Besides the humor of how Lyft's filter flagged traditionally Caucasian names like "Cummings" – in addition to the usual issues with non-Western names, e.g. Pimpong and Poon – I'm fascinated/confused how this made it into production? The user database already exists and was currently being used by the live application. Before deploying this new filter onto the production database, wouldn't you do a dry run to get not only the count of users who will be flagged and notified, but a listing of frequently flagged names? Which you could easily manually eyeball to make sure there weren't obvious false positives?
With a userbase as big as Lyft's, I'm sure there were a ton of obvious true positives (anyone named "Fuck", ostensibly). I just can't believe they didn't notice a surname as relatively common as Cumming/Cummings. Yes, the apparent naivety of the regex is an issue, but this seems like a system for which a lot of testing on actual data would be easy and natural to do as part of the QA process.
It always amazes me when US Americans talk in terms of human races like it's the most normal thing in the world. And no, “Cummings“ is not a “Caucasian name“ (whatever that is supposed to mean), it's an English name. I don't want sound too harsh, it's just that as a Central European with all our recent history, things like this really rub me the wrong way.
As an American I agree and this was also my reaction to the comment.
There are a number of these things, though. I personally get a little irritated with the way many people here use terms like "Hispanic" to contrast with "white people". To me, "Hispanic" is a wide spectrum of ethnicities but really more of a linguistic, cultural and national/political specifier, with lots of overlap with "white". People who are trying to be correct about this will pull out complicated phrases like "non-hispanic whites" which may be correct but are also clumsy, reflecting the absurdity of the way we categorize this country's social boundaries in the first place. "White" itself has had a fluid definition in the US over time, previously having excluded southern or eastern Europe, Jews, or even the Irish.
I know that in my own recent ancestry I have at least 4 European ethnicities, some of which would have been ridiculed by other Americans in the past. But this nuance washes away and I am a "white guy" which lumps me together with cultures I don't particularly identify with. There is no sense in denying, for example, that I am less discriminated against by appearance than other groups. But I do not think either that there is one homogeneous "white people" living in the United States.
Thanks for you comment! After all, the concept of "ethnicity" is highly debated and numerous definitions exist (just have a look at the wikipedia article). Many European countries don't even ask for "ethnicity" in their census; cultural minorities are often rather defined by their language because this is what practically matters regarding things like school, traffic signs, offices, court, etc.
Therefore I find it pretty odd that in the USA the idea of a uniform European "ethnicity" - largely defined by skin color! - is still very common and even officially practiced. I remember how I had to fill a form when entering the USA which asked for my "ethnicity". I was flabbergasted and just ticked "unknown" or something like that because I didn't want to identify myself as "Caucasian".
Officially practiced doesn't mean ideas are current and common. Government forms tend to be fossilized examples of culture and conventional wisdom from (sometimes many) decades ago. This is not unique to the US.
> Every form I can remember seeing in the US that asks whether you are Hispanic says that it includes people of any race.
Yes, that is the "correct" thing that goes on the form, written by people who have bothered to look into this question. It isn't how people talk in casual speech.
The kind you are likely to hear talking to random Americans. A lot of people you are likely to meet, of diverse backgrounds and origins, will talk about it imprecisely, and as if white and hispanic are contrasting terms.
I personally do not. Nor do those forms you are talking about. But it something I hear a lot out in the world.
Caucasian is a funny word to apply to Europeans since its a part of the area around present day Georgia and is a highly diverse ethnic mix of people which most people would classify as Central Asian (like Turks and Armenians for instance). Not exactly what you would think would be "white" which is what many Americans assume it means.
It does mean white/of European origin in American English. Just like entree means main dish. Both don’t correspond to the original meaning of the words.
You can find similar shifts in meaning in other languages too (e.g., German calls a mobile/cell phone “Handy” which makes no sense to a native English speaker).
I question the wisdom of telling native speakers that their language uses a word wrong/that doesn’t mean what “they assume it means”. Stuff in AE (and other language) means exactly what AE speakers (and speakers of other languages) assume it means.
Cau·ca·sian
/kôˈkāZHən/
NORTH AMERICAN
white-skinned; of European origin.
‘Handy’ comes from the WWII ‘handie talkie’, a transceiver small enough to hold in the hand¹, which followed the ‘walkie talkie’, a transceiver small enough to walk around with².
Meanwhile, at least in the modern US, "walkie talkie" is the name of the handheld unit and "handie talkie" would get weird looks because it's not really known.
I find that highly doubtful, since around 50 years passed between WWII and the advent of mobile phones. I heard that "handy" was some early model by Motorola.
> Not exactly what you would think would be "white" which is what many Americans assume it means.
Because that's exactly how some people teach the definition to mean.[0] I've always been told that to the people in Persia, the people that came across the Caucasus were much more pale skinned. Teachings also say those same people helped populate Europe.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_people
Race is not a uniquely American concept. The Germans were the ones who first came up with the idea of a Caucasian race back in the 18th century. You're not wrong though, we should use White European instead since that's what it means today.
