Names.io – Global Exhaustive Scraped Name Db • Hacker News Board

Re: Names.io – Global Exhaustive Scraped Name Db

#91

Post by packet_nerd » Thu, Oct 08, 2020, 1:45 PM UTC

wolfhumble wrote: post #63

powersnail wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Seems like a pretty simple solution So is changing her name. But people shouldn't need to do gymnastics for such a trifling matter. This is like cutting a foot to fit a shoe. Cultures have different naming conventions, and not all cultures pressure women to take names from husbands. The real simple solution is to accept that the common ground of name form is a string. One string.

If you move to another country I am of the opinion that you should have a certain respect for the conventions of the welcoming country. So you might not agree with their naming conventions, but why should I expect the country to change just because I show up on the scene? In an English speaking county, having a separate surname aids in sorting and presentation of family unities. The character set is typically A-Z. In…

If it's a government office or some service that only serves people from one country, then sure whatever, be a hard-ass if that's what you want to do.

The problem is it's every SaaS online service in the world many of which happily do business in Myanmar. You can't just tell an entire country with its own unique culture and 50 million citizens "FU, you're wrong", and when you do, it's you that's wrong not them! Everyone from Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, to federated platforms like Matrix or Mastadon, to developer tools, to every forum on the Internet [1] requires a first and last name! These platforms have literally millions of users or customers around the world - and at least one entire country - that don't fit the mold and I find it highly disrespectful to force it on them like this.

[1] My info might be out of date on some of these as I've been out of the country and not paid much attention for a few years. I would hope that by now at least some of these big multinational companies would get it right. However, suffice it to say, the vast majority of SaaS platforms today are disrespectful to people with one name.

Re: Names.io – Global Exhaustive Scraped Name Db

#92

Post by OJFord » Thu, Oct 08, 2020, 2:08 PM UTC

riffraff wrote: post #45

I have strong doubts this is exhaustive or that it could be. For one, it doesn't contain the name "Genoveffa" which is the italianized form of Jennifer. There are wikipedia-level people named thus, so it's not that uncommon.[0] There's an infinite amount of misspelled/localized names outside their country of origin e.g. Maicol for Michael, Sandiago for Santiago, Uilliam, Villiam, Willian etc etc Aditional "anecdata":…

It seems perfectly common surnames also missed if nobody with that name happened to have a child in the last x years (where x is quite small).

I'm not going to try do statistics, but I reckon that's quite a lot. Census would be a better source than birth registers.

Re: Names.io – Global Exhaustive Scraped Name Db

#93

Post by OJFord » Thu, Oct 08, 2020, 2:13 PM UTC

muzani wrote: post #19

alexmingoia wrote: post #3

Somewhat related and worth pointing out is that the whole world does not use family names, or the family name as a last name. My wife was annoyed when she came to the US and every form has a “first” and “last” field, but she doesn’t have a last name. Her passport for example, only has a “name” field.

I think it's an "exhaustive" list under the limitations for those who do have a first and last name. Once you expand it to surnames and given names, it's a lot more complex.

No, 'Ford' is missing.

Re: Names.io – Global Exhaustive Scraped Name Db

#94

Post by simiones » Thu, Oct 08, 2020, 2:14 PM UTC

muzani wrote: post #19

alexmingoia wrote: post #3

Somewhat related and worth pointing out is that the whole world does not use family names, or the family name as a last name. My wife was annoyed when she came to the US and every form has a “first” and “last” field, but she doesn’t have a last name. Her passport for example, only has a “name” field.

I think it's an "exhaustive" list under the limitations for those who do have a first and last name. Once you expand it to surnames and given names, it's a lot more complex.

It is not exhustive in any sense. There are enormously famous people, like Charles de Gaulle or Jaques Chirac whose last names are apparently not part of the exhaustive list.

Re: Names.io – Global Exhaustive Scraped Name Db

#95

Post by The_rationalist » Thu, Oct 08, 2020, 2:35 PM UTC

Could this allow to improve state of the art named entity recognition?

