Show HN: An API for gender classification

Jamie does pretty well. 50.24%. Jaime is further from 50%.

Thom is 99.999963% male though.

While it's a quite interesting coding task to write a classifier, for the overwhelming majority of applications you simply don't need to know a user's gender. Making it a public API is a bad thing.

Developers have a horrible tendency to gather as much data on someone as possible, everything they're willing to give in fact, for the simple reason of "just in case we need it later". It's far, far better to gather as little as possible and build something that simply doesn't need to know specifics. If we build things that are ambiguous, unspecific for age, gender, race, nationality, etc then the world will be a better and more inclusive place. Paradoxical as it seems, more privacy actually leads to a more integrated society. That is universally a good thing (in my opinion, obv.).

I know a female Michael.

The only reliable way to find out someone's gender is to ask them what gender they currently think they are. There are more than two genders and an individual's gender can change with time.

A better strategy all-round would to be ask yourself whether you need to know someone's gender. I can think of very few legitimate reasons to know and record a user's gender and many of them can be dealt with by simply asking them what they'd like to be referred as, perhaps in more than one scenario.