Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by pteraspidomorph | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

pteraspidomorph

...of Ulm ;)

Name forms really should just be:

Your full legal name: [accepts anything, modifies nothing]

Shortened name of your choice for our UI: [can have restrictions, esp. length]

View on HN

I feel like the pattern of names in the UI comes from wanting to justify collecting the name in the first place. What is it actually good for?

Hello X near the content you're looking for is a confirmation that you're logged in; without having to look at the header (which is usually more explicit). Having a friendly name there is an attempt to use less space.

Indeed. I consider "gender" even sillier - e.g. Facebook adding 100s of different genders to their website - how about just removing the field altogether? Same about "legal sex" - why would the government care in the first place?! (Doctors might, but the rest of the government, not really.)

This is for Facebook's ad targeting. They want advertisers to be able to advertise to 21-24 year old women in California.

They can probably infer it as accurately as asking people. The inference isn't always accurate, but people don't always tell the truth, either.

They can do both. Someone lying or their inference being wrong about their gender is yet another new data point.

Different sexes have different civic obligations. E.g. Selective Service, a.k.a the draft, in the US.

Sounds like it's ripe for a discrimination lawsuit.

> Sounds like it's ripe for a discrimination lawsuit.

Such a lawsuit has occurred:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Coalition_for_Men_v._...

I can see wanting to know what pronouns someone uses so you can autogenerate reasonable sentences about that person (i.e. "Tomp marked himself safe from the rabid bears in Honolulu")

When I'm looking at my contacts in Google Docs or Slack or whatever it's critical to have the names there. If it was bigchungus12@gmail.com and db23423@exxon.com it would be very annoying.

Phone, email, messenger, basically any collaboration software? My university assigned email addresses by initials - e.g. if you name was John Anderson Smith and you were the 167th person with the initials JAS, you'd be jas167@example.edu. Which is easier to find, search, and read in a contact list - John Smith or jas167?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com