1esrr.html?from=smh_sb) with sound

(The section I refer to begins with "All right, if there's nothing more you wish to say I'll terminate the interview now and the time as per my phone is 4.47pm.")

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Does he have it recorded that they stated they were not going to arrest him?</comment>


Why pessimism on Social Security could come back to bite millennials - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-column-miller-socialsecurity/why-pessimism-on-social-security-could-come-back-to-bite-millennials-idUSKCN1ST12R <comment><USER3> When it comes to funding retirement on a societal level, the only two numbers that matter are dependency ratios (the number of working people per non- working person) and productivity (the amount of useful work able to be done by one laborer). If either of those falls, living standards necessarily have to fall - you have fewer people doing the work of supporting everyone, potentially less efficiently. If you can get productivity to go up faster than the dependency ratio is falling, you have a chance of offsetting the fall.

Every government policy or financial product is just redistributing the pain of falling living standards. You can dictate that retirees receive transfer payments from working people, as per social security - but it means that they have less money to spend on themselves and their kids. You can transfer earnings within a corporation from current workers and shareholders to retirees, as per pensions - but it means the company will be a less attractive place for new hires, and risks the financial solvency of the whole company. 401(k)s have their own problems - the price of stocks, at any given instance, is set by the ratio of dollars entering the market to dollars leaving the market, so if all retirees try to pull their money out to fund retirement at once, they'll find the stock prices they were counting on crash.

<comment><USER4> Well, when the global food chain collapses with the environment, I think 'working people' will be overshadowed by 'starving' people.

<comment><USER3> Depends if political stability can be maintained. The Earth produces enough food _now_ to feed about 10B people, a roughly 50% increase over total world population. We still have famine because of distribution problems: the food doesn't get to people who need it, and instead gets hoarded by those with power.

Global warming isn't likely to cut _total_ arable land or food production (if anything, it'll likely increase it), but it definitely changes the _distribution_ of arable land. Current breadbaskets like Southern Europe, South Asia, and Brazil might see frequent droughts; currently desolate areas like the Sahara or Canadian Shield may become fertile again. If countries can work out trade deals so that food gets to where it needs to, things can work out. If they start closing borders and saying "fuck you I got mine", there will be widespread starvation and war in many regions.

<comment><USER5> Food isn't hoarded, it's wasted, because no one pays for deliver it where it's needed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I like how the author says: >Politicians routinely claim that Social Security is going bankrupt and that its shortfalls drive the national deficit - <USER2> is true.

Followed by: >Yes, there is a funding problem: absent other changes, the combined retirement and disability trust funds will be empty in 2035.

Which,to me, seems pretty contradictory. The author continues to say there is no problem at all, as long as a specific Act passes unmodified. So - everything is okay, but only as long as X Y and Z happen...

Seems like this is just a really roundabout way of being able to cram "millenials" into another story. They're killing the SS industry with their pessimism!

<comment><USER7> The article does continue to say "At that point, current revenue would be sufficient to pay about 80 percent of schedule benefits."

SS isn't going away. At worst the benefits will be slashed to some fraction of what the law requires.

Considering the rising cost of living we should all save for retirement using a pension plan or 401k anyway though. Agreed that the framing of blaming millennials makes no sense here.

<comment><USER8> The author also says that planning to receive 50% of your stated social security benefits is crazy, and then mentions that absent any legal changes there'll be a 20% cut in 15 years. Am I supposed to believe that that cut won't go up with time?

<comment><USER7> The Social Security Trustees report state that they can use revenue under current law to pay for 75% of scheduled benefits through 2093.

Unless there is a dramatic economic collapse due to climate change or global thermonuclear war or whatever, you should be able to plan on receiving more than 50% of your benefits. Of course in case of collapse like that my 401k probably doesn't keep its value either...

[https://www.ssa.gov/oact/TRSUM/](https://www.ssa.gov/oact/TRSUM/)

<comment><USER8> It would be wonderful if that 75% number pans out! But at the same time, I'm still going to do my retirement planning assuming that Social Security dies before I'm able to withdraw a single dollar.

Pessimistic assumptions are a good idea in situations like this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> My opinion is that the baby boomers are going to go down in history as the generation that broke America. They took far more benefits than they paid for and ran up the national debt, bankrupting the country.

<comment><USER10> FWIW, I'm worried that we (millenials) will do the same with Republicans who are only nominally concerned about the budget and Democrats who aren't even _nominally_ concerned (#CancelMyDebt #GreenNewDeal etc).

<comment><USER11> Democrats generally want to raise taxes to match spending. Democrats are "tax and spend," Republicans are just "spend."

<comment><USER12> I've said this a million times. I have no idea how the Republicans have managed to brand themselves as the fiscally-responsible party.

<comment><USER13> If anyone thinks _ANY_ political party can have _all_ the answers, they aren't using their brain. In addition, our structure today is about keeping the fights as an us vs them, while the corporations steal our lunch while we are distracted. It reminds me of a quote from the movie "The Usual Suspects", _' The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist.'_

<comment><USER12> I'm not sure how anything I said can even remotely be construed as implying that any political party can have all the answers, seeing as it was little more than a criticism of one policy area of one political party.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I don't understand why Congress doesn't incrementally, predictably, and slowly raise the retirement age for Social Security. It was never intended as a retirement program - instead it an insurance for those those that lived beyond the average life expectancy.

I don't think it's unreasable to expect people to save enough to cover then between their age of retirement to say 70 or 75. Then let the insurance kick in after that.

<comment><USER15> >I don't understand why Congress doesn't incrementally, predictably, and slowly raise the retirement age for Social Security. It was never intended as a retirement program - instead it an insurance for those those that lived beyond the average life expectancy.

This is absolutely untrue. Here is FDR's address as he signed Social Security into law: [https://www.ssa.gov/history/fdrstmts.html#signing](https://www.ssa.gov/history/fdrstmts.html#signing)

This doesn't sound at all like it's not meant to be a retirement program. He even explicitly uses the word 'pension.'

"Young people have come to wonder what would be their lot when they came to old age. The man with a job has wondered how long the job would last.

This social security measure gives at least some protection to thirty millions of our citizens who will reap direct benefits through unemployment compensation, through old-age pensions and through increased services for the protection of children and the prevention of ill health.

We can never insure one hundred percent of the population against one hundred percent of the hazards and vicissitudes of life, but we have tried to frame a law which will give some measure of protection to the average citizen and to his family against the loss of a job and against poverty-ridden old age."

<comment><USER16> Well, it was always _literally_ an insurance program -- the "I" in OASDI.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The weakest part of social security is that it's thought of as a pension and not as a service that government provides to the elderly and disabled. If government wished, it could be funded fully, regardless of whether it's "solvent."

It's not question of financial viability as much as it is a question of how much value we, or The US, puts on the lives of the elderly. Or otherwise framed as: How little we can spend on the elderly without the reemergence of poorhouses.

There are obvious concerns about having a healthy and productive tax base, but that will always be the case. Implicating the tax base for the existence of a government service is just politics.

</comment><comment><USER18> I am in no way a social security expert, but I'm concerned that this article missed several key points that feed the pessimism. I rarely see them addressed elsewhere, either.

Here are my concerns, and why I don't have faith in Social Security..... 1) Retirement age is going up. I probably won't be eligible until I'm 80. 2) Life expectancy is going up. Grampa will probably exhaust his SS before he passes away. 3) More and more doctors are putting too many underage work-eligible people on disability/SS just because they can't find work/aren't productive employees. This breaks the work/eat feedback loop that everyone else relies on. 4) My current contribution level won't mean shit in 50 years after infaltion.

When older generations complain I usually use the joke "Yeah well at least you're gonna be able to collect social security. I'm never going to retire." It's a lighthearted joke but I am 100% convinced that it's going to become reality.

</comment><comment><USER19> Mainstream financial planner advice has been pessimistic about Social Security for > 10 years. Of course, the incentive is easy, any financial planner benefits more if you invest more.

Major changes that drastically affect Social Security

\- Changing the Retirement Age, even adding a 3rd progression delay (for people who will keep working or have some savings) and pegging this to U.S. life expectancy.

\- Changing the survivors benefits payouts and required minimum distributions (arguably, if the middle and lower class has more 2 family incomes, these make less sense.)

\- (Biggest) Changes to healthcare. A large portion of Social Security right now goes right back into the hands of long term nursing homes. In addition, you have medical expenses related to "retirement living communities"; I'm not very sure that as boomers age even more into nursing homes, that those well prepared will be able to find supply.

I also look forward to the eventual reform of Social Security to allow more diverse investment methods. Whichever President is in office when age based asset diversification is added to SS will see a huge market boom!