> The Germans were the ones who first came up with the idea of a Caucasian race back in the 18th century.
Yes, but it has been completely abandoned by the scientific and political mainstream for decades now. Using the word "Caucasian" will definitely give you some strange looks ;-)
> You're not wrong though, we should use White European instead since that's what it means today.
I agree, because it would make it clear what it is really about: lumping people together by their skin color. This is one of those examples where PC speech only helps to hide a problem instead of solving it.
That really doesn't resolve anything, and just further demonstrates the really weird relationship with race and nationality that Americans have.
Namely: Why would it be called "white EUROPEAN" when basically none of the people it is applied to are European in any reasonable sense of the word? They may have great-great-great-grandparents who were European, but that does not make them European.
Americans do this all the time - they call themselves "german", "irish", or "italian", even when they are not born there, do not speak the language, have never even visited the country, and have zero exposure to the culture of that country.
This is a debate about language conventions, I can assure you that 0% of Americans claiming to be European in this sense actually think they live in Europe or are actual Europeans. There are some that speak the language and have exposure to the culture, but that is not what they are saying in this context.
In America, a nation of immigrants, people are often proud of where their family came from. This can trickle down a few generations. There is an increasing number of people that identify as "American" instead of where their family originally immigrated from, particularly in Appalachia and the South, so this could eventually change.
I understand the frustration from a European point of view, but I just wanted to provide some context to the phenomenon.
> have zero exposure to the culture of that country.
Even when that’s true—-and it often isn’t--they usually mean that they’re part of a specific American subculture.
Italian-Americans, for example, traditionally celebrate Christmas Eve with a “Feast of the Seven Fishes.” This dinner isn’t traditional in Italy, but it’s also not common in other American cultures either. An Irish-American family might have a turkey instead but they’re more likely to “observe” St. Patrick’s Day by eating soda bread and corned beef.
Yeah, no name filter is going to be perfect for all edge cases. But presumably, it's a lot cheaper to have the Lyft support team handle email tickets from the relatively few Professor Fucks, than to have them also deal with every Cummings and Dick.
Or just not filter names on an app like Lyft. You can't even see other users' names. Who is potentially being harmed by even a malicious Professor Fuck?
Drivers? Cannot imagine it being a big problem people having really offensive names though, after all you are actually meeting the driver irl and expect them to.. well, drive you.
If the drivers are harmed, why not just allow people to use their name regardless of offensiveness and then just display it to drivers as "Professor F*". Sure, it's not ideal but it prevents people arbitrarily being kicked off the system and from drivers being offended by their passengers' names.
If your driver’s name was Hitler Did Nothing Wrong Nazis Rule, would you want to drive with them? I think name filtering like this is incredibly dumb and have never seen a good implementation of it. But “don’t be offended” is rarely the blanket answer people seem to think it is.
Don’t know much about Lyft in particular, but with the amount of reports and cancellations you get with a name like that you’d get booted of the platform pretty quickly, no?
It is not the same for drivers though. Drivers have to use their real name as in their driving licence . I doubt that a registered legal name is going to be that kind of offensive.
Drivers have to go the in-personal approval thing first though, and they'd present their driver's license that would have their name on it - so the Lyft/Uber/etc employee who approves their driver status would presumably also verify that their name is real.
Not only do drivers see your name, but I believe when you do a Shared Lyft, other riders also see your first name. And customer support will see your name as well.
In general, just because someone is providing a service to you (e.g. driving you, providing customer support, etc) doesn't mean they should be unnecessarily exposed to offensive language.
It’s not “offensive language” if it’s legitimately part of someone’s name (and I don’t mean the obvious bullshit cases, but cases where someone has had the name since birth).
They are as dumb and undesirable as incomplete regex email filters in web forms.
Every single one ever written will have this problem. And ironically, absolutely nobody reading a fart joke will ever be offended. But the millions of people who are denied service and not twitter famous enough to reach a dot-com employee are very much offended.
...Also, the single reason to add those auto-censorship features is to please advertisers, not to protect users/drivers from fart jokes.
And what about Mr. Fucks, the fast food worker with no network to get his issues in front of a Lyft employee? He's probably just unable to use the service.
My point was not to defend the blacklisting of expletives. I remember a CS prof giving us dozens of legitimate uses, including people with Scunthorpe domain email not having their mail delivered. My point was that Mr Fucks is not as helpless as he seems and probably spells his name Fuchs when entering his name into a computer because he can't tell which system is poorly designed and which is not.
This is all bullshit anyway. A word is just a word and whenever it insults somebody it's their own problem. I would rather change my actual name to Fuck if I wasn't too lazy to deal with problems like that.
I once read a story of a Vietnamese man named Hui. He had to go to the court to protect his right to be named this way in Ukraine where the word is used widely and has only one meaning - a dick.
A word is just a word and whenever it insults somebody it's their own problem.
There was a study linked to on HN a couple of years ago that found that babies recognize swear words even before they have language skills, and that people can sometimes recognize swear words in languages they don't speak. It has to do with the tone and sharpness of the sounds.
