Sex Machine: Get gender from first name in Ruby • Hacker News Board

Re: Sex Machine: Get gender from first name in Ruby

#51

Post by ig1 » Tue, Apr 16, 2013, 11:27 PM UTC

andyroid wrote: post #26

ig1 wrote: post #2

Without 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…

> 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. Of course you can. Usage != distribution.

Agreed, but putting GPL code into your internal code is incredibly risky because of the vagaries of what counts as distribution under the GPL (for example if you distribute your code to a third-party security auditing company).

Re: Sex Machine: Get gender from first name in Ruby

#52

Post by drakeandrews » Tue, Apr 16, 2013, 11:33 PM UTC

obviouslygreen wrote: post #42

lkrubner wrote: post #35

I know that most of us already know this, but it is worth repeating: sex is biological, gender is cultural (for instance, "la montaña" - the mountain is feminine in the Spanish language). A "sex machine" would tell you whether you were dealing with a biological male or biological female, or something else, but it would not tell you the gender.

Of course you're technically right, but the pedantry is out of control. In reality, when speaking English in a professional (and pretty much any other) setting, "sex" means "gender." I don't think it's worth repeating. I'd say it's repeating this kind of misplaced vernacular revisionism that's making us (in which I controversially refer to the disparate collection of users on HN as a single group) look even more anal…

A non-zero quantity of people have a gender that is separate and different to their sex. By marking out differentating sex and gender as "vernacular revisionism", you are contributing to making the lives of a non-zero quantity of people worse than they need to be. Erasure sucks, please don't perpetuate it.

Re: Sex Machine: Get gender from first name in Ruby

#53

Post by dgreensp » Wed, Apr 17, 2013, 12:07 AM UTC

How is this useful?

The answer is convention over configuration. See, if we institute a societal convention that your gender is derived from your first name (automatically by a Ruby program), it will save a lot of time and energy and make the world more DRY.

Re: Sex Machine: Get gender from first name in Ruby

#54

Post by ftay » Wed, Apr 17, 2013, 12:29 AM UTC

dgreensp wrote: post #53

How is this useful? The answer is convention over configuration. See, if we institute a societal convention that your gender is derived from your first name (automatically by a Ruby program), it will save a lot of time and energy and make the world more DRY.

Let's institute a convention to refer to everyone by a unique identifier. Oh wait, that's prison.

Re: Sex Machine: Get gender from first name in Ruby

#55

Post by galvanist » Wed, Apr 17, 2013, 1:03 AM UTC

chriseppstein wrote: post #18

Gender identity is actually a quite tricky topic and should be approached carefully. I would discourage anyone from trying to use this library, the real world doesn't fit neatly in your multiple-choice view of gender. For more information, please watch this great talk: http://vimeo.com/61172068 .

I can't imagine making a dating site these days: "I'm (name text field), a (sexual identity text field) interested in meeting (sexual identity text field) for the purpose of (dating/friendship/sex/swinging/whatever text field)." Good luck with that business logic. Maybe we do need intelligent agents for this stuff.