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm planning that Social Security will either not exist or be so paltry as to be useless, and doing my retirement planning accordingly. It certainly wouldn't hurt my feelings any to be proved wrong, but I'm not depending on ever seeing a single red cent out of it.

<comment><USER21> That all good and well for you. However, if you extend that attitude to say "and I'm not going to allow congress to properly fund social security as a result", then you are the problem.

<comment><USER22> I vote to not pay into social security, let me manage my own money.

<comment><USER23> You can always vote with your feet if you feel like opportunities in the US don't justify the level of taxation.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


People with names that break computers - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160325-the-names-that-break-computer-systems <comment><USER6> A few years ago I ordered a custom license plate 'NULL'. What should have been a 2-3 week process lasted 8 months, with the order being canceled multiple times, and at one point a blank plate being shipped to the county clerk's office.

More recently I've gotten out of a parking ticket in a certain municipality when a frustrated meter maid told me they saw my plates were valid, but the handheld device used to issue tickets would crash any time they tried to issue the ticket.

<comment><USER7> I've always wanted a license plate I1II0O0O just to mess with the automated license plate scanners and video tolls

<comment><USER8> Many states don't allow both "I" and "1" or "O" and "0" in their character set. NJ is one that doesn't.

However in NYC I saw a limo with the plates "1I11II1"

<comment><USER9> Wouldn't be a problem if they used the FE font. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FE- Schrift](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FE-Schrift)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Breaking computers can be useful.

Isaac Asimov had a series of short stories written in the form of conversations between the writer and a friend named George. George claims to have discovered how to summon a demon, and the conversations are about that demon. The demon is not allowed to directly help George, but he will do favors for George's friends.

These favors invariably do not turn out good for the friend. Each story is basically George telling the author the tale of one of these favors, and the writer trying to make sure George does not ask the demon to do any favors for the writer.

Anyway, in one of the stories George had a friend who wants to be able to do something to have a big positive impact on the world. George told the demon about this, and the demon said he'd help.

The next time George encountered that friend, the friend told George that he had been having all kinds of problems with computers. He'd go into his bank to cash a check, and when he'd get to the teller their computer would stop working. And it wasn't just the bank...anyone he encountered who was using a computer would find that their computer crashed when the friend came near. His mere presence seemed to be enough to crash computers.

This was, of course, making the friend's life miserable, and this was in the 1980s. If it kept happening it would get even worse, as computers were clearly going to become more and more common in everyday life.

George found out from the demon what had happened. The demon had indeed (irreversibly) made it so that computers could not work when the friend was near, in order to grant the wish to make a big positive impact. The demon says that when the friend is an old man humanity will be enslaved by an uprising of intelligent computers, and the friend will be the weapon that humanity will use to defeat the computers and regain freedom.

<comment><USER11> This story is great, I want to checkout the author now! The demon seems less of an actual evil being and more as a person who gets excited about awesome stories, uses ying yang guide the vine of destiny. Maybe half expecting a smile only to see horror. I know this is now the best place for poetry, but this story was very fun to read

<comment><USER12> You want to check out the author? .... _Isaac Asimov_...

Yeah, you should probably do that.

<comment><USER13> I checked out a bibliography. Seems like lots of derivative stuff playing on the same old memes you see everywhere.

<comment><USER14> Most of those memes are memes because Asimov invented them.

You sound like I guy I once heard complain that The Lord of the Rings was just a collection of D&D cliches.

<comment><USER15> "I tried to read Shakespeare, but the storylines were so cliched... like every romantic comedy..."

"I don't like the Beatles, I've heard that pop style a million times before"

<comment><USER16> I think the latter is fairly reasonable. They may have invented it, but at this point it has been done an awful lot, and someone could be forgiven for being sick of it.

Shakespeare's writing OTOH is still outstanding even if the stories are cliche (and they were cliche at the time as well)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I had a strange experience where my cable company's mobile app, which streams most channels, was missing audio on a few channels. After escalating the issue to an engineer, he finally got back to us and told us that if a username contained "ts" like mine did this issue would happen. After making a second username without that combination, all worked fine. I'd still like to know what logic in their application would get stumped by these two letters.

<comment><USER18> In the context of acoustics, "ts" almost always means time-step (inverse of frequency). But I don't have the faintest idea of how it would collide with the username string :|

<comment><USER19> Guessing they're scanning for parameters in a JSON object by doing something like

        ts = parseInt(jsonstr.indexOf("ts")+2);

I wish I didn't come to this guess by seeing it in real code so many times…

T_T

<comment><USER20> One of the reasons I've always been leery of regex. Especially since everyone I've seen using them tends to blindly copy an example from elsewhere and then bats at it until the test case passes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I wasn't able to buy tickets once because "your name cannot include numbers, special characters, or the words 'select', 'drop', or 'user'". I (don't really) apologize for having a name containing one of the magic words your programmers aren't competent enough not to care about.

\--

In the 90s, I worked for an ISP. Our very first customer was "Joe Test". We had well-meaning customer service people delete his account a few times because our billing system didn't have fancy features like a notes section.

\--

I've been bitten many times by "People have, at this point in time, one full name which they go by." I have the same first name as my son, my dad, my grandpa, and back 6 further generations. We've all gone by nicknames or middle names. My middle name _is_ my legal name, in the sense that it's what I do all business as (and have for my entire life).

My signature is my middle name. My credit cards have my middle name. My family, friends, teachers, students, and employers know me by my middle name. And yet, so many institutions are incapable of handling the situation and insist on calling me by my first name, which is _not_ who I am. If my doctor, lawyer, and banker call all use my middle name, your system can deal with it or I'll find an alternative.

<comment><USER22> > insist on calling me by my first name, which is not who I am.

As someone who goes by a nickname, I find this to be a feature. If I get a phone call or email addressing me by my legal first name, it's almost certainly a sales call, and I can take appropriate action.

<comment><USER21> > As someone who goes by a nickname, I find this to be a feature.

Oh, that's definitely a perk. "Hi, um, may I speak to... Firstname?" "No, but I can take a message."

As a bonus, my first name is ridiculously pronounceable but cold callers act like they've never seen that arrangement of letters before. Imagine being Robert Joe Smith and they ask, "is... Row... Bort... there?" If you can't even _say_ my first name, I have no prior business with you (and almost certainly no future dealings).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> It doesn't even have to be an "edge case", as stated in the article. My first name has a single accented vowel and breaks tons of online forms.

What annoys me is not so much having to re-enter my name with the unaccented version of the vowel, it's when the form throws up an error message saying "Enter a Valid Name" [or suchlike]. I find that insulting.

At least make your error text put the blame where it belongs: "Sorry. This form can only handle ASCII Text". Don't insult your users by telling them their name isn't real.

<comment><USER24> These kinds of limitations are fascinating because they reveal the cultural biases (and I don't mean bias in the negative sense) of their creators. A Western, American system might not be designed to accept names with accents and vowels because who has those in the States?

Anecdotally, I also heard of a female games journalist who had trouble using a VR headset because she wore mascara. It threw off the eye tracking because the system wasn't designed to handle that.

Any designer must test his or her product on many groups of people to find these problems.

<comment><USER25> Wasn't there a thing that happened a while back where a fitness tracker was found to not work with darker skinned individuals?

<comment><USER26> I recall Kinect had the same problems.

<comment><USER27> And now I feel compelled to mention Better Off Ted, Season 1 Episode 4.

<comment><USER28> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIBdmyFWZVE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIBdmyFWZVE)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I have a close friend who lives in rural Ireland. That's not in a town, but on a small farm in a general area of about 15-20 other small farms. His address is just the name of the general area and the county.

The Irish postal system is clever enough to know that the person with this name, in that general area lives in that house. In fact, he probably still isn't even really classified by his name, rather as the husband of his wife, whose family has been in the general area for generations.

This article made me think about how he deals with online forms. His response was that it's been a godsend that finally this year Ireland has introduced postcodes. Previously, and if the form still insists on a house number and street name, he just "bashes his head against the wall."

<comment><USER30> Ireland is like that throughout the whole country, except maybe Dublin. It's worked for them for ages; there's been articles written about wackily- addressed mail being sent to people in Ireland and arriving to the correct destination. (I remember one that was just a long description going something like "the lad who...").

The problem is if someone in Ireland tries to order something from a company in another country, where the computer system isn't set up to handle totally arbitrary addresses.

Even UK addresses look pretty anarchic to someone in America, where every address has a street name, a house number, a city, a state, and a zip code. UK addresses will have a postal code, and a city name, but after that there's no telling; it'll frequently list smaller and smaller towns and then some hamlet, and not have any kind of street or house number.

If you design your address-storage system to just handle two arbitrarily-long "street" lines, plus a city and postal code, that should handle everything in the UK. For Ireland, just don't require a postal code. The problem is when programmers try to place restrictions on the address to ensure it has "correct formatting". Don't do that; if you need to verify the address, there's APIs you can subscribe to in different countries to check address correctness. Doing it yourself is how these problems happen.

