Show HN: List of movie and book characters I use during application development | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: List of movie and book characters I use during application development

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72 pointsNameNickHN41 comments

Would you humor a fellow HNer and tell me if you're in your early forties?

I happen to be working on a toy machine learning project that, based on the fictional characters known by someone, predicts their approximate age. Your list is the first organic validation set that happened onto my machine!

LOL yes.

Excellent. The theory is that, for most people in the US (perhaps elsewhere?), one's reading / movie watching / tv watching tend to be clustered into specific time periods.

When Friends or Firefly were on, for example, I was watching a lot of TV (like you) because at that stage of my life I was settling into a long-term relationship (early twenties) and we found those to be mutually enjoyable things to watch. Movie watching tends to fall off around the time people start having kids. So far, on my friends-and-family (kids and grandparents alike) polls, it's pretty accurate.

Thanks again for answering :) I may just post my quick and dirty hack when I'm through playing with it.

I'm fresh out of college, and I'm curious if this would stand up with people that are my age and close-ish to my demographic. From my experience, I think our cultural experience is the file-sharing or "Netflix" generation. My friends and I all have deep connections to characters from 80s, 90s, 00s and 10s entertainment, because we have been able to access it all. I am definitely going to reference Flash Gordon, Mal Reynolds and Patrick Star in a poll of fictitious characters.

I don't know, it's just something that I'm curious about. I would love to take your test (although I am already primed by seeing the OP's list).

I think there's a chance your cohort will have more people like this (that have great fondness for "older" characters and media) due to Netflix/streaming, but on the overall I think you're a subset. For every person who appreciates classics, there are ten that binge watch current/trendy/popular stuff only.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out with all of the great access to media history we have today!

This is the most HN thing ever, I love it. Can't wait to see this public.

Fantastic. Want to try a smaller dataset? My stock names start with Alfred E. Neuman, George Tirebiter, and Ted Nugent.

I had Alfred E. Neuman and Ted Nugent in the data, but I really need more music references.

It guessed early 70's.

It's written to guess early/mid/late subsets of ten-year ranges, and actually does have some data for kids/teens. Mostly it had fictional characters in movies, books and television but some singers snuck in there when I had my family fill out excel worksheets, heh!

Any advice on how I could collect this kind of data? A survey on ask HN? Mechanical Turk?

EDIT: the only features it uses are fictional names that one can rattle off in one sitting and the specific age to use for the label. No gender or other demographic information. So that's what I would collect, just a list of fictional names a submitter can think of in one sitting, and their age. It's basically a form of supervised topic classification training seen in other ML tutorials, but using the age as the training set topic label. I'm experimenting on enriching the data afterwards with media (book/movie/tv flags) see if that feature improves its performance, but I'm teaching a class this week and don't have any spare time to work on it.

I see after going over your comment history that you're 52. Now I feel bad!

Looking at my data, only one person had Ted Nugent. My uncle, who is now 77. I have new respect for him. A handful of Alfred E. Neuman references are in there, wildly varying ages. It really underscores the value of a comprehensive training set to see how wildly off some predictions are when there aren't enough samples. Plus, just two vectors (as in your case) do not a classification make.

It does make me wonder about the validation though... I should try validating the model with varying numbers of input names to see if there's a baseline where it's able to reliably predict age. I think that's where media would come in handy...

My informal theory is that everyone's favorite music is what they were listening to when they were in high school. I'd guess that's a less well-specified version of your idea, but I think including musicians/bands would improve your results. The point someone else made about having access to all of prior history is valid though; my George Tirebiter reference came from listening to 'Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers' by The Firesign Theater, which is a decade or so older than I'd be expected to know if you just knew my age.

I was going to say 45-55, but George Tirebiter threw me. I now have no clue.

I didn't know there was a fictional character named after him! That's neat!

Speaking of datasets, and age, I have a question for younger people. I don't know if you like, or it's politically correct to refer to you as Millenials. I didn't like generation X, or baby boomer.

Here goes, and I'm not trying to make fun of anyone, and I don't belive it's true. Personally, I believe the millenial generation might be the most knowledgable in history.

That said, I've heard some of you don't know what a 45 record is, or how a rotary telephone works?