Babies are recognizing the act of swearing at someone rather than the particular word being spoken.
The baby wouldn't experience the father's name as a swear word unless the conversation was for example about the dicks new girlfriend and his wife's assessment of the matter.
> A word is just a word and whenever it insults somebody it's their own problem.
That's what you think the world should be like, not the way it is. If your name is Adolfhitler Smith, a perfectly legal name in the US, then you will have trouble getting hired.
That's a made up example, but there's evidence[1] that unusual (not necessarily obscene) names will lead to less success in job applications.
If you have a "bad" name, it's your problem well before anyone else's.
This is a nonsensical argument. A word has meaning, which is why it is a word and not a sound.
If I yell insults at you, you are saying that doesn't mean anything? And if you get insulted, it is your own fault?
No, words have meaning based on a common understanding between the person saying the word and the person hearing the word. If I insult you and you understand it, it is me who did the insulting, it is not 'your problem'
You should try this argument out in court: "No, your honor... I can't be guilty of threatening to kill someone.. sure I said, 'I am going to kill you tomorrow at 5pm', but those were just words! If the person felt threatened, that is on them!"
Yes. It's just sounds that you hear, then your brain recognizes and turns them into words with meaning. How you react to the meaning is entirely within your consciousness. This is how you might pick up words from languages you don't know if the sounds are similar, yet you wouldn't claim to be insulted by them.
> "If the person felt threatened, that is on them""
Yes, your feelings are your own, nobody else controls them. That's one of the fundamentals of free speech. There are some very limited situations (like threats) where it's overruled, not because of your feelings but because of the intentions being forecast. Even then, there's a very high bar to prove any criminal intent there.
> How you react to the meaning is entirely within your consciousness.
Considering that it is often very easy to guess how people will “react to the meaning” of the sounds you make, it’s often considered polite to refrain from making them when they would probably offend.
In such a case I would just assume you are stupid or something and keep on my business. If you don't have capacity to ignore that kind of noise you probably need treatment. Threats, however, are a different story.
You shouldn't care much if some random people express their opinion which is you're a moron (unless you meet such people often - then it might be a good idea to actually make sure there is nothing wrong with you or you are not hanging out in a wrong place) - ignoring insults usually causes better consequences than reacting to them. At the same time you usually should be worried if somebody threatens to kill you, ignoring threats can often get you in a real trouble.
This is very much the same argument I hear online on why it's ok to use the word, nigger, and even why it is ok to call black people that word. Words have meaning and swear words have meaning and history to their usage.
If you yell insults at me, I will be offended. It doesn't matter if the words you use are "fuck off", "f*k off" or even "would you be so kind as to vacate the premises by the violent application of a large phallic-shaped object on your rear end".
The entire discussion here has been about being offended by a word, even though that word is used in a context which is not offensive at all.
Right, but that is because of a flaw in their attempts to fix the problem of trying to stop people who are setting their names in attempt to insult and offend people.
Some people are trying to insult and offend, so they set their names as offensive and insulting names... in an attempt to stop that, Lyft messed up and blocked non-offensive names that share the same words as the offensive ones.
That doesn't mean words can't be insulting and offensive, it just means context matters and algorithms have trouble with context.
Does the skin color of the person vibrating the air impart some intrinsic quality to it?
The point of the comment above is that the meaning is informed by the listener, you can import all the traumas and neuroses of those around you or you can listen mindfully and limit the impact to whatever is the speaker's intent and capacity to harm you.
I just tried to create a driver's account on Lyft's website. There's an initial page where you give them your name. And then, deeper into the process, a form for supplying your name as it officially appears on your driver's license.
Which makes sense. There's likely a lot of drivers who want to go by "Tom" instead of "Thomas" or whatever their full official name is – which is even more important for drivers with very uncommon names who want to go by something more familiar/pronounceable. There's probably a decent safety argument for not requiring drivers to have their full real names be accessible to the user, especially in cases where a driver has an uncommon (i.e. easy to doxx) name.
I hear the argument but taxi drivers were always required to show their real name, so the same should apply to Lyft drivers.
The privacy of the driver is outweighed by the need for the public to feel they will safely be taken to their destination in an enclosed vehicle totally controlled by another party.
I'm not sure what the official rule is for NYC's taxis when it comes to the name display; fwiw you can see the official list of medallion license numbers and associated names here:
In any case, rules are different for different jurisdictions and entities. If NYC TLC did have that requirement, then it's possible that real name display is mandatory for Lyft drivers operating in NYC, given that TLC has some oversight over services like Lyft. However, TLC also has some say over livery cabs. It's been awhile since I've been in a livery cab, but I think they do operate under different requirements in terms of what's required for display.
None of the major card networks except for American Express validate cardholder name. The Address Verification Service (AVS) also only validates numeric values (so if your address is 123 Main Street, 123 Maple Ave will return a matching response)
Having worked around payments, I can guarantee you that card networks do check the Card Holder name. Better yet, they can match against first name, last name and middle name to adjust the risk rating of individual transactions.
