Yeah fuck foreigners who want to be able to spell their own name right.

tsimionescu 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

In all cultures, there is an expectation that you have to provide a name for yourself that is intelligible to the culture you're interacting with, both in written language and in speech. If your name is Albert and you are going to interact with many Japanese speakers, you'll have to call yourself アルバート in writing and pronounce your name as something like "Ah roo bay toe" to fit in. If you have a name whose pronunciation depends heavily on tones, such as a Mandarin or Vietnamese name, and you are going to interact with speakers of a non-tonal language, you'll have to come up with a version that you're happy with even if pronounced in the default neutral tone that those people will naturally use. If your name is 高山, you'll have to spell it as Takayama.

Similarly, if you're going to create an identifier for yourself that is supposed to be usable in an international context, you'll have to use the lowest common denominator that is acceptable in that context - and that happens to be a-zA-Z0-9. Why the Latin alphabet and numerals and not, say, Arabic, you might ask? Because Chinese and Indian and Arabic speakers are far more likely to be familiar with the Latin alphabet than with each other's writing systems.

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skrebbel 6 hours ago | parent [-]

The article has examples about people naming themselves "Аdministrator". That's not about machine-readable identifiers, it's about display names. This entire subthread is either people missing that and thinking they're talking about login usernames and the likes, in which case I don't disagree, or people actually believing it's OK to limit people's screen names to a-zA-Z0-9 in which case I say, that's deeply imperialistic and a super shit thing to do.

	▲	popcornricecake 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Is HN "deeply imperialistic and super shit" too? Or is it okay because there's no option to set a display name?

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kgeist 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

For logins, we're already used to the fact that they're expected to be in Latin. Having them in the native alphabet is more trouble than it's worth (one system supports it, another breaks etc., easier to remember one, in Latin, across systems) I'd be irritated though if I couldn't use my native alphabet in the user profile for the first name/last name

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integralid 6 hours ago | parent [-]

>Please provide your name exactly as it is in your government documents.

>This is extremely important. Failure to comply will lead to termination of your service with no refund, criminal prosecution, our CEO calling you in tears and a hitman being informed about your last known location

...

Validation error: "First name" contains invalid characters.

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kgeist 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Heh, I had this exact thing when getting certified at Microsoft (remotely). They required me to enter my name exactly as it appears on my government ID (not a single Latin character), but their registration site... simply blocked any characters outside of Latin. I had to obtain an international travel passport to get the "official" transliteration of my name

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netsharc 5 hours ago | parent [-]

I've gotten a visa to a country that doesn't use Latin characters. My name got transliterated. At the bottom of the visa there's the machine-readable field that uses ASCII characters, and my name lost a character (a OU became just U).

	▲	kgeist 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It's also fun when the official transliteration rules suddenly change: a visa/passport issued in one year has a different name in Latin than a passport issued in another year. I was once two separate people :)

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diacritical 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think restricting the allowed characters should apply to usernames and other unique identifiers that can lead to confusion (admin vs аdmin with a Cyrillic "а"). So if I write my name as "José", I should be able to make an account called "Jose" and still enter "José" in the name field, if such a field exists in the first place. Although I'm not even sure about this.

If you're saying that "José" should be accepted as an username, shouldn't "Борис" or "김" or "金" also be valid?

It makes sense to restrict the alphabet for things like usernames that should be unique, should be easy to read for security reasons and should be correctly handled by various types of backend software.

I'm not from the US and my name isn't ASCII, but I wouldn't mind spelling it with the English alphabet, even in a name field.

I also don't understand how English has 26 letters, but letters like "é" in "José" or "ï" in "naïve" appear as normal letters. And if I write "Jose" instead, it would read as offensive. In my language that uses Cyrillic, the letters of the alphabet are all the letters we use, period. It would just be wrong to borrow a letter from another alphabet, even if it's the same script, just because someone's name includes it in their language. I have a friend from a neighboring country that changed one of his Cyrillic letters when he came to my country. I would do the same if I went to his country and they didn't have a letter we have.

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silon42 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

As someone with non-ASCII name, I'd like a unicode whitelist (system wide if possible).

And special features to mark cyrillic or other for-me-dangerous characters.