Some people claim to not to know certain dated things because it's fashionable. I once heard a young Rebublican claim to know nothing about the GOP past. The guy sitting next to her said, "I didn't live through the French Revolution, but I know what happened?" That ended the conversation.

So what the truth?

Rotary phones reminds me of a "hack" I was most proud of as a teenager.

I was barred from calling my girlfriend at night in my room, and my phone was replaced with one that was broken. My parents wanted me to be able to answer the phone, but the keypad didn't work, so I couldn't dial out.

What I could do, however, was rapidly toggle the receiver hook. Turns out the pulse frequency tolerance had a pretty wide range, and I became quite skilled at quickly tapping out her number. That, and the Nintendo gamer hotline. Priorities!

I've submitted a Show HN post asking for assistance in getting more data for this little exercise. I'll post a Jupyter Notebook describing the model and results, along with a live "guess my age" form, in a week or so.

Nice! May I ask if you collected those manually? Perhaps they should be sorted/divided according to the genre they're from? Books/Movies/Tv-shows, etc?

This list made be realize a sort-of annoying (sometimes) tendency I seem to have developed. It appears that my first reaction to cool things is now not wonder but 'I need to engineer the shit out of fit'.My first thought after looking at the list was not 'wow, cool', but more of 'so if I use Named Entity Recognition, and a large corpus, I could have tens of thousands of such names in hours. Maybe I can catch up on computational linguistics literature on the issue, and even identify the relative importance of characters on the text. Should be a day-long project'. Need to learn to enjoy things for what they are, sigh.

> May I ask if you collected those manually?

Yes, whenever I read a book or watched a movie I've added some of the characters to the list.

> It appears that my first reaction to cool things is now not wonder but 'I need to engineer the shit out of fit'.

Imagination and creativity. Nothing wrong with that. And nobody can blame you if you haven't the time to realize the idea.

Haha, I've noticed the same thing.

My approach is in part to learn to accept that it's what I'm like, it's something that fortunately helps put bread on the table, and fighting it too much seems pointless. And the other part consists of forcibly turning it off at times, through meditation or other activities, and seeing if it actually benefits me or if I'm just trying to be something I'm not.

So far I lean towards 'accepting who I am' with the occasional and very necessary break. It's only when I become to 'meta' about this process itself that I get truly unhappy (trying to engineer my periods of non-engineering, and then to force myself to not engineer this process, and so on).

In fact, it's all the 'meta' stuff in general that seems to be a bigger problem than any of my natural urges. But I digress...

Yeeshh. I should to see a therapist for _that_ if nothing else. All that meta-ness, which I guess might(?) arise from insecurity, often makes me stop saying things other people would say, because I'm too conscious about the 'meta-ness'. People sort of use the heuristic that the 'metaness' is a quick way to identify a weirdo, so I often present myself as a lovable unknowing buffoon instead. Or maybe none of it is true, and I just make these things up to make myself feel better about myself.. Hmmm...

See what I mean? ; )

I'd say it's mostly normal behavior: a very sensible desire to not be a weirdo, as being branded one can have bad consequences. But I suppose the more insecure one is, the more likely it is that this 'internal monologue' becomes a problem. And of course it can be argued that what is normal is not necessarily good or healthy :-).

My favorite (short) novel illustrating this 'meta-existence' is Notes From Underground. I read it in a period where I was very insecure and becoming more and more withdrawn. Seeing on paper my exact thought process and how it negatively bleeds into my (social) behavior and becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy was very confronting, and a great warning and incentive to snap out of it somehow.

I think the problems arise in a way similar to addiction: the 'meta' becomes habitual, then compulsive an overpowering, and is experienced as negative, perhaps even debilitating. But also gives a form of comfort. So we keep doing it.

A certain degree 'meta', of self-reflection is fine, perhaps even necessary in the complex societies we inhabit, but especially in bad times it can become an addiction, making those bad times even worse.

I strongly believe being alone is crucial for our mental health. Or to 'just be', I guess. And being 'meta' in your head is like constantly having conversations of sorts with yourself or with others. It's not being alone.

In fact, it's worse than being alone, because your mind can puppeteer all these others, so you really just end up projecting your insecurities and judgments back unto yourself, except with more authority, because you're imagining your partner, parent, boss, or friend doing it, which somehow makes it seem more objective and real and painful.