<comment><USER31> > UK addresses will have a postal code, and a city name, but after that > there's no telling; it'll frequently list smaller and smaller towns and then > some hamlet, and not have any kind of street or house number.

Royal Mail don't recommend these long addresses; there's a form on their website to produce a canonical address, something like

      [Building name]
      [Number] Street
      [Hamlet/village/town]
      TOWN
      PO57 C0DE

However, good luck telling anyone who's proud of their tiny hamlet this...

[http://www.royalmail.com/find-a-postcode](http://www.royalmail.com/find-a- postcode) (and the "Read our PAF Code of Practice (PDF)" link).

<comment><USER32> The fact that addresses don't come in canonical form is an interesting challenge for anybody who wants to verify addresses, e.g. for fraud preventing. Actually, many banks, when verifying addresses for online transactions, just strip out all non-numeric characters when doing address verification.

<comment><USER33> My apartment has two different apartment numbers, the right one and the one that Royal Mail made up for their database. Makes it interesting to match things up on different accounts

<comment><USER34> Also, a lot of websites have this thing where you have to enter your postal code and then you can pick your address from a list of addresses associated with the postal code. I used to live in a development for a while that was so new that it didn't appear in many of these databases, so signing up for various services (or even paying council tax) was near impossible.

<comment><USER29> I had a similar, derived issue. A new house I was renting was marketed as "24 Street Name",the lease document was written as such and the front door had a number 24 on it.

However, after moving in, we discovered that on all official databases it was "24-26 Street Name".

This caused a number of frustrations over the years. After a while we just put "24-26" on everything and be done with it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Has anyone created a public data set for testing names? People publish lists of exceptions (e.g. [1] and [2]), but it would be great to have actual examples in a simple format that can be used for automated testing. The first (and most difficult) step would be to create a universal name schema.

[1] [http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods- programmers-b...](http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers- believe-about-names/)

[2] [https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-personal- names](https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-personal-names)

</comment><comment><USER36> People do no have names that break computers. Programmers believe they have certain structures when they don't then his or her code fails.

[http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods- programmers-b...](http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers- believe-about-names/)

<comment><USER37> For what it's worth, programmers do not have the tools to perfectly handle the complexity of human language. It's a hard problem.

<comment><USER38> A free text entry field would cover almost everyone.

<comment><USER39> Websites that insist on forcing me to enter a first and last name always get abuse in the latter. What I call myself on websites is my business, not yours.

<comment><USER40> If at any point in the process they need to bill you for something, they have to ask for your first and last name because that's exactly what the credit card companies require. So there are use cases.

Personally, I don't see why any company is asking for a name if they aren't billing you for something or they aren't a social network.

<comment><USER41> > they have to ask for your first and last name because that's exactly what > the credit card companies require

No they don't, they ask for a single field, name on card which is a single string containing everything on the card.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I realize that the issue of names is complicated when you consider different practices the world over, but is there not some kind of RFC or other specification that people are supposed to follow? How can that be in 2016?

The first job I took in IT, after graduating with a liberal arts degree, was in software testing for a company that made point-of-sale systems. Only a month or two out of training I was given the task to test a name and address form. Knowing that quotes were special characters in databases, I tried entering something like O'Connell as a last name. Sure enough, the system broke. I remember filing a snarky bug report about how Irish and Arab people ought to be able to use the form.

My point is that testing for quotes and "Null" as a surname isn't some kind of esoteric science. What's wrong with people!

<comment><USER43> My cousins have given up and changed their name from O'Keefe to OKeefe to avoid the single quote headache that seems to plague a lot of systems.

<comment><USER31> An alternative which is truer to the original would be to use _Ó_. It means 'grandson of'. But perhaps the other part should also be "deanglicized", giving either _Ó Caoimh_ or _Ó Cuív_.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O'Keeffe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O'Keeffe)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I have had a decent number of forms that would not allow me to enter my last name because it contains a space: De Kok. Apparently over the centuries americans coming from Europe would drop spaces. For instance Vanderbilt is a Dutch name, that stems from the original Van der Bilt (means from the Bilt, which is a Dutch city)

So now American programmers assume a space in a last name (or a dash for that matter) never happens so is an illegal condition that should cause validation to fail. I don't agree

<comment><USER45> A friend in university had the last name "des Trois Maisons", or "Of the three houses" (if I'm remembering it correctly). I can only imagine the number of computer systems that just die on that. Not one space, but _two_!

Come to think of it, I bet he reads this comments. Hi [name withheld]!

Seriously, what a great last name.

<comment><USER46> You might want to edit your comment to avoid giving out your friend's first and last names.

<comment><USER47> Or at least to provide sensationalistic information about the billions in gold he has stored at his house.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> I have a first name composed of two names, and one of them with an acute accent. This is enough to cause some of my credit cards to be printed with a repeated name because they assume my "second first name" to be a middle name too. The acute accent results in encoding problems once in a while.

But nothing compares the problems that people with names longer than 30 characters have to face. Creating a SSN card, or driver license, or pretty much any official document can be very painful. The name does fit in their systems and the attendants just don't know what to do and most of them are very reluctant in using abbreviations.

Every programmer should at least read Patrick's article that is cited in the story: [http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods- programmers-b...](http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers- believe-about-names)

And if you are naming kids and want to save them a lot of bureaucracy in their lives, give them short names.

<comment> david-given That list makes me very sad. Not because it's not interesting, which it is, but because it'd be so much _more_ interesting if it discussed each item as it went.

This one, for example:

        People's names are assigned at birth.
        OK, maybe not at birth, but at least pretty close to birth.
        Alright, alright, within a year or so of birth.
        Five years?
        You're kidding me, right?

Don't leave me there! Tell me which culture assigns names more than five years after birth!

I'd love to see an annotated version.

<comment><USER18> >Tell me which culture assigns names more than five years after birth!

In the United States of America it is common for females to change their name at marriage, substituting their birth surname for that of their husband.

Also, in many tribal cultures the definitive name is not assigned until an adulthood rite of passage has been passed.

Adult names also change to reflect upgrades in social status such as the completion of a PhD, admittance into a society, acquisition of nobility titles, etc.

<comment> david-given That's _changing_ a name, not _assigning_ a name. The list is implying that some people don't have names for at least five years after their birth.

...or maybe it's not; without expanding on the items in the list, it's kinda hard to tell.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> My legal name is Martin C. Martin. This has only been a problem for computer systems 2 or 3 times. Once or twice on some no-name web site, which rejected names where first and last were the same. The other time was when the company I was working at was bought by Oracle. Oracle's internal email system simply refused to create a user with the same first name as last name.

(For the curious, I was born Martin C. Hilgerdenaar and changed my name in college.)

<comment><USER50> Heh. My name is Randall R. Randall. I have had quite a lot of pushback from humans ("No, sorry, I need your LAST name..."), but I can only remember two systems that ever really caused me issues: Facebook and Google+.

<comment><USER51> I have to ask. Does the R also stand for Randall?

<comment><USER50> No, it's Reginald. You are in good company in wondering, though. :)

<comment><USER51> Oh well. I was secretly hoping it stood for Randall R. Randall.

<comment><USER52> At the third level you may call him Recursive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> In _Programming Pearls_ , Jon Bentley mentions the story of an application, written in APL that bombed when it got to Ecuadorean data. Somebody figured out that it read the name "Quito" and processed it as "Quit".

</comment><comment><USER54> A large global company I worked at hired someone who chose the username 'lib' and this user was based in a remote location (China as I recall), I don't remember exactly but I think it was their first name. Some of the developer tools recursively searched parent directories for a 'lib' when running builds, this in turn caused a massive mysterious increase in build times when users in the USA were suddenly sending NFS requests to China looking in /home/lib for libraries.

</comment><comment><USER55> My favourite "real world fails to fit the model we've come up with" is Carmel- by-the-Sea, which has many streets that have no addresses:

" _To this day, there are still no addresses, parking meters or street lights, and no sidewalks outside of Carmel 's downtown commercial area. Those seeking directions receive hints such as "fifth house on the east side of Torres Street, green trim, driftwood fence" or by the legendary names adorning most houses, such as "Hansel" or "Sea Urchin."_"

[http://www.carmelcalifornia.com/fun-facts-about- carmel.htm](http://www.carmelcalifornia.com/fun-facts-about-carmel.htm)

<comment><USER56> > My favourite "real world fails to fit the model we've come up with" is > Carmel-by-the-Sea, which has many streets that have no addresses

You might be surprised to learn that in India, _all_ addresses are more or less like this. This is due to the fact that we never ended up with the standardised street numbers and names that a lot of other countries have, and road naming is a highly political thing in India, so a lot of people call roads by colloquial names.

