Fake Name Generator • Hacker News Board

Re: Fake Name Generator

#91

Post by hgsigala » Tue, Jan 21, 2014, 4:30 PM UTC

qnk wrote: post #6

Very useful resource! I'm curious though, where did you get your Hispanic names from? Seems like they come from a database of funny, weird and probably offensive names. No one is called like that in Spanish-speaking countries, and yes, I know the names are supposed to be fake, but just comparing the Hispanic with the American ones, you can tell there's a big difference. Whether or not is intentional, it could be even…

Hispanic here: tried the same thing and had the same reaction. Dampne is not a hispanic name...

Re: Fake Name Generator

#92

Post by nollidge » Tue, Jan 21, 2014, 4:31 PM UTC

antirez wrote: post #23

Italian names are not realistic. Try #1: "Dante Marcelo". Dante is a very strange name for an italian, I guess it is used in the US. Marcelo lacks an "l" (it is Marcello) so it sounds Spanish instead. Try #2: "Berto Trentino". Trentino is realistic but Berto sounds a lot like an abbreviation of "Alberto", so not a real name even if I guess there are people actually named "Berto". Try #3: "Pupetta Rizzo". Can't imagin…

My guess is that it's just randomly selecting from a list of names with equal probability, rather than weighting them based on how common they are. So all of these long-tail names are coming up way more often than you'd find in a phone book.

Re: Fake Name Generator

#93

Post by seanhandley » Tue, Jan 21, 2014, 4:34 PM UTC

A lot of the vehicles make/models are not typical cars you'd see on British roads i.e. the marketing name is for another country, even if the vehicle itself is largely the same.

Re: Fake Name Generator

#94

Post by pierlux » Tue, Jan 21, 2014, 4:36 PM UTC

French Canada names are not typical. Here are examples: François Tremblay Marc Gagnon Diane Côté Line Dion

Re: Fake Name Generator

#95

Post by FootballMuse » Tue, Jan 21, 2014, 4:41 PM UTC

GFischer wrote: post #64

kriro wrote: post #63

I wonder what database they are using for the ZIP codes. I tried googling around a bit and only found a bunch of "pay X$ to get all US ZIP codes". I'm pretty sure I've found these before for an ERP project I worked for...maybe the CIA? database (I distinctly remember they had some pretty good stuff)

I thought there were plenty of those available freely. Are these good enough? : http://geocoder.ca/?freedata=1 US Zip Codes File of all US 5-digit ZIP codes. Includes zip, city, state, latitude, longitude, and county (Last Updated: March 30th 2010): US Zip Codes (41,755) or http://sourceforge.net/projects/zips/ Edit: MaxMind recommends this one http://download.geonames.org/export/zip/ There's also Google's geocoding…

Not exactly.

"ZIP Codes are commercially sensitive... proprietary information"[1]

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6685917

Re: Fake Name Generator

#96

Post by 11001 » Tue, Jan 21, 2014, 4:44 PM UTC

At least with Russian names, the algorithm seems to apply a uniform probability distribution over all names in its database. It results in way too many extremely rare names. In other words, a batch of Russian names generated using this program would not look statistically realistic.

Re: Fake Name Generator

#97

Post by tommis » Tue, Jan 21, 2014, 4:44 PM UTC

Finnish names were very good. Only thing that was a little off was the car models, which seemed very US centric. Car models have lot of regional variants (big differences in naming US vs EU vs Asia)

Re: Fake Name Generator

#98

Post by zbowling » Tue, Jan 21, 2014, 4:47 PM UTC

verandaguy wrote: post #77

SmileyKeith wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a reason to use either of those systems over homebrew? Since homebrew seems to have a lot more community support now.

I could be wrong, but I believe MacPorts has more ports in the default repository at the moment. Not sure about Fink. But yes, arguably, `brew` is moving forward very quickly.

MacPorts is full of useless junk. MacPorts will install a new sandboxed python, ruby, perl, etc when just want to get wget (the built in versions are fine!). The libraries are all broken out where brew keeps them simple and a lot of the packages are old silly packages that no one on the Mac really cares about (every single GNOME library for example).

brew isn't just moving forward quickly, it has really just out right replaced MacPorts and anyone still using MacPorts is living in 2007.

Re: Fake Name Generator

#99

Post by mturmon » Tue, Jan 21, 2014, 4:55 PM UTC

tragic wrote: post #68

pavanky wrote: post #20

As an Indian I am a bit sad to see Hobbit, Klingon and Ninja in there but no option for Indian names.

Just as well, probably. If they had Indian, you'd get a Punjabi first name, an Urdu surname, and a 1992 Pontiac Sunbird in your New Delhi driveway.

Salman Rushdie has to get his story ideas from somewhere.

Re: Fake Name Generator

#100

Post by lucb1e » Tue, Jan 21, 2014, 4:58 PM UTC

aestra wrote: post #34

incidence wrote: post #31

I've been using this for testing webapps for years

Me too, and when I do I always blindly copy and paste and end up with very fake looking data... Which doesn't matter to me at all!

Don't know where you live, but the Dutch government publishes spreadsheets with testdata. It contains names, middle names, addresses, domestic and foreign names, etc. No need to generate your own. I haven't had to use it yet and I didn't have a very good look, but I'd think it contains all sorts of exceptional cases which your system needs to handle. If it successfully processes that spreadsheet, it probably handles anything.