Sex Machine: Get gender from first name in Ruby
1–10 of 55 posts
Re: Sex Machine: Get gender from first name in Ruby
#2Without knowing what data it's been trained on it's of questionable use. What maybe a 18 year old american girls name may be a 60 year old german mans name.
The gender of a name can vary heavily by culture and time-period, it would make much more sense for the api to return the data in the form of ranked probabilities.
As an aside it's worth noting that as this library is GPL3 it means you can't use this code in any non-GPL product.
Re: Sex Machine: Get gender from first name in Ruby
#3As a man named Tracy I would just throw out a caution to anyone thinking of using this. At this point in my life I don't really care about people calling Ms. Tracy Platt. But what it does do is immediately signal that I don't really need to pay attention. Fake familiarity doesn't usually work too well.
As a side note I would like to mention that having a girl's name does have some benefits. For example my wife can handle bank account issues over the phone for me. Also some near misses - I was assigned a locker in the girls locker room in junior high but they caught on before I could use it, and once a telemarketer called to offer me a spot in an all woman's resort spa. The only time I said yes to a telemarketer and I got rejected.
Re: Sex Machine: Get gender from first name in Ruby
#4Without knowing what data it's been trained on it's of questionable use. What maybe a 18 year old american girls name may be a 60 year old german mans name. The gender of a name can vary heavily by culture and time-period, it would make much more sense for the api to return the data in the form of ranked probabilities. As an aside it's worth noting that as this library is GPL3 it means you can't use this code in any…
Its probably useful for aggregate statistics. The Jordans and Teagans and Pats are outliers.
Re: Sex Machine: Get gender from first name in Ruby
#5Iiiiit's Pat!
Re: Sex Machine: Get gender from first name in Ruby
#6Without knowing what data it's been trained on it's of questionable use. What maybe a 18 year old american girls name may be a 60 year old german mans name. The gender of a name can vary heavily by culture and time-period, it would make much more sense for the api to return the data in the form of ranked probabilities. As an aside it's worth noting that as this library is GPL3 it means you can't use this code in any…
Its probably useful for aggregate statistics. The Jordans and Teagans and Pats are outliers.
As are the Leslies, Shannons, Ashleys, and Tracys.
That makes me think, if you had firstname + birthdate, you could probably be a tiny bit more accurate.
Re: Sex Machine: Get gender from first name in Ruby
#7Any reason you called it "Sex Machine"?
Re: Sex Machine: Get gender from first name in Ruby
#8Shouldn't this be called "Gender Machine", they get it right on the project description but not on the project name, weird.
Re: Sex Machine: Get gender from first name in Ruby
#9As a man named Tracy I would just throw out a caution to anyone thinking of using this. At this point in my life I don't really care about people calling Ms. Tracy Platt. But what it does do is immediately signal that I don't really need to pay attention. Fake familiarity doesn't usually work too well. As a side note I would like to mention that having a girl's name does have some benefits. For example my wife can ha…
My full name is Matthew Stephen Trout.
This means I can filter a substantial percentage of junk mail simply by throwing away anything addressed to 'Ms. Trout'.
... or Grout, Sprout, Trent or any of the other hilarious misspellings people also seem to manage.
Less OT: Using such a thing to pre-select the probably-right option on a gender picker might be actually useful without the false selections causing the "fake familiarty" problem.
Re: Sex Machine: Get gender from first name in Ruby
#10This gem is too clever by half.