A typical address in India goes

      - House / Building Name (a lot of bungalows in India have names)
      - <USER2>
      - Near [Landmark]
      - Possibly another Landmark
      - Road Name
      - City Name
      - Post Code
      - State Name
      - <USER3>

<comment> david-given I grew up in rural Scotland with an address which was:

        - House name
        - Community name
        - <USER4>
        - <USER5>

Just the other day I found myself explaining this to a cow orker some ten years younger than me, and they couldn't believe it.

"But how did the postman know where the house was without a number?"

"They just knew."

"What, all of them?"

"Yup. Each postman knew their own area."

"But how did the post get to that postman? There's no postcode!"

"People in the sorting office read the addresses..."

We also had a three-digit phone number. (One of the outer isles used to have one-digit phone numbers.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Air Canada and several other airlines have for several years been unable to read my passport on the automated check in because I have a suffix in my name (II). I am told that "this happens with everyone who has a suffix", which just boggles my mind.

<comment><USER58> I have the same situation, though my suffix is less common. My strategy is to drop the suffix when purchasing a ticket, which has mixed results. Some airlines (United) remove the space between my last name and suffix when I do have to use it (International flights) which caused me some angst until I figured it out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> I have a coworker whose last name is Corp. He was unable to create a Google+ account for a couple years and had a bit of difficulty with his Facebook account because they assumed he was a business.

<comment><USER60> Had a friend with last name of "Root". She worked as a UNIX admin back in the day. Had trouble off and on with her name.

<comment><USER61> > whoami

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> Another fun edge case -- people with just one name.

Teller (of Penn and Teller) legally changed his name to just "Teller". Apparently his drivers license reads Teller NLN for No Last Name.

</comment><comment><USER63> In addition to the obligatory little Bobby Tables, this blog post describing the falsehoods programmers believe about names is informative and a must-read for anyone dealing with names in software:

[http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods- programmers-b...](http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers- believe-about-names/)

<comment><USER64> It's linked in the story, too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> I can see how having a non-representable name can lead to problems (e.g a non- unicode character), but I fail to see how a system can end up with a bug that converts the string "null" into a null or blank string? Even throughform posts and sql there is a difference between "null" the string and null the literal?

Edit: ah saw the SO link now. Shoddy roundtrips to xml/soap/json can do it.

</comment><comment><USER66> Randall Munroe numbers his jokes, and so many threads end up with multiple links to the same strip. It will end up like the old joke: [https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/2uuii3/a_man_goes_to...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/2uuii3/a_man_goes_to_prison_joke_with_two_opposite/)

327!

<comment><USER67> I only recognize 386, but that's "Someone is wrong..." and now you will too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> The official way to transcribe the Danish letter ø into English is OE,and if you scan my passport the ø part of my name will show up as OE, but nobody knows this and the transcription is not clearly visible when looking at the passport.

So what should I write when I order a plane ticket? Write an O that the agents looking at my passport expects or the OE that matches what the computer reads?

</comment><comment><USER69> There is a story within the story here: this article was not "fact-checked" by any person who has ever actually used SQL while developing software.

To quote: 'This is because the word "null" is often inserted into database fields to indicate that there is no data there.'

The story is that companies can't be bothered to hire programmers who are clever enough to know that null and "null" are not the same thing.

The story within the story is that news websites can't be bothered to get their technical stories proof-read by people who actually know the technicalities.

</comment><comment><USER70> WHen I started programing (mainframes) in the early 80's I came across an odd instance in which my name messed things up. All printouts had 3 letter as a banner that were used to identify who to hand them too once burst up from the line printer. Popped onto a trolley in which they would be shipped up to us programmers. Now alas I only had a first and surname and in part due to bureaucracy had to add a middle letter as PG was not acceptable for some unknown reason of standards that was in play. SO I added an X for PXG and then spent several years explaining to anybody new that my middle name was not Xavior.

Equally during my training we were coding a script upon a GCOS 8 machine and had to copy current edit file to a new file and on the system (asterix)SRC was used to reference that file.

Now one person doing the exercise thought they would cheat, looked at mine, then another chap and concluded I'd copied his and he would be clever and not make the same mistake. Turns out the other chap he was checked was with the initials SRC and whilst neither of us had copied anybodies this cunning chap ended up with (asterix)MTW. Sadly this chap went on to the systems division and too this day, still bewildered how and who he sucked up too for that position with such talents.

So names are and always will be amusing at times, in more ways than breaking a system as well.

</comment><comment><USER71> I guess that you need to hire Portuguese or Brazilian programmers to write programs handling names. They have both accents and long names. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese_name](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese_name):

 _" It is not uncommon in Portugal that a married woman has two given names and six surnames, two from her mother's family, two from her father's family, and the last two coming from her husband. In addition, some of these names may be made of more than one word, so that a full feminine name can have more than 12 words. [...] For the sake of simplicity, most Portuguese people have two surnames"_

Those Portuguese/Brazilian programmers will not forget to accept short names they may use a nickname. Examples from football are Edson Arantes do Nascimento (Pelé), and the various Ronaldo's and Ronaldinho's. [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/teams/brazil/78105...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/teams/brazil/7810561/World- Cup-2010-Brazilian-players-nicknames-explained.html):

 _" Back when Ronaldo, he of the record for most goals scored in the World Cup, joined the Brazilian team, the squad already had a Ronaldo, a defender. So Ronaldo became Ronaldinho. Then another Ronaldinho came along, and they called him Ronaldinho Gaucho, for the area in Brazil where he was from. When the first Ronaldo was done playing, Ronaldinho became Ronaldo again and Ronaldinho Gaucho lost the Gaucho. (For everyday use, that is. He's often listed as Ronaldinho Gaucho in squads, and his official website is www.ronaldinhogaucho.com.)"_

</comment><comment><USER72> I am convinced that the programmer interviewed in this article by BBC is the same Patrick McKenzie(patio11).

<comment><USER73> It must be right? How many Patrick McKenzies that live in Japan and can talk to a reporter about tech issues can there be?

<comment><USER72> Yes.I am.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> I received a Dutch surname as a second middle name. I can never use it -- the "Van" alone is enough to break things. But even without "Van", having two middle names usually does not compute. I've seen people who lack middle names entirely have the opposite problem and insert the middle initial "X" just to satisfy the system.

<comment><USER29> My wife and son have no middle name. An ex-girlfriend also had no middle name. I would have thought it's pretty common.

<comment><USER75> I commonly see "NMI" for "No Middle Initial."

<comment><USER47> Sounds like NMI actually is TMI. Perhaps you meant NMN?

<comment><USER76> Might be a factor of certain systems. I was registered with NMI (not having a middle name) on IBM computers in the early 1970s. Not seen it since....

We were still using punch cards back then.

<comment><USER77> Star Trek memorably listed LT CDR NFN/NMI DATA, see the screenshot at [http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Data](http://memory- alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Data) (third from the top, on the right).

<comment><USER76> Ah, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER78> One of the applications I work on has a long history of problems handling data for people with the last name Null. I've given feedback on these bugs and make several recommendations for fixing them, but the folks who work on the application framework just...don't care? I don't know. They certainly don't design with exceptions in mind.

That's such an alien way of thinking to me. I was taught that 80% of your work is spent handling 20% of the data. Is there something cultural that prevents other programmers from working in exceptions-first mode?

Maybe it's just with boring business logic. I've heard that the most robust networking applications are written assuming constant worst-case failure states. Anyone have any insight into this phenomenon? I get that there are practical limits to what you can plan for, but if you're accepting string input, shouldn't you at least be prepared for apostrophes?

<comment><USER79> I have a one word name. I was recently pulled over for speeding. When I called the court, the ticket had already been dismissed. Because the officer hadn't properly filled out the ticket; he had copied my (one) name from my DL.

So, don't fix that particular system, thanks very much.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> For anyone wondering about the Hawaiian name:

[http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo- way/2013/12/31/258673819/...](http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo- way/2013/12/31/258673819/hawaiian-woman-gets-ids-that-fit-her-36-character- last-name)

Keihanaikukauakahihulihe'ekahaunaele, pronounced as: KAY'-ee-hah-nah-EE'-coo- COW'-ah-KAH'-hee-HOO'-lee-heh-eh-KAH'-how-NAH-eh-leh

Rough meaning: 'When there is chaos and confusion, you are one that will stand up and get people to focus in one direction and come out of the chaos.' It also references the origins of her and her husband's family."

</comment><comment><USER80> Ha ha, the first response; "There's no way that's true". How right they are.

<comment><USER26> Yet it may or may not be false.