Nice list, for just names it's a great resource. I see some umlauts, spaces in names, punctuation in names, and it's clearly splittable for first/last name fields. I'm not sure what other ground could be covered that someone would need to account for.

I'm not "book" cultured, so a lot of names I don't recognize, but nice shout outs to 30 Rock and Anchorman :p

Github complains that it's not a properly formatted CSV file. Maybe consider a TSV? It'd probably still complain.

I've yet to use it, but it's been in my back pocket for when I need it. This PHP package looks nice if you need more than just names: https://github.com/fzaninotto/Faker

> it's clearly splittable for first/last name fields.

Yes, I need that for a simple script that generates email addresses and links.

I didn't recognize most of them, I had to search some to get an idea.

If the goal is testing, an improvement would be to add some internationalization. There are not other than English characters there. You want to be sure that your first foreigner don't break your program.

Actually, maybe it would be a nice project to accept pull request from around the world and create an standard international data set.

> If the goal is testing, an improvement would be to add some internationalization.

The goal is rather to be using some fun names during development. For example, when I work on our appointment scheduling software, I often need to walk through the scheduling and registration process in order to check the user experience. Instead of using the tired old John Smith123 and john123@example.com I can use some names that I fondly remember from a book or movie.

Fair enough.

Can I suggest adding Iñigo Montoya at least?

Can't. Haven't read the book yet and was unimpressed with the movie. Sorry. ;-)

is it only "good guys"? I noticed several WOT names but only from the "light" side, no Forsaken (maybe harder to get last names) or Padan Fain.

I omitted indeed characters I didn't like. Those are not necessarily the villains. There a quite a few of them in there as well.

Nice list. If I need to generate names for sample data I usually just use the Faker library.

When I'm writing database fixtures for use in tests, I like to manually choose names from movies/tv-shows for related entities.

For example for an Account with multiple Users I will pick Phil Dunphy for the owner role, Claire Dunphy for the admin role and Luke/Haley/Alex dunphy for regular user roles.

> I like to manually choose names from movies/tv-shows

I knew I couldn't be the only one. And using family members to illustrate different user roles is quite clever.

At work we needed a "clean" dataset for a five-character code. We wanted it to be something you could say out loud, e.g. "Hey, are you working on FORKS?" "No, I'm working on CHUCK", so random wasn't an option, and we were afraid an algorithm, like "consonant-vowel-consonant..." would randomly generate naughty words.

We ended up using our customers' first names and it was a disaster. We had all kinds of joke entries put in, like "JERK"... My favorite customer name was "POOP LENGTH". lol. /facepalm.

Anyway, so in this multimillion dollar enterprise application we're showing "POOP" to the whole company.

At least it was an intra-enterprise-only app.

Does that worth to be shared in this community? has that ever been a problem worth mention to someone? I am only aware to problems related to those names when a living person feels they are using their name/image in a defamatory or unauthorized way but I think anyone can find by herself a fiction or historical name for that task (or generics such as John Smith/Max Mustermann)

> Does that worth to be shared in this community?

Since it has been starred and forked on Github I think the answer is yes.

> has that ever been a problem worth mention to someone?

It has been to me. When I work I want to write lines and not think what name I use when testing. I have a simple script that creates a link to my applications so that the registration forms get pre-filled.

My go to name is Keyser Söze, which I use whenever I'm writing examples in documentation and such. It also has the advantage of containing a unicode character.

This isn't a great list because it assumes far too much about what a name is. Patio11 wrote a great blog post about what developers frequently get wrong when it comes to people and names; http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b...

I'd encourage you to phrase feedback of this nature in the general form "Thank you for doing free work on behalf of the community, which has certainly made no one's life worse and some peoples' lives better. I feel like this list could be even more useful if you added names like ... and/or restructured the fields you store for names to resemble ... The reason for this is that the existing list is generated from a subset of fiction which is broadly representative of part of the global population but which fails to exercise a lot of consequential cases commonly encountered when working with names. For more details, see $LINK."

Optionally: "If you'd like, I'd be happy to do some of the legwork for you there. Would you be open to receiving a pull request?"

You really need to add Jack Reacher.

Please add Phoebe Buffay & Regina Phalange .. I will send a pull request may be :D

Thanks. Added.

Love the beginning :P

I edited the order of names before creating the repo on Github, to be honest. :-)

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