Albeit, this is rarely used to block payments, because if they stopped payments when customers didn't put their middle name the exact way it's written on their card, nobody would be able to pay online.
It’s up to the merchant to decide. You can ask for as little as card number and expiry. All up to the merchant based on how they configure their payment processor
There is no error code that denotes invalid name. Sure the banks gateway fraud detection can decline auth(most don’t), but there would be no way to communicate back to the merchant that the customers needs to check the spelling of the name. I’ve also never seen it when I ran technology at a e-commerce startup that did millions of transactions of month.
I think the claim is that credit card processors don't validate names at payment time. Back before KYC became a thing you could sign up for a credit card with whatever name you preferred. I think it's a bit more strict these days.
That feature is a configurable option (at wildly variable strengths) that is set up by the merchant when they are setting up their payment gateway. All the CC processors I have worked with provide these varying levels of Name/Address strictness.
Was always wondering about that, only occasionally misspelling a letter here or there to see if a transaction would get approved. Can anyone corroborate?
A credit card is not required to use Lyft. You can use credit from gift cards or promo codes, as well as 1 time payment methods like Apple Pay which are completed at time of ride booking and do not expose names
Are you sure about that? I don't have Lyft where I live. But, about a year back, I was given a Lyft code for an interview. When I got the code, the instructions made it clear that I needed to register a credit card for liability. I had my account created with my personal credit card and redeemed the code. I thought I was good to go. When I got to the destination city and tried to order a ride at the airport, it said I needed to enter a SECOND credit card for verification. Unfortunately I traveled light and didn't a second card on me.
To use Lyft, or to sign up? Using alternate payment methods makes sense once you sign up. I do it, too. But can you start a new account without a credit card?
I think you and the driver are supposed to exchange names. This is probably awkward when you name yourself "suck my balls" or something, which people undoubtedly do because people are terrible.
No, you and the driver are supposed to exchange a keyword to make sure you got into the right car. That keyword happens to be a name by default because it's very... human, I guess, but it does not have to be your name. For taxis, I frequently use two or three random names common in my country.
OK, not _supposed_, but it is a common practice, going back to traditional taxi services where you'd call a number and order a taxi to an address where you are. They'd ask you for your name which they'd also tell the driver they send you. On arrival, the driver would then ask the name when you're entering the car.
It's useful for busier locations, where more people would call for a taxi at the same time.
One of my co-workers once got in the wrong Uber; she and another person with the same name were being picked up on the same corner, and the cars just happened to arrive close enough they each got into the wrong car. It was confirming the driver's name as they sat down that clued them in.
There are many terrible things in the world. People naming themselves Mike Rotch isn't one of them. Certainly not as "terrible" as denying hundreds of thousands of people a service.
The Simpsons gag however would bypass the naughty word filter completely. The name Bart uses is "Mike" last name "Rotch" Moe just ends up pronouncing it as "My Crotch".
I’m guessing test and prod are highly-segregated to prevent improper data access. Remember when one of the app-based taxi companies had employees who spied on their exes via their system? I’m guessing they beefed up security to mitigate the insider threat risk.
Regardless, your point still stands. The product manager should have gone through whatever process was needed to pull down a limited set of production data to test against. Or the engineers could have logged exceptions in prod before making the filter active.
What's the upside of deploying this anyway? It's not as though it's similar to Facebook where these names are very publicly visible. It's just the drivers who would see the names.
They could just generate the list of questionable names and get support to give them a call about it or institute a rider identity verification programme.
I have a friend named Aryan who was not allowed to sign up for a Microsoft account with that name. Support even refused to make the exception when asked, suggesting that he sign up with the name "Ryan" instead.
To this day, emails from that account have "Ryan <lastname>" in the header.
> Scholars point out that, even in ancient times, the idea of being an "Aryan" was religious, cultural and linguistic, not racial. — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aryan
> Which you could easily manually eyeball to make sure there weren't obvious false positives?
Implying devs test their code thoroughly. lol. After working at numerous companies (some with high bars of entry) I've noticed many devs push changes without testing properly. Or, if they test, they rarely consider edge cases or implications of what they're doing and only test the obvious base cases.
As someone already pointed out here, Fuck is a real last name. Fucker is also a real last name. You need a credit card to pay for Lyft; I don't quite follow why they can't just match people up with their credit card data.
It seems like tech companies have been doing DIY profanity filters. Apple has a profanity filter for engraving text onto a device in the online store (https://twitter.com/minimaxir/status/1213188371452841984 ); intended to be your name, so terms like "Dick" have to not be filtered.