</comment></comment><comment><USER81> This should not be a problem by now. Especially in government databases. Is there a corpus of names that can be used for testing?

</comment><comment><USER82> I'm thinking I should either name my child "Define", or change my surname to "Define"...should make Google searching for personal information somewhat frustrating.

</comment><comment><USER83> Close to relevant XKCD: [https://xkcd.com/327/](https://xkcd.com/327/)

</comment><comment><USER84> Edge cases like the ones mentioned on this article will keep happening more often with the increased access to the internet worldwide.

Either programs deal with these cases more intelligently or some family names will stop existing, virtually speaking.

I have lost count of how many different versions of my last name I have since I moved to the United States. My health insurance, car insurance, apartment contract, driver's license, passport (this one has the correct name) are all spelled differently because some systems here don't accept white spaces on last names, so they add dashes. They length constraint is a short number, so they concatenate my 3 last names into a humongous word. Etc.

I always find it funny, except when I need to, say, take an official certificate test and the name I put on the registration doesn't match to one on the IDs I bring, therefore I can't get admitted into the testing center.

Of course I learned how to work with the system by now.

</comment><comment><USER85> Growing up, the class roster printout did not have characters to show my full name. As a result, it would truncate the last letter of my first name, showing "Ala" instead of "Alan."

Inevitably, on the first day of a new class, the teacher would call out attendance, and would briefly pause with a puzzled look on their face, and attempt call me "Ala"? "Allah?" while my friends snickered in the background.

I'd sigh, and say "No it's Alan" and the teacher would correct the attendance sheet and we'd be done with that, for that semester at least.

Until there was a substitute, and we'd start the whole process over.

These days, I don't mind people butchering my last name, and when I have to spell it out over the phone, I endure the occasional comment about it. I take it in stride, as I myself struggle with ethnic asian names. However, I get very testy when someone butchers my first name (it happens more than you would expect).

</comment><comment><USER86> A company I used to work for ran into some trouble when a customer attempted to change their payment information on the company's website. All attempts resulted in a rather frightening (to the user) "Access Denied" screen. The customer's last name was "Curl."

</comment><comment><USER87> This article reminds me of Sir Charles Antony Richard Hoare (aka Tony Hoare)'s InfoQ presentation [1]. What the article described are part of that $1 billion damages.

For people who don't know Tony, he's is a British computer scientist, probably best known for the development in 1960, at age 26, of Quicksort. He also developed Hoare logic, the formal language Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP), and inspired the Occam programming language. [1][2]

[1] [http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Null-References-The- Billi...](http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Null-References-The-Billion- Dollar-Mistake-Tony-Hoare)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Hoare](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Hoare)

</comment><comment><USER88> There's an amusing short story from the 1960s called "Computers Don't Argue" which this reminds me of: [http://atariarchives.org/bcc2/showpage.php?page=133](http://atariarchives.org/bcc2/showpage.php?page=133)

</comment><comment><USER89> I am glad the Null family doesn't give in. I was quite sad when the Spaniards changed the collation of the "ll" and "ch" digraphs in the mid 1990s simply because it made life hard for programmers.

</comment><comment><USER90> But 'NULL' !== NULL. Well, in a more perfect world ;)

<comment><USER91> Heck, even NULL !== NULL

</comment></comment><comment><USER92> Speaking of web form, I always think it's more 'universal' to use 'Given Name' and 'Surname' instead of 'First Name' and 'Last Name'. Many languages (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc) put surname in front of given name. Your thought?

</comment><comment> m-i-l I know someone who had no idea why their surname was being removed from posts to the internal social media system. It was because their surname was on the list of blocked words, but I don't know how far this was explained to them. We were also unable to post anything about welly wanging or Numberwang.

</comment><comment><USER93> If these services are evaluating the string in the text field such that it results in the value Null rather than the string "Null" it is concerning. The usibility my be compromised for users with these surnames but I wonder if the security is also compromised via code injection through these fields.

</comment><comment><USER94> People who cannot properly separate database contents from metadata and control words in 2016 are incompetent.

<comment><USER89> Though I wholeheartedly agree, 2016 may not be a big problem. Theres still a lot of code from the 1970s in routine use today.

</comment></comment><comment><USER95> Also on the subject of being reckless with strings, I recommend this blog post by Glyph Lefkowitz:

[https://glyph.twistedmatrix.com/2008/06/data-in-garbage- out....](https://glyph.twistedmatrix.com/2008/06/data-in-garbage-out.html)

</comment><comment><USER96> There have been a few British tourists over the years that have tried to visit Sydney NSW (New South Wales) and ended up in Sydney NS (Nova Scotia), perhaps because some computer system incorrectly truncated the state abbreviation to US/Canadian 2 letters.

</comment><comment><USER97> From an online form:

Location (City, Country): Singapore

Nope.

Singapore, Singapore.

>:(

<comment><USER98> UK forms which ask for a city and a county present the same problem for residents of London. US forms which ask for a city and a state present a similar problem for residents of New York. You're part of a select club!

<comment><USER99> Not sure I understand. The city of London is in the county of Greater London. New York City is in the state of New York. But Singapore is a city-state.

<comment><USER98> Do you really not understand, or are you being oblique?

In any case, there is no county of Greater London. Greater London is an 'administrative area' \- have a read of the London Government Act 1963, which created it, and abolished the county of London which had existed before. That's why we have a Greater London Authority (and before that a Greater London Council), rather than the London County Council we had when London was a county. Of course, everyone treats it as a county because it would be maddening not to, but that's a bit like how everyone treats Washington DC as a state of the US (oh, we should add Washington DC to that list).

Legally, there is no 'London' which is a proper subset of Greater London (other than the City of London, which is a red herring in this case). So putting "London, London" is directly analogous to putting "Singapore, Singapore".

The New York case is different, but it still involves writing the name of your city twice. If anything, it's even sillier, because the whole state is named after one city.

EDIT: clarify about the GLA, GLC, and LCC (i hope)

<comment><USER33> London, along with most county towns in the UK shouldn't have a county appended to them. This isn't the case for New York.

<comment><USER98> In a postal address, no. But in the comment which spawned this godforsaken subthread, i specifically referred to "UK forms which ask for a city and a county".

<comment><USER33> In administrative terms about half the cities and many of the large towns in the UK aren't part of a county anymore. It's just a field which doesn't help much if there's a postcode, and should never have been mandatory anywhere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER100> Isn't this problem mostly solved by type casting? I've never encountered a problem where 'Null' and Null were the same thing. Is it just shoddy code that runs everything through an eval or lambda?

<comment><USER46> Read the StackOverflow link in the article for an example of how it can happen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER101> well, computers do not stop a microsecond upon any name. They consider them in digits anyway. What fails in certain cases is logic of the executed programme, and by no means its a program failure. It was management failure to ensure edge cases have proper workarounds.

I still suffer when LLOYDS online bank cannot accept my long name in certain forms, stripping the last 3 chars.

During my US time, I met no systems capable of storing and displaying Eastern European diakritical chars.

</comment><comment><USER102> This is why you avoid in-band signalling if you can. If you must do it, at least have escape sequences which are consistently applied.

</comment><comment><USER103> This is just terrible programming. Everything should get escaped and quoted before interacting with any code.

</comment><comment><USER91> A friend of mine, last name O'Neil, legally changed it to ONeil so he could fill out more forms online.

</comment><comment><USER104> How is Null as a name a problem? Null value and null string are different.

<comment><USER105> Did you look at the stack overflow link?

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4456438/how-do-i- correctl...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4456438/how-do-i-correctly- pass-the-string-null-an-employees-proper-surname-to-a-so)

<comment><USER106> Oh snap. I just felt the urge to break some web services...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER107> Little Bobby Tables [https://xkcd.com/327/](https://xkcd.com/327/)

(Edited)

<comment><USER108> Why does everyone seem to refer to this as "Little Johnny Tables". It's "Little Bobby Tables" – which is so much better.

<comment><USER107> Whoops, right you are.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER109> Little Bobby Tables made some new friends.

</comment><comment><USER110> [https://xkcd.com/327/](https://xkcd.com/327/)

</comment><comment><USER111> Obligatory: [https://xkcd.com/327/](https://xkcd.com/327/)</comment>


New BitTorrent Sync API - <AUTHOR> http://blog.getsync.com/2015/07/15/get-the-new-bittorrent-sync-api/

<comment><AUTHOR> BitTorrent have announced a new API for BitTorrent Sync. They seem pretty focused on monetizing it through requiring a licensed key (apart from an eval key for development). I wonder how successful that will be, given that Sync is a paid product itself (well, for a certain level of features).</comment>


Show HN: Preview Python Execution from VSCode - <AUTHOR> https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=fraser.live-coder <comment><AUTHOR> I was inspired to work on this by Bret Victor's "Inventing on Principle" lecture [https://youtu.be/PUv66718DII](https://youtu.be/PUv66718DII)

Any feedback appreciated!</comment>


EBay Security Vulnerability - <AUTHOR> http://pastebin.com/9KvGPRPf

<comment><USER2> It sometimes helps to demonstrate the attack with a test user account that you create and record a video of the demonstration.

