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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

#31

Post by benten10 »

mercer wrote: post #30
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 'a…

Yeeshh. I should to see a therapist for _that_ if nothing else. All that meta-ness, which I guess might(?) arise from insecurity, often makes me stop saying things other people would say, because I'm too conscious about the 'meta-ness'. People sort of use the heuristic that the 'metaness' is a quick way to identify a weirdo, so I often present myself as a lovable unknowing buffoon instead. Or maybe none of it is true, and I just make these things up to make myself feel better about myself.. Hmmm...

See what I mean? ; )

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

#32

Post by marincounty »

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 was going to say 45-55, but George Tirebiter threw me. I now have no clue.

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

#33

Post by marincounty »

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!

Speaking of datasets, and age, I have a question for younger people. I don't know if you like, or it's politically correct to refer to you as Millenials. I didn't like generation X, or baby boomer.

Here goes, and I'm not trying to make fun of anyone, and I don't belive it's true. Personally, I believe the millenial generation might be the most knowledgable in history.

That said, I've heard some of you don't know what a 45 record is, or how a rotary telephone works?

Some people claim to not to know certain dated things because it's fashionable. I once heard a young Rebublican claim to know nothing about the GOP past. The guy sitting next to her said, "I didn't live through the French Revolution, but I know what happened?" That ended the conversation.

So what the truth?

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

#34

Post by spdustin »

marincounty wrote: post #33
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!

Speaking of datasets, and age, I have a question for younger people. I don't know if you like, or it's politically correct to refer to you as Millenials. I didn't like generation X, or baby boomer. Here goes, and I'm not trying to make fun of anyone, and I don't belive it's true. Personally, I believe the millenial generation might be the most knowledgable in history. That said, I've heard some of you don't know what…

Rotary phones reminds me of a "hack" I was most proud of as a teenager.

I was barred from calling my girlfriend at night in my room, and my phone was replaced with one that was broken. My parents wanted me to be able to answer the phone, but the keypad didn't work, so I couldn't dial out.

What I could do, however, was rapidly toggle the receiver hook. Turns out the pulse frequency tolerance had a pretty wide range, and I became quite skilled at quickly tapping out her number. That, and the Nintendo gamer hotline. Priorities!

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

#35

Post by spdustin »

spdustin wrote: post #24
pjmorris wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I see after going over your comment history that you're 52. Now I feel bad!

Looking at my data, only one person had Ted Nugent. My uncle, who is now 77. I have new respect for him. A handful of Alfred E. Neuman references are in there, wildly varying ages. It really underscores the value of a comprehensive training set to see how wildly off some predictions are when there aren't enough samples. Plus, just two vectors (as in your case) do not a classification make.

It does make me wonder about the validation though... I should try validating the model with varying numbers of input names to see if there's a baseline where it's able to reliably predict age. I think that's where media would come in handy...

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

#36

Post by [deleted] »

marincounty wrote: post #33
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!

Speaking of datasets, and age, I have a question for younger people. I don't know if you like, or it's politically correct to refer to you as Millenials. I didn't like generation X, or baby boomer. Here goes, and I'm not trying to make fun of anyone, and I don't belive it's true. Personally, I believe the millenial generation might be the most knowledgable in history. That said, I've heard some of you don't know what…

[deleted]

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

#37

Post by tremendo »

NameNickHN wrote: post #29
RobertoG wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. ;-)

is it only "good guys"? I noticed several WOT names but only from the "light" side, no Forsaken (maybe harder to get last names) or Padan Fain.

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

#38

Post by inanutshellus »

At work we needed a "clean" dataset for a five-character code. We wanted it to be something you could say out loud, e.g. "Hey, are you working on FORKS?" "No, I'm working on CHUCK", so random wasn't an option, and we were afraid an algorithm, like "consonant-vowel-consonant..." would randomly generate naughty words.

We ended up using our customers' first names and it was a disaster. We had all kinds of joke entries put in, like "JERK"... My favorite customer name was "POOP LENGTH". lol. /facepalm.

Anyway, so in this multimillion dollar enterprise application we're showing "POOP" to the whole company.

At least it was an intra-enterprise-only app.

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

#39

Post by NameNickHN »

tremendo wrote: post #37
NameNickHN wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

is it only "good guys"? I noticed several WOT names but only from the "light" side, no Forsaken (maybe harder to get last names) or Padan Fain.

I omitted indeed characters I didn't like. Those are not necessarily the villains. There a quite a few of them in there as well.

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

#40

Post by pjmorris »

spdustin wrote: post #35
spdustin wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I see after going over your comment history that you're 52. Now I feel bad! Looking at my data, only one person had Ted Nugent. My uncle, who is now 77. I have new respect for him. A handful of Alfred E. Neuman references are in there, wildly varying ages. It really underscores the value of a comprehensive training set to see how wildly off some predictions are when there aren't enough samples. Plus, just two vectors…

My informal theory is that everyone's favorite music is what they were listening to when they were in high school. I'd guess that's a less well-specified version of your idea, but I think including musicians/bands would improve your results. The point someone else made about having access to all of prior history is valid though; my George Tirebiter reference came from listening to 'Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers' by The Firesign Theater, which is a decade or so older than I'd be expected to know if you just knew my age.
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