I learnt that Apple has a validation endpoint. Since the engraving service was recently updated, I took a profanity wordlist and checked it against the endpoint just for fun. The results are...counterintuitive: https://pastebin.com/mzpECiQw (NSFW language, obviously)
A bit of a tangent but you reminded me-- and maybe, I'm totally full of shit or like my memory is wrong, but the iPhone predicting profanity was my favorite feature. For YEARS it would never write "duck" instead of "fuck," and generally was great, but then (and this is the like maybe I'm totally wrong part) after Jobs passed away that stopped completely... and now I get this bullshit I have to fucking correct all the time (I have had to set up shortcuts to prevent it from fixing my profanity).
I can't imagine Jobs putting up with trying to swear at someone over text and repeatedly getting "ducking."
iOS autocorrect has always been terrible, it’s not exclusive to profanity. Both in terms of its performance and experience. Its incredibly frustrating to use when it autocorrects words 3-4 words later, and navigating text fields has become significantly more difficult on recent versions of iOS.
Android is the superior experience in almost every UX category imo, and text handling is the best example of that.
Yeah, the whole "replace a block of text" auto-correct can be a fucking nightmare, but I personaly haven't had bad performance. Maybe I'm just not remembering it... or I'm not thinking of all the uses cases.
On Android the latency of the screen has always bothered me when typing so much I can't notice anything else, but I haven't had a high-end Android device in years where that could be remedied (I was very tempted by the OnePlus 7 but didn't want to fork over the cash just to try).
By the way Semen is the way the Russian equivalent to Simon is spelled officially. There is quite a number of Russian men who have just that for their first name in their passports. I once met one, he worked as a developer and people were making fun of his name.
Transliteration is almost always a mess, rarely yielding good results. If I were him I would just demand the authorities to spell my name as Simon. Or, perhaps, keep it as Semen and make fun of that myself. I could even sue someone who would ban me for this.
The Apple endpoint, inconsistent as it was, was a little more permissive than I expected. At least compared to something like the Sony Playstation ID filter; for example, 'hitler' is fine for Apple, whereas Sony seems to block out any ID containing the literal string of 'hitle', e.g. `hitle123987` [0]. Meanwhile, Apple manages to block some of the more esoteric sexual profanity that Sony's filter can miss, e.g. `bunghole`.
I'm still trying to work out what Sony's filter doesn't like about my username (zeta0134) which I've had for ages. The first bit is just the letter "z" in Spanish; there's no deeper meaning. To my knowledge it's not considered offensive in Spanish, but Sony would not let me have it no matter how many variations I tried. Maybe there's some political thing I'm not aware of?
Anyway, I switched languages and I'm "zed0134" on their network. The whole thing struck me as a bit odd.
And got a response indicating that the name was both valid (i.e. not "improper") and available. Maybe at one particular time the word was flagged, but I can't imagine why.
edit: As other repliers have said, I did think that it could have something to do with Los Zetas, and maybe that was the case in the past. However, as of now, `zeta0134`, `zetas0134`, and `loszetas0134` are all valid and available names, according to the endpoint.
Interestingly, `pabloescobar0134` is considered improper. However, `elchapo0134` is not – which supports the argument that Sony's blacklist is (obviously) manually curated and perhaps subject to change. Maybe enough people who wanted "Zeta" complained for Sony to realize it was a word that had many more uses than in Los Zetas
Pablo is a very common Spanish name, and Escobar is a fairly common last name. There probably are thousands of people called Pablo Escobar who could want to use that name.
This is making me think of elevators that deliberately leave out floor numbers (13 in north america, 4 in asia) because they are 'bad luck'. Numbers! As Mitch Hedberg would say, the people on the 14th floor know which floor they're really on.
I don't know Mitch Hedberg, but that's also my reasoning. I'm not superstitious, but if I were and I had a problem with number 13, I totally wouldn't want to sit on row "14". There is a supernatural power that makes 13 bad and you can fool it by printing a "14" on top of what's clearly the 13th row? The spirit, deity or force of nature that causes bad luck looks at the labels? Come on!
> I'm not superstitious, but if I were and I had a problem with number 13, I totally wouldn't want to sit on row "14".
I imagine the way you're approaching this is not unrelated to the fact that you're not superstitious. That is to say, if you were superstitious, it's possible you wouldn't feel this way about the fake 14th row. Not having to see and think about the number 13 may be enough.
"Eta" is a Japanese derogatory slur referring to the descendants of butchers, funeral workers, executioners, and other people who handled dead things for a living. It means filthy person. They are still discriminated against, and in the past it was incredibly severe.
The profanity filter in the Apple App Store was [0] amusingly wrong, but fortunately also a soft filter rather than a hard filter.
What happened was, the German localisation of the app description included the word “Knopf”. Knopf is not a rude word, according to any German I’ve discussed this with — it is one translation of “knob” in the sense of “button”, but Apple’s naughty word detector clearly thought it was “knob” in the sense of the euphemism for a body part.
It didn’t stop the app passing review, but the automatic warning was still a regular part of updates for that particular app.
Honestly if filter try to filter out euphemisms all is lost because:
1. People who use them for that just come up with new ones all the time
2. People still use the word in the regular sense, like would I now have to come up with a euphemisms to describe a door knob ?!
