11–20 of 63 posts
Please just don't. There is no point antagonising people by guessing information about them wrongly - particularly if it's something they've become sensitised to by it occurring frequently. If you need to know someone's gender (and largely, you don't), then ask them.
Think outside the box. This has many other use cases.
http://api.genderize.io/?name=eloi&language_id=ca
http://api.genderize.io/?name=tomeu&language_id=ca
http://api.genderize.io/?name=rigoberta&language_id=es
http://api.genderize.io/?name=presentaci%C3%B3n&language_id=...
Credit for distinguishing between names in languages, though! Joan returns female in English, but male in Catalan.
Please just don't. There is no point antagonising people by guessing information about them wrongly - particularly if it's something they've become sensitised to by it occurring frequently. If you need to know someone's gender (and largely, you don't), then ask them.
Interesting from a machine-learning perspective - but this strikes me as a solution looking for a problem. If any service needs to know gender (and I'm having a hard time thinking of times you NEED to know gender - dating sites?) - why not just ask? surely in a situation where you're reliant on having accurate gender information, guessing from $firstname and getting it wrong is worse than asking.
Except, of course, that I am male. My name is used for both genders. The thing completely failed on a few other ambiguous names I tried. I'll second AndrewDucker's opinion—just don't.
Please just don't. There is no point antagonising people by guessing information about them wrongly - particularly if it's something they've become sensitised to by it occurring frequently. If you need to know someone's gender (and largely, you don't), then ask them.
It also assumes two distinct genders which is a fallacy.
Interesting from a machine-learning perspective - but this strikes me as a solution looking for a problem. If any service needs to know gender (and I'm having a hard time thinking of times you NEED to know gender - dating sites?) - why not just ask? surely in a situation where you're reliant on having accurate gender information, guessing from $firstname and getting it wrong is worse than asking.
Why not just ask? More form fields means less conversions. Using the service one can ask for the gender later during the registration process only if confidence in the sex detection is lower then a defined threshold.
I'm sure this is interesting from a statistical point of view, but does the tech scene really need yet more reinforcement of a binary view of gender?
This is Hacker News. Such enlightened thought is frowned on by our new brogrammer overlords. Here's your beer.
The "probability" return value appears to be a straight average; it returns 1 for "Peter", which is almost guaranteed to be incorrect - all it takes is a single female Peter, anywhere on the planet. A better approach, in the absence of more complex models, would be to use Laplace's sunrise formula.
It also seems accurate:
Pat = about 50/50 David = All man Jessica = All woman
Also, wrt to "binary gender identity" complaints, are we all college freshmen here?
* my own name (Nord) sucks and gave a gender of null. Spent my whole life being called Nerd, Nora, etc. I'm not flipping out.