Then send them the movie.</comment>


Three Years in Identity Theft Hell - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-13/my-three-years-in-identity-theft-hell <comment><USER2> Counterintuitively, this is evidence that the Equifax breach isn't necessarily going to cause massive harm. If someone wanted to impersonate you, they could already.

I remain hopeful that the full list of 140M SSNs will be posted in full. It's a rare opportunity: if that happens, the US will have no choice but to finally switch to a new system. One that doesn't rely on SSNs being private. That's the absurdity. It is easy to steal your identity because we have allowed it to be easy.

It's going to be difficult to switch to a new system, but the pain will be worth it. Imagine if the author could finally have peace of mind because nobody could impersonate him.

That is a fairytale, admittedly. It's always going to be possible to steal someone's identity if you're determined. But just look how trivial it is right now. Your driver's license plus the thief's photo is all they need. And it's possible to forge: they don't even need to swipe your physical one.

 _Those are "the keys to the kingdom," said Bo Holland, CEO of AllClear ID, an identity-monitoring service. "Once you have somebody 's name, social, birth date, and address, you can go and open new accounts."_

The SSN shouldn't be the critical key in that list.

[https://youtube.com/watch?v=Erp8IAUouus](https://youtube.com/watch?v=Erp8IAUouus)

<comment><USER3> > Counterintuitively, this is evidence that the Equifax breach isn't > necessarily going to cause massive harm. If someone wanted to impersonate > you, they could already.

This argument doesn't not follow logically. It's like saying you shouldn't lock your house because if somebody really wants to get in, they will do it.

<comment><USER4> It would be analogous to a security breach of a manufacturer's database of keycuts and corresponding locks, not outright refusing to lock your doors.

<comment><USER3> Right. That analogy it more correct, but it doesn't make it follow logically. It's like a someone having the keys and address for each key.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > "We demand convenience over security," Velasquez said.

Banks send a constant stream of credit card offers through the mail and pay people to use credit cards (with rewards). Stores are always trying to get you to sign up for their credit cards and offering big discounts if you do, and car dealerships offer special deals - but only if you agree to finance your car. People might want more credit, but lets be honest - the financial industry is doing everything it can to shovel debt onto the American public.

Imagine if a loan shark went door to door in a neighborhood paying residents $500 to take one of his loans. That seems almost cartoonishly evil, but that's more or less what the financial industry does. And it's not hard to see why - the average credit card has an annual interest rate of 15%. Even after you factor in things rewards and people who don't pay, you're still looking at a very nice rate of return.

It's hard to see how identity theft isn't directly linked to financial institutions trying to make credit as easily available and as widespread as possible. Instead of viewing identity theft as a high price to pay for the convenience we want, it should be viewed as yet another terrible consequence of the financial industry's efforts to push as much debt onto Americans as they can.

</comment><comment><USER6>
        > In an economic system where U.S.
        > consumers carry $12.73 trillion in
        > household debt, you shouldn't be able
        > to just call up, say "it wasn't me,"
        > and leave thousands of dollars in
        > obligations by the wayside.

Yes, you should, and the banks should be the ones left holding the bag. The author did _nothing_ wrong, and was victimized by the banks' incompetence at adequate fraud checks.

</comment><comment><USER7> I've been a victim of identity theft in Europe. Took many letters to several police departments in the UK and various states in Germany over the course of five years...

I've not been stopped at EU airports for awhile but I am still not 100% sure if my name is on the Interpol blacklist still. The process of clearing your name is totally opaque. A helpful officer at London MET assured me to undertake the work to do it.

The amount of times I've had to explain the very concept of "identity theft" to enforcement is just crazy. And sadly I don't think they fully understand it most of the time.

I'm a little afraid to travel to eastern Europe, since this "advance fee" for a VW fraud in my name is particularly common there and I am tired of receiving threats. Sigh....

</comment><comment><USER8> My solution is make a site called credit.gov

This would be the final say in any credit accounts, accounts not listed here are not legal debt (ie they cannot be collected or sued for)

You can still use SSN for identification but authorization would require more. I imagine maybe a few different levels of security:

1\. Password (or list of passwords) you can set/change in person at any post office. The company adding the credit account would need this password to register the debt.

2\. Yubikey or other auth token you can register at the post office to create one time passwords for companies creating credit accounts.

3\. Every new credit account requires physical confirmation at the post office.

Then just setup really good cameras (maybe face scanner or biometric scanner) at every post office and make it like a 10 year felony to impersonate someone at the post office. The scammers will be out of the system very quickly.

</comment><comment><USER9> In my country, its the bank that has the responsibility to ensure that they are talking with the right person. If not, then its the bank who will pay, not the customer.

So, the banks here are pretty annoying, opening an account is a lengthily process.

<comment><USER10> ^^^ This. Why is this not in fact the case?

<comment><USER11> Because banks think that if they inconvenience people, they'll lose customers.

Convenience trumps security in the US.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > There's a logic to the maze you have to run to expose fraudulent financial > accounts. In an economic system where U.S. consumers carry $12.73 trillion > in household debt, you shouldn't be able to just call up, say "it wasn't > me," and leave thousands of dollars in obligations by the wayside.

Perhaps if it was easier to do that, there would be less of the predatory lending that created such a crippling burden of debt.

</comment><comment><USER13> Why is this only a problem in the US?

I think that one of the reasons is that the US does not have a central government registry of all the people.

In Austria, we have the "Melderegister". Every person that stays in Austria is required to register the address of their current residence. Your name and address is always in this registry, from the day you are born until you die (foreigners residing in Austria are also required to register).

Everything relies on this registry — voting rights, taxes, etc.

I think that Banks can check this register to verify your address. So even if an identity thief is successful in applying for a credit card, that credit card would be mailed to the victims actual address, so the identity thief would have to intercept postal mail as well.

So many problems that I read about in the US (using utiliy bills to proof you are a resident, registering to vote) just sound like a clumsy workaround to the fact that there is no "Melderegister".

<comment><USER14> Countries like Australia do not have a central government registry of _all_ people, unlike most countries, including those in Europe. Each State does have a register of all births and deaths. There is no national ID. It surprises many that one is _free_ to carry NO identification.

One can decide to not work (get a tax number), not drive (get a drivers license), not travel (get a passport), not get free healthcare (get a medicare card), not vote (evade census'). Unlike most countries, one doesn't need to register or let anyone know where you live, and there is no national service (conscription).

It also has very little identity fraud.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Okay, blocked of time to freeze my credit on Monday.

<comment><USER16> The pin code they will give you to unlock it is the date/time stamp of when you locked it.

And, if you happen to forget it, they will unlock it if you can cough up the very information supposedly compromised in the equifax leak anyway.

<comment><USER17> > And, if you happen to forget it, they will unlock it if you can cough up the > very information supposedly compromised in the equifax leak anyway.

Wait, what? Any more reading on this?

<comment><USER18> Here's the link to "obtain your forgotten or misplaced PIN". [https://www.experian.com/ncaconline/freezepin](https://www.experian.com/ncaconline/freezepin) And it says, "provide your e-mail address for faster delivery of your results."

<comment><USER17> Wow. This whole thing looks like a massive joke. Thanks for the link!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estonian_ID_card](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estonian_ID_card) \- everyone get's their own cryptographic certificate. I don't know why banks aren't pushing for a legit national ID, if anything it would make it easier to lend and eliminate a lot of expensive fraud.

</comment><comment><USER20> So how does one protect against this if freezing is useless because all that information was leaked anyway?

<comment><USER21> Freezing doesn't protect the information, but it does protect your credit account from being added to. Once frozen, you are almost in a 2FA scenario where creditors are required to request any new accounts or credit hits, and the credit agency is required to then obtain your approval using the private information only you (should) know.

<comment><USER22> _Freezing doesn 't protect the information, but it does protect your credit account from being added to._

Going to take the liberty of adding to this because the imprecision might cause some people to develop a poor model of how financial institutions work: you don't have a "credit account." You have a few firms which have partial views of your "credit history", sourced by reports from some firms you've previously done business with before. What a freeze does is that those firms (CRAs) who could disclose your credit history to a bank will, instead, report to the bank "That file is frozen."

How is this different from your mental model? Because credit decision is between a financial institution and a bank -- they don't have to ask anyone else's permission, including the CRA, to lend you money. They also don't have to "respect" a freeze on your file; it's purely advisory. It may deter _some_ banks from issuing you _some_ credit but it will likely not deter _all_ banks from issuing you _all_ credit products.

