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Show HN: List of movie and book characters I use during application development

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Re: Show HN: List of movie and book characters I use during application development

#21

Post by patio11 »

onion2k wrote: post #11

This isn't a great list because it assumes far too much about what a name is. Patio11 wrote a great blog post about what developers frequently get wrong when it comes to people and names; http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b...

I'd encourage you to phrase feedback of this nature in the general form "Thank you for doing free work on behalf of the community, which has certainly made no one's life worse and some peoples' lives better. I feel like this list could be even more useful if you added names like ... and/or restructured the fields you store for names to resemble ... The reason for this is that the existing list is generated from a subset of fiction which is broadly representative of part of the global population but which fails to exercise a lot of consequential cases commonly encountered when working with names. For more details, see $LINK."

Optionally: "If you'd like, I'd be happy to do some of the legwork for you there. Would you be open to receiving a pull request?"

Re: Show HN: List of movie and book characters I use during application development

#22

Post by RobertoG »

I didn't recognize most of them, I had to search some to get an idea.

If the goal is testing, an improvement would be to add some internationalization. There are not other than English characters there. You want to be sure that your first foreigner don't break your program.

Actually, maybe it would be a nice project to accept pull request from around the world and create an standard international data set.

Re: Show HN: List of movie and book characters I use during application development

#24

Post by spdustin »

pjmorris wrote: post #20
spdustin wrote: post #12

Would you humor a fellow HNer and tell me if you're in your early forties? I happen to be working on a toy machine learning project that, based on the fictional characters known by someone, predicts their approximate age. Your list is the first organic validation set that happened onto my machine!

Fantastic. Want to try a smaller dataset? My stock names start with Alfred E. Neuman, George Tirebiter, and Ted Nugent.

I had Alfred E. Neuman and Ted Nugent in the data, but I really need more music references.

It guessed early 70's.

It's written to guess early/mid/late subsets of ten-year ranges, and actually does have some data for kids/teens. Mostly it had fictional characters in movies, books and television but some singers snuck in there when I had my family fill out excel worksheets, heh!

Any advice on how I could collect this kind of data? A survey on ask HN? Mechanical Turk?

EDIT: the only features it uses are fictional names that one can rattle off in one sitting and the specific age to use for the label. No gender or other demographic information. So that's what I would collect, just a list of fictional names a submitter can think of in one sitting, and their age. It's basically a form of supervised topic classification training seen in other ML tutorials, but using the age as the training set topic label. I'm experimenting on enriching the data afterwards with media (book/movie/tv flags) see if that feature improves its performance, but I'm teaching a class this week and don't have any spare time to work on it.

Re: Show HN: List of movie and book characters I use during application development

#25

Post by NameNickHN »

RobertoG wrote: post #22

I didn't recognize most of them, I had to search some to get an idea. If the goal is testing, an improvement would be to add some internationalization. There are not other than English characters there. You want to be sure that your first foreigner don't break your program. Actually, maybe it would be a nice project to accept pull request from around the world and create an standard international data set.

> If the goal is testing, an improvement would be to add some internationalization.

The goal is rather to be using some fun names during development. For example, when I work on our appointment scheduling software, I often need to walk through the scheduling and registration process in order to check the user experience. Instead of using the tired old John Smith123 and john123@example.com I can use some names that I fondly remember from a book or movie.

Re: Show HN: List of movie and book characters I use during application development

#28

Post by RobertoG »

NameNickHN wrote: post #25
RobertoG wrote: post #22

I didn't recognize most of them, I had to search some to get an idea. If the goal is testing, an improvement would be to add some internationalization. There are not other than English characters there. You want to be sure that your first foreigner don't break your program. Actually, maybe it would be a nice project to accept pull request from around the world and create an standard international data set.

> If the goal is testing, an improvement would be to add some internationalization. The goal is rather to be using some fun names during development. For example, when I work on our appointment scheduling software, I often need to walk through the scheduling and registration process in order to check the user experience. Instead of using the tired old John Smith123 and john123@example.com I can use some names that I…

Fair enough.

Can I suggest adding Iñigo Montoya at least?

Re: Show HN: List of movie and book characters I use during application development

#29

Post by NameNickHN »

RobertoG wrote: post #28
NameNickHN wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If the goal is testing, an improvement would be to add some internationalization. The goal is rather to be using some fun names during development. For example, when I work on our appointment scheduling software, I often need to walk through the scheduling and registration process in order to check the user experience. Instead of using the tired old John Smith123 and john123@example.com I can use some names that I…

Fair enough. Can I suggest adding Iñigo Montoya at least?

Can't. Haven't read the book yet and was unimpressed with the movie. Sorry. ;-)

Re: Show HN: List of movie and book characters I use during application development

#30

Post by mercer »

benten10 wrote: post #5

Nice! May I ask if you collected those manually? Perhaps they should be sorted/divided according to the genre they're from? Books/Movies/Tv-shows, etc? This list made be realize a sort-of annoying (sometimes) tendency I seem to have developed. It appears that my first reaction to cool things is now not wonder but 'I need to engineer the shit out of fit'.My first thought after looking at the list was not 'wow, cool',…

Haha, I've noticed the same thing.

My approach is in part to learn to accept that it's what I'm like, it's something that fortunately helps put bread on the table, and fighting it too much seems pointless. And the other part consists of forcibly turning it off at times, through meditation or other activities, and seeing if it actually benefits me or if I'm just trying to be something I'm not.

So far I lean towards 'accepting who I am' with the occasional and very necessary break. It's only when I become to 'meta' about this process itself that I get truly unhappy (trying to engineer my periods of non-engineering, and then to force myself to not engineer this process, and so on).

In fact, it's all the 'meta' stuff in general that seems to be a bigger problem than any of my natural urges. But I digress...

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