3. How I wore is my decision. As long as I don't hurry anyone intentionally or knowingly no person and even less company had the (moralic) right to constraint me. (Through wrt. Minirs, Y least younger ones, their parents opinion matters, too.)
This is what happens whenever someone decides that they have enough expertise in something they don't.
We see the same phenomena with encryption, authentication, and password security. People just tend to have a myopic understanding of the topic and vastly overestimate their ability in something they've barely even studied, which is the worst kind of ignorance. And they very much deserve to be named and shamed when they inevitably screw it up.
When dealing with names & addresses, consult an expert.
My last name “Hung” was blocked by Apple’s Genius Bar at one point when they displayed the names queue on the digital board. They don’t like certain methods of Chinese romanization (particularly the one used in Taiwan).
How do they not realize what an obvious shitstorm this will cause?
And who is bothered by this, really?
I find it hard to imagine that it's the drivers calling themselves Dick Cummings out of immaturity. So what does it really matter what the customers call themselves?
>I find it hard to imagine that it's the drivers calling themselves Dick Cummings out of immaturity. So what does it really matter what the customers call themselves?
That was my thought too. It's one thing if you're using obscenity in an anonymous online alias, as a great many Redditors seem to love doing, but I'm struggling to believe that it's something people do in signing up for real-life ride-sharing apps, either as a driver or rider.
Obviously there must be some amount of people doing it, otherwise Lyft wouldn't bother with this at all, but it's just so... unexpected.
> "Obviously there must be some amount of people doing it"
There's no data that this is true. It could simply be a project manager deciding that it's a good thing or the result of a tiny fraction of complaints.
From my experience building filters, this is one of the most frustrating tasks in software development, because getting it right is thankless and highly contextual, and if you get it wrong, the results are obvious.
Edit: Actually, it's worse bc if you get it wrong you open up your employer to getting called out for cultural insensitivity.
You can never get this 'right' and trying to is a waste of time and money. Words are just words. Trying to police what words a person has in their name, username, email, etc. is wrong and has unintended consequences. What's inappropriate to these 'decision makers' is actually the given names of some of their users.
You should never try to define 'appropriate language' and then impose your definition of that on to the world. Especially if you want to do business.
yep, this is why I'm a huge fan of the 80% solution. You'll never get it right, put a system in that flags problematic accounts. If it gets flagged, ask the user "are you SURE?", and if they say yes, put it up for human review, whether that be internal or social in some manner.
A few years back, Facebook and others were banning People with the name
Isis. Anyone with more than two brain cells who had spent some time studying
the humanities would not have made that mistake. I'd think that people
who write code and design algorithms would at least be aware of the concept
of overloading, too.
The US has a serious problem with saying normal things like fuck, cunt and shit. I find it extremely offensive to hear beeps in series and even the verge author self censors his article. Fucking stop being hypocrites.
Twitter seems to filter through the prism of US standards of speech. Woe betide you if you're Scottish and use the word cunt. In Scotland there's quite a lot of nuance in the usage of cunt. In fact I go so far as to say that the use of "profane" language is a bit of an art form in Scotland, but sadly not appreciated by our Facebook and Twitter overlords.
Ditto in Australia. In fact we even have a saying about it: "Australia: where you call your mates cunt and you call cunts mate".
Obviously context and tone play a lot into it and both "cunt" and "mate" can be friendly or threatening/derogatory depending on delivery and circumstance, but I imagine it would be remarkably difficult for people who aren't immersed into Australian culture to figure out which is which based on text alone
I'm not offended by words. I was just talking about other people. Some people are offended by words, some are apparently offended by others being offended.
I just thought it was unusual that someone would complain about being offended by the beeps that hide the words that other people are offended by. So I pointed out that they must know how the people they're complaining about feel when they hear those words, since they have to hear something (beeps) that they're offended by.
And my name was filtered by Spectrum, who at the time was the only ISP in my area. Made chat support incredibly difficult whenever I had to type in my name. Explaining why I wrote it with spaces with an explanation to remove which spaces was quite the test in reading comprehension apparently. Especially funny was when the customer support tried to type it back to confirm only to see nothing! Confused them even though I just explained why I was doing it!
I hope to one day be able to see the feature spec and QA that led to these types of hiccups.
I hereby propose the term "AS" for Artificial Stupidity: The use of software to automate obviously stupid behavior.
Sample usage: "AS is sometimes an unintended result obtained when insanely smart people work with vast resources on very complex problems for long periods of time."
It's always funny (not) when companies don't slice realize that there is a certain overlap between "bad" words and last names (many because of a shift over time wrt. What words are bad, and differences between languages and dialects).
I got randomly "banned" from nexus mods two months ago because they forced a password change, which wouldn't proceed because it said my name wasn't allowed. Apparently having "fucker" in your name is against the community guidelines for a website which lets you download adult content such as hyperviolent and hypersexual game mods. I've also had this account for almost a decade. I ended up getting in quite a spat with customer support until they stopped responding.