<comment><USER2> I'm curious: say you freeze your credit and then take an action that should negatively affect your credit, e.g. skip out on paying a doctor. What happens? That's nearly identical to what a fraudster _might_ do, except there is no fraudster.

How does the system differentiate between someone showing up and doing something in your name vs you actually showing up and doing something negative?

<comment><USER23> It works because nearly every institution that would "extend credit" relies on the reports from these agencies to decide to do so. So when they try to pull a report (for you or a fraudster) they get back "sorry, frozen" and that causes them to actually stop and try to actually verify the true identity of the person requesting the loan. If that is you (the proper owner) then you can 'unfreeze' for the purpose of obtaining the loan. If that is a fraudster, they will likely not have your pin's to do the unfreeze, so the bank/business says "no" to the request for money.

[edit: spelling]

<comment><USER2> I suppose a doctor's office and the dentist are two of the rare exceptions. I can't think of any others.

(They generally don't ask for payments till the end.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I had my "identity" stolen by someone who tried to open accounts at local banks after somehow managing to swipe a copy of my drivers license (from our mail box, as far as we know) and seemingly only was able to rent a Uhaul in my name (unbeknownst to me until I tried to rent one to move).

The banks kicked him back and he tried forging checks from others (not me).

I filed the reports with the police. And checked my credit. Nothing serious happened as he seems to have been pretty much thwarted by most places he went.

But then he got caught when he was pulled over for having a brake light out.

All in all I suffered no real harm from this guy. Seems like for the most part the system works...

<comment><USER25> My old flatmate was the victim of identity theft around 2010. After tons of paperwork, calling banks, closing accounts, working with the police .. he still lost about $3k that he didn't feel it was worth to try to recover.

You just got lucky and caught it early.

<comment><USER26> How did he lose $3k?

I've been curious about the real-world impacts of identity theft for quite some time. In the article linked, the author's only obvious losses were a) on the home mortgage (couldn't cosign; worse rate) and b) at the airport, with TSA (which I don't get; how did his credit rating have an impact on the secondary security screening?).

It's unclear to me why I should care that much about identity theft, or what a thief can do. I'm not saying it wouldn't be a huge hassle to get calls from scammed creditors or be unable to obtain consumer credit, but I am fortunate enough not to need credit and I already have the credit cards and bank accounts I need.

There is the whole IRS fraudulent return thing, which could be quite tedious to sort out and meantime would take real money. But that's about all I can think of unless you need consumer credit.

<comment><USER27> You've never lived in a state where your car insurance premium depends on your credit score, have you. I think you understand perfectly well the problems identity theft can cause, but you're just being intentionally obtuse.

> It's unclear to me... what a thief can do.

Um... well... how about anything you can do with your identity, except it's someone else? Do you really not understand why that's a bad thing?

<comment><USER26> > You've never lived in a state where your car insurance premium depends on > your credit score, have you.

Hmm, I don't know, to be honest. That hadn't occurred to me.

> I think you understand perfectly well the problems identity theft can cause, > but you're just being intentionally obtuse.

Huh? No, I was asking a question. Why would someone be intentionally obtuse about something like this? I can't figure out how my comment was misinterpreted, but it certainly was. I apologize for my lack of clarity in the original post.

> Um... well... how about anything you can do with your identity, except it's > someone else? Do you really not understand why that's a bad thing?

"Anything you can do" isn't very clear, hence my desire to understand the threat better. Assuming I have no need for consumer credit (like, actual loans), it's just not clear to me in which cases a bad credit score can be a problem. Auto insurance had not occurred to me, so thanks for that example.

Once again, I think you may have misinterpreted my comment in some manner. Do people really troll each other over, like, identity theft? Weird. But I wasn't. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I submitted this like 2 days ago :D [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15247810](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15247810)

<comment><USER29> Sometimes things get attention and sometimes they don't. Also sometimes it's a slow news weekend and other times there's a ton happening. Don't ever stress about whether your submission gets traction.

<comment><USER28> No worries man, m just sayin

<comment><USER30> It might be worth reading Dang's comment history discussing reposts: [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=dang%20porous&sort=byPopularit...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=dang%20porous&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=comment)

It feels shitty when someone else gets the points for something you submitted earlier, but life isn't always fair, and as long as you keep submitting good content and making good comments, things even out in the end.

<comment><USER31> Plus karma ain't worth jack.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Honeycast – View, setup and record honeypot sessions - <AUTHOR> http://honeycast.io/

<comment><USER2> I know what a honeypot is. And I know what a cast is. Can you provide more on what I am actually viewing though? Not clear.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure. You're looking at recorded sessions of real attacks on our honeypots. The commands they're entering, the malware they are uploading.

<comment><USER2> Guess the sessions I looked at just were not quite what I expected to see... perhaps that's the interesting part?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> what's up with all these eastern casting hack sessions?</comment>


Ask HN: Would You Be Interested in a Google Analytics Downloader SaaS - <AUTHOR> Hi HNers,
my idea is to create a SaaS where you can compile recipies for the GA Reporting API, i.e. you define metrics and dimensions and a set of segments. The service will then permutate the segments, download the data from GA Reporting API directly to your S3.
This could be used in your ETL pipeline.
Advantage: You don't have to care about handling pagination or quota limits, you just create your set of queries and get the ready CSVs in your S3. Additionally, this can keep historical CSVs, so that you would not have to query these again.
Would that be a good idea? Is there something else on the market (I've found nothing) or do people prefer doing this on their own within their ETL infrastructure (e.g. Airflow)?
Thanks! <comment><USER2> Isn't that what Biquery for Google Analytics does?</comment>


Overscripted: Digging into JavaScript execution at scale - <AUTHOR> https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/06/overscripted-digging-into-javascript-execution-at-scale/ <comment><USER2> > As champions of a healthy Internet, we at Mozilla have been increasingly > concerned about the current advertisement-centric web content ecosystem.

I don't understand this.

Isn't Mozilla's funding reliant on search engine royalties, generated via "the current advertisement-centric web content ecosystem"?

<comment><USER3> Yes, it is. Advertising is easy to complain about (and most are really just talking about the implementation) but there aren't any other options yet for the same scale.

<comment><USER4> So starting a conversation about alternatives is the right thing to do, as far as I can tell.

<comment><USER3> These conversations have started decades ago and are still in progress, but there has been no alternative solution yet. The current hype cycle is around blockchains for microtransactions and direct patronage but it remains to be seen.

On a personal side note, I find "start a conversation" to be one of the most cliched and overused ways to really say "someone somewhere should do something".</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Is fragmentation bad? - <AUTHOR> http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2008/03/is-fragmentation-bad.html

<comment><USER2> "Decentralization" would better convey the positive connotation he wants to emphasize than "fragmentation".

<comment><USER3> I agree, in a way. I clicked through because I was wondering how anyone could possibly consider disk fragmentation to be a good thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What happens if we extend this notion beyond online conversations?

Does it lead to gated communities? The segregated townships in South Africa? Ignoring people because they're not part of your fragment? To the extent that we make people into "others" we reduce their humanity. And it might be that full populated fragments would reduce any tendency you'd have towards reaching out and making an "other" someone in your fragment.

There was a meme some time back about the way that cable TV changed the nature of water-cooler conversations because no one watched the same stuff anymore. I'd argue it is even worse now, because you can hop over to TelevisionWithoutPity and have a substantive conversation with people that DO care about the retcon in the 8th season of Buffy. And you'll still have nothing to talk about at work.

Do we want things reduced to limiting possible cultural touchstones to sporting events?

I don't have answers, I'm just asking questions.

</comment><comment><USER5> I think users should create their own communities by picking the set of people whose posts they would like to see. These people may not be friends.

For example, for a discussion on startups, I might specify that I would like to see PG's posts along with any posts that PG would like to see.

One could also provide exceptions. I could for example exclude certain people from the set above as well as posts from people that they receive (though not excluding someone for which there's an acceptable path to that person).

Of course, such a scheme has problems since you may reply to someone's posts yet you are not included in the set of people whose posts he/she will see.

But maybe one can find a way to make this workable.

<comment><USER6> It works great if you pick the set of people whose _threads_ you would like to see. That way encourages discoverability since you see your 'followee's posts but also other people on those threads that you may find you're interested in.

This is the approach I took with my hystry interface for HN. I have whitelists and blacklists, and show _threads_ involving people on the whitelist but not _comments_ by people on the blacklist. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=71827>

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> One other advantage of fragmentation (which I'm surprised he did not touch) that became apparent as I've been trying ffeed is that I am free to say stuff relevant to me as opposed to a public forum with people who do not know me.

