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Shine Solutions Group
Company blog · shinesolutions.comprogrammingbusiness
Shine Solutions Group is the company blog at shinesolutions.com, writing about programming and business. Since 2016, 24 different Hacker News readers have linked it 29 times, most often “Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names – With Examples”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-09-14, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (19) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Its follow-up to the 'Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names' list gives concrete examples, and HN commenters link it whenever name handling comes up in discussion.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 19 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Technology consultants and developers specialising in Digital Platforms & Apps, AWS Cloud Solutions, Cloud Managed Services, and more.
Most-linked posts?
- Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names – With Examples19 people · 21 mentions · first linked 2018-07-27
What Hacker News says?
Maybe it could be added to the list of falsehoods programmers believe about names: https://shinesolutions.com/2018/01/08/falsehoods-programmers...
Comment linking /2018/01/08/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names-with-examples/
on “NULL license plate not such a bright idea”Submitted Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names – With Examples as a story · 159 points
HN discussionIt's always annoyed me that the blog post above didn't contain examples, and I'm grateful that someone posted a latter post that does contain examples: https://shinesolutions.com/2018/01/08/falsehoods-programmers...
Comment linking /2018/01/08/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names-with-examples/
on “My name causes an issue with any booking”Submitted Using Google Cloud AutoML to Classify Poisonous Australian Spiders as a story · 107 points
HN discussionDon't assume anything about names, let a user enter whatever they wish - https://shinesolutions.com/2018/01/08/falsehoods-programmers...
Comment linking /2018/01/08/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names-with-examples/
on “My name causes an issue with any booking”Submitted Falsehoods programmers believe about names – with examples (2018) as a story · 87 points
HN discussionYes. AWS biggest advantage now is the giant marketplace of vendors and partners so you can get help and managed services for just about anything. In my experience, most startups just want managed options they can run themselves rather than engaging partners but if that's what you need then AWS will have more companies to offer, although GCP does have qualified partners. I recommend contacting one of the GCP develope…
Comment linking /
on “Twitter migrates data to Google Cloud”Submitted Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names – With Examples as a story · 5 points
HN discussionNext time you get a "Cannot read property <x> of undefined" error at runtime, take a moment to trace why it happened, then read https://shinesolutions.com/2017/01/06/writing-safer-code-wit...
Comment linking /2017/01/06/writing-safer-code-with-typescript-strict-null-checks-type-guards/
on “Svelte and TypeScript”Submitted Falsehoods programmers believe about names (with examples) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI find the idea of expecting names from other cultures to follow the customs of one's culture to be quite curious. https://shinesolutions.com/2018/01/08/falsehoods-programmers... (but, in any case, this discussion here on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18567548 provides some nuance)
Comment linking /2018/01/08/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names-with-examples/
on “I couldn't debug the code because of my name”Submitted Google BigQuery hits the gym to beef up even more as a story · 3 points
HN discussion> nobody's surname needs 128 bytes I believe that's #6 falsehoods programmers believe about names (with examples) https://shinesolutions.com/2018/01/08/falsehoods-programmers... Ingoring multi byte characters there are still plenty of long names https://www.ancestry.com/c/ancestry-blog/discovering-the-his... If you're going to try for a "reasonable" max name length it would probably need to be at least 4kb.
Comment linking /2018/01/08/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names-with-examples/
on “I'm not a fan of strlcpy(3)”Submitted 10 amazing secrets to become a truly professional software developer as a story · 2 points
HN discussionIt's always annoyed me that this blog post above didn't contain examples, and I'm grateful that someone here on HN in another thread posted a later post that does contain examples: https://shinesolutions.com/2018/01/08/falsehoods-programmers...
Comment linking /2018/01/08/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names-with-examples/
on “Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names (2010)”Submitted A Pragmatic Approach to Removing Known Vulnerabilities in Software as a story · 1 points
HN discussion> Scenarios to try: Use “ “ (space) as a delimiter with TEXTBEFORE to extract the first name and TEXTAFTER to extract the last name I guess this warrants linking to https://shinesolutions.com/2018/01/08/falsehoods-programmers... .
Comment linking /2018/01/08/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names-with-examples/
on “New Text and Array Functions for Excel”Submitted AWS re:Invent 2019 – from the comfort of your own home as a story · 1 points
HN discussionhttps://shinesolutions.com/2018/01/08/falsehoods-programmers...
Comment linking /2018/01/08/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names-with-examples/
on “It’s hard to have an unusual name in China”Submitted Analysing Stack Overflow Comment Sentiment Using Google Cloud Platform as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI like how the article provides examples, that's what I was always missing in the original articles; fortunately there are versions with examples now, e.g.: https://shinesolutions.com/2018/01/08/falsehoods-programmers... . I wish there were more points though; at the moment there are only five, while the linked "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names" had more than 30.
Comment linking /2018/01/08/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names-with-examples/
on “Falsehoods programmers believe about Biometrics”https://shinesolutions.com/2018/01/08/falsehoods-programmers... gives examples. One counter-example for "People have, at this point in time, one full name which they go by." I learned from the 2020 election concerned the Georgia voter fraud claim that someone used the name "James Blalock" to vote, years after he died in January 2006. Thing is, it was his 96-year-old widow, "Mrs. James Blalock Jr.", who voted. That w…
Comment linking /2018/01/08/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names-with-examples/
on “Your last name contains invalid characters (2010)”Okay but that's a terrible example: lots of people don't have the same last name despite being married. So you better use separate fields for that if you want "last names". But of course, programmers famously have no idea what names are, resulting in a never ending stream of "why the fuck won't you let me use the name that I have?" for anything from ecommerce to government websites, so you really shouldn't even have…
Comment linking /2018/01/08/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names-with-examples/
on “Browsers, JSON, and FormData”> I wish there was a similar list: Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Human Names. There is: * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18567548 * Points to: https://shinesolutions.com/2018/01/08/falsehoods-programmers... * Which references: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-... Also, "A curated list of falsehoods programmers believe in." * https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-falsehood
Comment linking /2018/01/08/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names-with-examples/
on “Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Phone Numbers (2016)”I think on the technical end, if you're serious about writing a valid checklist, it will probably be as easy to write code that does it. And those end up as frameworks, even if it's as simple as https://html5boilerplate.com/ There's a lot of noise out there because of all the consultants trying to do marketing. And while some, like Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names [1] are actually helpful, the line between…
Comment linking /2018/01/08/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names-with-examples/
on “Ask HN: CTO to-do list for new software product startup”I find this follow on article really helpful: https://shinesolutions.com/2018/01/08/falsehoods-programmers... It contains concrete examples of each of the ideas listed in the first article.
Comment linking /2018/01/08/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names-with-examples/
on “I Changed My Name”Looks 5NF enough to me. That being said, names is an awful example; if you have to assume a specific structure from someone's name you kinda already lost [1][2]. Better to just assume it's a opaque mutable unicode string and hope for the best. [1] https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-... [2] https://shinesolutions.com/2018/01/08/falsehoods-programmers...
Comment linking /2018/01/08/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names-with-examples/
on “Nulls Nullified (2005)”names are not that easy though. https://shinesolutions.com/2018/01/08/falsehoods-programmers...
Comment linking /2018/01/08/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names-with-examples/
on “Random digits is not enough to uniquely identify all human beings”Someone else decided to write a follow-up with examples: https://shinesolutions.com/2018/01/08/falsehoods-programmers...
Comment linking /2018/01/08/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names-with-examples/
on “Ask HN: How to handle Asian-style “Family name first” when designing interfaces?”