I expect I will be receiving a similar notification from Lyft soon as the email address I am registered with definitely has a name which would incorrectly trigger this algorithm.
Doesn't Lyft know the real names of these drivers by the time they're on the road? If people are offended by other people's given names then they're the ones in the wrong, not the people named "Dick Cummings".
When are we going to grow up and realize that the mere appearance of words like "dick" and "cum" don't hurt anybody?
Religious, especially Puritan, values still echoing down through the decades. Organizations reinforcing the idea that words about body parts are inherently offensive are even worse.
I remember getting sent home for using the word "Penis". My parents both went to the school for a parent-teacher interview. That principal had brought the teacher in and were serious about my need for detention etc. The whole thing ended in farce as my father laughed in the principal's face then angrily demanded no consequence for me.
I doubt today's generation of teachers would tolerate this. Probably react to being humiliated like this by calling it harassment or similar nonsense. But I also think my father if he was part of this generation would have twittered the whole incident instead and let the twitterverse do it for him.
This is a problem not just in profanity filters but also on marketplaces like Etsy. Heaven forbid anyone named Harry Potter wanting to sell on Etsy. They would more likely than not find themselves banned with little recourse.
In this case for 'trademark' reasons, but the problem is the same. Filter for a set of things, and eventually legitimate examples of said thing are going to get caught up in it.
Sounds like a bad product manager. Could’ve talked to literally any company that has a real name policy on common pitfalls and this would be near the top.
My first impulse was that was a troll name and I wondered if the journalist verified it. I'm sure it's possible, I just haven't heard it or variants of it before.
What about the Wangs, Coxes and Butts of the world. That's a significant portion of the population Lyft is shutting out.
Also, is it really "the algorithm" or does Lyft just maintain a list of entries of banned names? I know "the algorithm" is the hip new thing, but I have my suspicion it's the latter.
Hey, the Wangs of the world probably only number about 100 million. Almost certainly less than 200 million. Even at the high end, that's only 3% of the world population. ;p
I have to say, when I first moved back to the U.K. after a long time in the states, I absolutely could not control my shock followed by giggling when people asked if they could bum a fag off me at a pub or suchlike. (Fag is slang for cigarettes for those outside the U.K.)
I've always known the word "fag" to also mean a bundle of sticks, like you'd use to start a fire. I expect the meanings are related.
Life seems to be peppered with problems with people with limited vocabularies who would rather make themselves "offended" by something, rather than think.
It's not an algorithm, it's some overjealous dev/PM with not many important tasks on hand except for a little incident which he made big deal out of it by downloading all dirty words and do string contains.
Names are funny, you can't really tell people what names they can use because they are THEIR NAMES. You try to censor certain names and you will trample someone who has a name you didn't expect just because of their background or race.
There must be some very smart people behind Lyft making decisions, as if they have never met a person named "Cummings" or "Dick". I'm astonished by this. I mean, those people have degrees in CS and software engineering. What were they thinking? I suspect that they chose the easy solution, not the smart solution. In that case, because the "Community Guidelines" and the filtering system disrupt business operation, I would fire everyone involved and replace them with smart people.
FromSoft has a similar problem with totally inane censorship of names in online play in the Dark Souls series. E.G. you would think they'd whitelist the word "knight" in a game about knights, but it's always censored to k*ht. There's some other wacky stuff going on but in this case I don't quite blame them because the devs probably don't speak English natively or at all, and you can tell they had a tight budget/schedule.
It is no longer a common name in the US. It wasn't always used to describe a male body part (though it has in modern times). It is also the nickname for "Richard". So there are Richard's that prefer to be called "Dick". I'd imagine the people choosing it today (if any are) would be that it is a family name.
I’ve run into something similar when naming loadouts in Call of Duty. “Assault” is never accepted presumably because it has “ass” in it. It’s not even something other players can see, like a username.
This reminds me of a story arc on "Hill St. Blues" where LaRue comes across a great stand-up comic and invests in his management... only to find that his full name is "Vic Hitler"... and further finds that Vic had made his father a deathbed promise that he wouldn't deny his surname or family "on account of that one unrelated lunatic".
I don't think this is really a case of a "real name" policy gone awry. For starters, to be a Lyft driver, you have to supply your driver ID (including your official name). The issue at hand seems to be the names the drivers choose to be visible to users on the app, e.g. "Jon" instead of "Jonathan". If Lyft had a real name policy, they would just force drivers to display their name as it appears on their submitted driver's ID.
Its funny to me how they try to apply christian values like avoiding vaguely sexual sounding words while also making significant amounts of money off late night debauchery, picking people up from clubs at 3am.
Jumping straight into religious flamewar like this was a huge violation of the HN guidelines and did serious damage. Would you please review them and not do this again on this site?
How does this directly relate to “Christian” values? Could “Islamic” values be applied? Afterall, the Prophet Mohammed made his opposition to crude language clear in the Hadith.
Follow up: Also appears there are some misgiving regarding crude language within the Hindu religion as well. [0]
Ironically a lot of "puritan" values are now considered "social justice" values.