<comment><USER8> Yes, exactly. Because it's fragmented, it's also possible for it to be personal, and inside jokes or off topic comments are fun instead of annoying.

<comment><USER9> I like the idea of a inside jokes from sub communities. There was a cool talk about this recently: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBGIQ7ZuuiU>

I think a good unified commenting system that allowed for friending would be an alternative.

If comments from my friends boiled to the top of Disqus, it would be the best of both worlds. For Tipjoy, I had been thinking that using Disqus could be useful for comments if we could feed to and from the original thread on a blog.

<comment><USER10> So commenters could tip the blog poster for useful content, and likewise the poster could tip commenters to reward intriguing comments. Commenters could tip fellow commenters. Lurker nonmembers could tip everbody.

<comment><USER10> Yecch, I fat-fingered that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I bet someday somebody comes up with a formula that describes the optimal amount of fragmentation for any given community.

I would think that there must exist some sort of rational percentage of fragmentation that is beneficial to prevent stagnation, but above which creates a less than optimal signal-to-noise ratio and leads to a steady decline in the percentage of useful or substantive interaction.

Hmm, I can only hope whoever it is names it "Trevor's Law" :-P

</comment><comment><USER12> His argument could apply equally well to explain that the fragmentation (read: number of) Linux distributions is not such a bad thing either. It is just a sign people have freedom to do what they want, and guess what, when people have freedom, they will not always all do the same thing as everyone else.</comment>


All Winter 2016 Application AMA in one place - <AUTHOR> http://www.askmeanything.me/brands/ycombinator/?from=@ <comment><USER2> Putting plain text "Curated from hackernews and genius.com" is a shitty way of attributing where you've copied every piece of content from. Every piece of copied text has a source and context and likely discussion etc so you're really making all those answers a bit worse by not linking to them properly.

Attributing the content to the person who copy/pasted it is also unhelpful, who wrote the content is usually more valuable to know.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Every batch someone from YC does a Q&A.

Additionally YC partners give a lot of good startup advise at events, twitter etc.

We wanted to create a wiki of all YC related Q&A. You can submit any more by emailing firstname.lastname@example.com and we will have it posted with due credit to you and the original source. Also please share any feedback. We loved reading all of them. Hope you like it too!</comment>


Wine 1.8 is released - <AUTHOR> https://www.winehq.org/announce/1.8 <comment><USER2> I recently used Wine on Ubuntu and was amazed how smoothly it just worked. Download an msi Windows installer and open it just like you would in Windows. The program installs just like on Windows, and runs from its own icon just like in Windows. You hardly need to think about the fact that it's not Windows. Understandably there were a few compatibility problems but having it so well integrated into the UI was a surprise. It's perhaps almost good enough that you don't need to port your Windows application to Linux anymore. Just avoid the broken functionality. As a Windows programmer, I now keep Wine compatibility in mind when deciding to use new features and libraries and will be trying to remove incompatible code.

<comment><USER3> Interesting. Is that just Wine itself, or does Ubuntu/GNOME/whoever have some special sauce that facilitates the seamless desktop integration?

<comment><USER4> No real special sauce, but you have winetricks which has a few things to help solve common problems, and then winehq.org to see if others made a particular software/game on Linux.

I've found it to work remarkably well with games. Basically install Steam from Wine and then install Steam games like you normally would. It mostly just works.

I also installed and played "Path of Exile" through Wine with no problems. It's a fast, online hack 'n slash where if I died I would have to start over tens of hours of gameplay and Wine never let me down on latency or anything.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Thanks a lot to the team for these improvements

As a normal man, in addition to the technical changelog, what would be interesting for me to have is a list of software that can now be run by wine, or that have a significantly improved experience with this version compare to 1.7

<comment><USER6> Given the way Wine versioning works, I wouldn't expect any significant changes from the latest 1.7.x cycle. Wine uses the same versioning system that Linux used prior to (and perhaps after, I'm not sure) the 3.0 release. The second number represents a stable version if it's even or an unstable development version if it's odd. Odd releases are used to "build up" new features towards an even-numbered release.

<comment><USER7> That convention/development model was dropped with Linux 2.6. Current Linux is essentially still the 2.6 series. Linus just felt silly having the same major version number for ~8 years and has switched to incrementing it whenever the fancy strikes him.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm frequently surprised that wine just works even with the most obscure and odd programs, e.g. exe packed Flash SWFs and programs with weird custom GUIs.

<comment><USER9> Flash Player redistributables aren't really obscure, they're all the same program, so I'd imagine WINE would support it well.

<comment><USER8> Fair point. I somehow was under the false impression that no one ever uses these Flash Player projectors, but it seems to have been supported for a long time according to the WINE app DB. Still awesome. =D

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Great work by Wine team. I use Wine for a lot of Windows application but I could never make Office (2010 and later) work on Ubuntu. If I can somehow do that, probably I would never switch back to Windows. Open Office/Libre office is frustrating and so are most online word replacements.

<comment><USER11> Office 2010 should run under the commercial version of Wine dubbed Crossover: [https://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/crossover/microsof...](https://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/crossover/microsoft- office-2010)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> To those using it: did it happen to you at least once to find out that a specific application (or game) you really needed did not work with Wine? What was it?

<comment><USER13> Games are great and everything, but I'm still hoping for Visual Studio support. Ever since MS switched to a WPF-style UI (2010 and newer), it's been unusable. Here's the status for VS 2015 as of 1.7.49: [https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iI...](https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=32486) .

If I could get this, I could run Linux on all of my work dev machines. But I'm pretty sure the day this works is rather far away. Thankfully, people like Anastasius Focht have been extremely helpful in dealing with related issues.

<comment><USER12> Isn't it more realistic to expect that Visual Studio will be made binary- available by Microsoft itself on Linux or even open sourced at some time given the latest Microsoft turnarounds?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> One thing I'd like to note that some may not realize but ReactOS is based in part on Wine[0], so any improvements to Wine will likely find themselves to ReactOS where possible.I mention this because there was a recent post about ReactOS[1].

[0]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReactOS#Wine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReactOS#Wine)

[1]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10746799](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10746799)

</comment><comment><USER15> Nice! I'm excited to try out the 64bit support on OSX. Thank you to everyone that works on this!

</comment><comment><USER16> WINE is an amazing project. Big kudos to the team at CodeWeavers and all contributors.

</comment><comment><USER17> Native Pulseaudio support. Thank you!

<comment><USER18> Wine has Native JACK support. just install jack, and make pulsaudio its slave.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> What part of Windows would need to be made open in order to get a 100% Windows binary compatibility on Linux?

<comment><USER19> Windows binaries using win32.dll are working pretty universally nowadays. Even WinRT is pretty much implemented. Its all system support libraries and opening up Windows would not make the implementations come faster besides having better access to finding the bugs in the documented API that many programs expect.

For example, DX11 being opened up doesn't matter because it relies on the Windows driver model while Wine is translating HLSL and D3D calls to OpenGL, or Gallium-Nine is translating them to TGSI. Opening up most system libraries doesn't work, because they are all using Windows kernel primitives the Linux kernel won't have.

The complexity of Wine is more that Windows is a 30 year old maze of complexity with millions of independent APIs and callbacks implemented over the years without rhyme or reason, and a Windows exe can call any of them any time and get anything back because the APIs are anything but bugfree. You need to translate Windows soup to Posix soup and somehow get all the expected behavior the running program needs, and then on the backend they are supporting pretty much every non-Windows OS so they have to fight with all their targets quirks.

<comment><USER12> > millions of independent APIs and callbacks implemented over the years > without rhyme or reason, and a Windows exe can call any of them any time

Do you have a typical good example for this?

So, genuine question, are you suggesting that if Microsoft decided to do something about this, that would pretty much have to rewrite it from scratch?

<comment><USER19> [http://source.winehq.org/git/wine.git/tree/HEAD:/dlls](http://source.winehq.org/git/wine.git/tree/HEAD:/dlls)

These are all the system libraries Wine has reimplemented so far, and thats only up to its current near-DX10 support, and these libraries are just the base - most applications can ship their own copies of Windows libraries, but as long as the core libraries everything else depends upon work you can run other libs on top of them.

But a lot of Windows has been reimplemented between the old 3.1 era and now, and not just the kernel - MS has maintained fair backwards compatibility the whole say so new versions of the same API can be dramatically different in implementation.

If Microsoft wanted to support Windows executables on Unix they would need to just pick up where Wine is at now and continue their work, albeit with insider access to code to know all the edge cases of their own implementations of these APIs, since software is written against the bugs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Anyone know if there is a way to run MacOS X or iOS apps on Linux?

<comment><USER21> Darling: [https://www.darlinghq.org/](https://www.darlinghq.org/)

Previous HN discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6171925](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6171925)</comment></comment>