Re: Names.io – Global Exhaustive Scraped Name Db

#96

Post by netsharc » Thu, Oct 08, 2020, 2:38 PM UTC

alexmingoia wrote: post #3

Somewhat related and worth pointing out is that the whole world does not use family names, or the family name as a last name. My wife was annoyed when she came to the US and every form has a “first” and “last” field, but she doesn’t have a last name. Her passport for example, only has a “name” field.

A friend also has the same issue with his passport, but he had survived many years believing his first of 2 names was his first name, and the 2nd name his last. It worked okay until he moved cities (in Germany) and the authorities decided, "According to your passport, these 2 names is your last name, and your first name in our system should be '-'".

Luckily, like everything in Germany, there was a form to fill to fix it.

Re: Names.io – Global Exhaustive Scraped Name Db

#97

Post by seszett » Thu, Oct 08, 2020, 3:41 PM UTC

williamdclt wrote: post #73

Uberphallus wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A French colleague's last name is "Le". As in, the main stopword in French.

Ouch, that must lead to a lot of confusion. Especially given that "Le" is a fairly common surname prefix in France (eg Yann Le Cun, John Le Carré)

It's a very common Vietnamese surname so it's not unheard of in France though, it's often pronounced as "lé", maybe because it's the right pronunciation (I don't know) but in any case it makes it immediately different from the common word "le".

Although when written, if that person has a typical French name like "Jean Le" there might be people who think it's been truncated indeed.

Re: Names.io – Global Exhaustive Scraped Name Db

#98

Post by aphroz » Thu, Oct 08, 2020, 3:42 PM UTC

stevesimmons wrote: post #49

aphroz wrote: post #17

I have worked on projects where I needed to extract firstnames and lastnames and if you want to use this dataset to extract names, here are some caveats: - firstnames can be lastnames as well - common words can be names as well - some stop words can be names - the order can change, you can write firstname, lastname or lastname, firstname - Some names are as short as one letter Using ML can be useful if you can separa…

> Some names are as short as one letter I recently read a French political news story referring to O. It must be a misprint, I thought at first. But there is a French cabinet minister named Cedric O. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%C3%A9dric_O

Indeed I was thinking about him, but he's probably not the only one

Re: Names.io – Global Exhaustive Scraped Name Db

#99

Post by powersnail » Thu, Oct 08, 2020, 4:02 PM UTC

wolfhumble wrote: post #63

powersnail wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Seems like a pretty simple solution So is changing her name. But people shouldn't need to do gymnastics for such a trifling matter. This is like cutting a foot to fit a shoe. Cultures have different naming conventions, and not all cultures pressure women to take names from husbands. The real simple solution is to accept that the common ground of name form is a string. One string.

If you move to another country I am of the opinion that you should have a certain respect for the conventions of the welcoming country. So you might not agree with their naming conventions, but why should I expect the country to change just because I show up on the scene? In an English speaking county, having a separate surname aids in sorting and presentation of family unities. The character set is typically A-Z. In…

I also translate my name into a more pronounceable string of letters for English speaking people's sake; forcing a different language on people is disrespectful. We don't disagree there.

However, I don't see how if a person has no first/last name, and expects to be referred so, can be construed as disrespect to the English-speaking culture. There is no need to learn another language; all it takes is to "know" that the person has one string as a name.

You said it helps with sorting, and that is exactly why I said cutting a foot to fit a shoe. It's asking people to change their name for the sake of paper work.

I don't expect to show up and make a country change, for the sake of me. My name is already in first/last form.

I wish countries, and systems (frankly many of which are expanding to be used worldwide) to change, because I believe it to be the right direction, and in the end will save everyone's time.

Re: Names.io – Global Exhaustive Scraped Name Db

#100

Post by ffpip » Thu, Oct 08, 2020, 5:03 PM UTC

someguy101010 wrote: post #21

ffpip wrote: post #18

Calling it exhaustive is a bit much. It doesn't have many names of my friends. Here in India you get very long/sometimes weird lastnames. Many are not there on the list.

You should contribute!

Why? It'll never be exhaustive. Names are infinite.

I'd rather waste my time on HN :)