See eg "shirtgate" where an astronomer was castigated by feminists for wearing a shirt with skimpily clad figures, on the basis that it was offensive to women. Ironically, the shirt had been given to him by a feminist woman friend who thought it was liberating.
There's always some subset of the population whose conception of "morality" consists of blindly bellowing the dogma of the day. It's not weird that the behavior looks identical even though the dogma itself is nominally different.
Interestingly, 'vulgarity' as a concept is more universal than you would think. Certain concepts in traditional Japanese aesthetics, for example, emphasize an avoidance of vulgar behaviors, which are not too dissimilar from the western counterpart. It mostly has to do with avoiding (perceived) unrefined behaviors of the lower classes.
>> Also appears there are some misgiving regarding crude language within the Hindu religion as well.
> Ok, let's call that puritan values of abrahamic religions.
Opposition to bad language is a feature of every society with more than one social class, which is all civilized societies and a lot of uncivilized ones.
Everyone shits, but "shit" is still considered a bad word because of its material properties. Fuck, on the other hand, is something everyone loves doing, except when done by force... I guess the reason it's still seen as a bad word rather than a "love word" (besides old religious believes that sex is actually intrinsically bad, which some people might still hold) is that "fuck" is unconsciously associated with forced sex (rape, to be clear) while consensual sex is associated with other words/phrases like "make love", "intercourse" etc. which do not have the same bad connotation.
I think the "old religious beliefs" have more to do with it than any connotation of forced sex (at least I have never recognized this in the way people use the word).
"making love" is something partners do as a healthy and (re)productive part of their relationship, "fucking" is what 'animals' do, purely done for pleasure. It is a bad word for the same reason gluttony, excessive alcohol and drugs are a sin. A society where everyone mindlessly chases dopamine from carnal pleasures is less productive, especially when this leads to unrest and violence (and I guess that's where forced sex comes into play).
Islam is almost a branch off Christianity considering Muhammad knew many Christians and was likely inspired by them. Muslims also view Jesus as a holy person.
We've banned this account for violating the site guidelines. You can't do flamewar like this here, let alone religious flamewar.
If you don't want to be banned on HN, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
Forbidding a name like Cummings because it is not "polite" is neither secular or logical. Also in non-Catholic Christian countries sex and nudity are not a big deal (example: Germany), so you are partially right: not a Christian connotation, just particular forms of it.
It's ironic that you specifically mention Germany.
Although you are correct about nudity not being a big deal there, they actually have specific laws about the names that newborn children are allowed to be given.
Tell me again why anybody cares? Is it because the Church is so central to our lives? We're masters of rationality and technology, who believe in a retributive super-ape in the sky?
Is it because we're medieval scribes and we really want to use the Latin faeces to indicate our scholarly intentions, instead of the Anglo-Saxon shit that everyone around us uses?
There is no reason I can think of that comports with a technological or innovative worldview.
Including cybersecurity. ("Shit" is just an identifier or a guessable string with 13 bits of "chaos" completely equivalent to "Dave" or "Phil.")
Edit: Well I see small-minded superstitious dunderheads have shown up to downvote me, so FUCK CUNT SHIT ASS
"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."
We don't come close to seeing everything that gets posted to HN—there is far too much of it, so we rely on users to let us know about the worst stuff. I had no idea that flamewars were going on in this thread until someone told me about it.
When you see a comment that ought to have been moderated and hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we haven't seen it yet. We can't moderate what we don't see.
Words have meanings. These particular words have offensive meanings, in the sense of them being used to intentionally offend others. There's no word I'm aware of that is only ever used to offend and they all have (and generally have stated with) inoffensive meanings.
In pretty much every community, we seek to reduce the friction between members, and as a part of that, different communities would often choose a point on that chance-to-offend spectrum and discourage use of anything more (potentially) offensive than that point. Despite myself generally preferring more open (and more offensive communities), I find it very rational for others to set the bar at other points.
Sure, agreed, and Lyft's apparent priorities are a big part of why I'm not in a relationship with them or part of their "community" (read: "customer base." Community is a lie and therefore offensive, despite being totally a "clean" word... great and unexpected example... I digress).
Edit: sorry, digressed so far that I forgot to finish. By "priorities" I mean, Lyft, pull your people off of pointless projects like messing with people's identities, and put them on QA of basic functionality like accepting a credit card payment via your website. Last and only time I tried it, it failed utterly. Now I don't know how much anti-sales other people need to de-persuade them before they'll not-buy, but in my case that was enough. The person for whom I was trying to buy a gift card, got something nicer with a lifecycle that doesn't burn such an obscene/offensive quantity of fossil fuels.
With a userbase as big as Lyft's, I'm sure there were a ton of obvious true positives (anyone named "Fuck", ostensibly). I just can't believe they didn't notice a surname as relatively common as Cumming/Cummings. Yes, the apparent naivety of the regex is an issue, but this seems like a system for which a lot of testing on actual data would be easy and natural to do as part of the QA process.