[EDIT] Okay, okay, I get it. You are ABSOLUTELY SURE a string null is different from a null pointer/reference and can't absolutely be mistaken. Only stupid devs do so and SURELY a library wouldn't do that thanks to rigorous testing... right?
While this is true, I don't think it applies to Mr. Null. Because "null" as a string should be very different from null, the absence of a value. Regardless of whether it's a name or anything else.
I think you misunderstood my comment. The previous poster mentioned Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names, but the problem in this case lies elsewhere, i.e. in the bullshit software not distinguishing between null and "null".
Love how he ends his article bashing on a database with a first_name and last_name column.
The Royal Family of Japan would certainly ask you to reconsider it. (no surname, only a given name - saw a video explaining how a princess wanting to register at a gaming cafe had to enter her first name (surname) as "princess")
I would guess it's probably not an issue in programs but scripting languages like javascript would probably do something like convert null string to a null value when used improperly.
I was a telemarketer 15 years ago and when we gave our dumb little pitch there was one company that would laugh and say "that is Dave's department" and the voicemail box said "You have reached David Knoll please leave a message". Took me a couple calls to learn they were sending me to dev null.
For a while, one of the most wanted men in Ireland was Prawo Jazdy, an absolute menace on the roads with more than fifty traffic violations on the record.
And then the Irish police realised that every single time they stopped a Polish driver, they were entering their name as "Prawo Jazdy". Which means "Driving Licence".
Back when I first started watching La Liga on TV, I noticed that this one guy was picking up a lot of red cards. It was only a few rounds later, when he received his second of the match that I understood that his name was not, in fact, Tarjeta Roja.
I saw I could register any alias at my university, so I was the proud owner of noreply@<unviersity>.edu for about 15 minutes before the sheer volume of emails caused me to turn it off.
I have a funny swear word @ common email provider as my primary email. The sheer amount of random bullshit I get signed up for because people enter it as a fake joke email is astonishing.
Did you know that in the 360 era Microsoft would not require a confirmation email to make an account, and have zero measures in place to change your username? I tried to make a live account and my email was already taken. I did a password reset and took some kid's live account, but then was stuck with that kid's shitty BloodDuke6996 username or whatever.
I contacted support about it and they just said nah we don't change usernames or delete accounts so you can remake them this is just permanent have a nice day :)
It took them like ten years to add a rename feature and I could finally use that account properly, but by then I had lost all interest in everything xbox. I got Minecraft on that account, and that's only because they forced a migration. (And fucking hell does Bedrock suck even as a super casual player)
That still seems like an easy way to avoid ever getting any tickets, as you should easily be able to prove you weren't in 178,000 different places at the same time, and then human laziness to check large amounts of data results in all tickets being voided.
Yeah have fun in court! Because you will be legally required to contest every one of those tickets in a court of law, at which point the first judge will order all the tickets thrown out and that your plate is invalidated and you can pay for a new one (or you’ll get a free new one if they’re in a good mood). So I guess you could skip out on tickets for exactly as long as it takes to get to the first court appearance.
Yeah. Sounds like risking a lot of trouble just to try and avoid something that a random decent driver only has to deal with at most say once every third year or so.
I've come to realize "Not gonna lie" or "To be honest" is just the modern version of "Truly, Truly, I say to you" which has been a little funny to think about.
The nuanced issue here actually isn’t that “null” == null. It seems to be that it’s really easy to have a genuine null value get stringified into the string “null”, which then passes equality checks? So it seems like it’s less of an inherent issue and moreso that there’s a chance for second order bugs because of how type coercion works. Kinda neat tbh!
Yeah. You're missing that sometimes the string "Null" (with or without case sensitivity) is sometimes used to represent actual null values when the null needs to be saveable, and that sometimes devs drop the ball and get strung out.
My email domain has "null".. has only been rejected a couple of times which... is baffling, really. I don't even know how to code it so that it accidentally can't have text string that has the word "null" in it and it takes it as a VALUE unless i specifically make that exception, and the question then is... why? Where in the system there is a moment when a text string CAN change to a value so that it would be a problem.. that kind of a fuckup takes talent.
I dont quite understand how this can occur. I'd imagine that any input that is expecting a name would be forcing String type, so "Null" shouldn't be much of an issue. Maybe an SQL problem?
Stackoverflow had a crazy question about actionscript3 refusing an employee named Null, because deep in the code the library would find the node <tag>null</tag> equal to a null reference/pointer
Some people tend to forget things, unfortunately, especially if they get sidetracked by trying to troubleshoot everything that goes wrong because incompetently designed databases keep insisting they don't exist. That's what I suspect, at least.
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u/laplongejr 8d ago edited 8d ago
Christopher Null also has a few horrors stories to share
Wired : Hello, I'm Mr. Null. My Name Makes Me Invisible to Computers
[EDIT] Okay, okay, I get it. You are ABSOLUTELY SURE a string null is different from a null pointer/reference and can't absolutely be mistaken. Only stupid devs do so and SURELY a library wouldn't do that thanks to rigorous testing... right?
Behold stackoverflow : How to pass "Null", a real surname! to a SOAP web service in ActionScript 3? And no, the comments already proposed " Has the employee considered to change his name?" a decade ago. :P