Hacker News Reader

Comment by powera | Hacker News Reader

I would think it shouldn't be used in the real world because an 80% guess rate of gender based on name is really terrible compared to other naive approaches, like "list of 1000 most common names by gender".

View on HN

80% is not very good for practical uses (the Gender Classification as a Service on the web most likely use a map of names to probability of gender), but I think it is very good for 3 features.

Well, why is that constraint interesting?

This is interesting because using only last 2 letters of a name and the position of a's, and throwing away all the other information, you can guess the gender of a name with 80% accuracy.

That's really just restating what you did, not explaining why it's interesting to have done it. Is three features a common limitation of systems? Is this useful in a way that augments existing tools like comparing the name to the SSN database? There is definitely a place for articles saying "this is a toy problem you can use technique x on" but it's worth differentiating that from "this is a novel technique/a discovery made using this technique", and it feels a little like you've done the first kind and you're trying to label it as the second kind.

The point still stands though - guessing a user's gender based on their name whatever solution you use will get it wrong every time the user doesn't identify with the normative gender for that given name. It's much more user friendly to ask (and include an option for "Prefer not to say").

> get it wrong every time the user doesn't identify with the normative gender for that given name

While I'm not really buying your root argument, this statement is spot on.

Case in point - I'm a man named Lyndsy.

Serious question: How can a name have a biological sex? (Wouldn't the fact that penis-people and vagina-people could be named Amy, but society heavily biases towards one, imply names are indicators of societal genders and not biological sex?)

I agree with your above points about the dangers of making guesses on gender. I'm just not well versed in the progressive gender concepts and don't understand the semantics you are arguing for.

I think that by 'biological sex' they are saying it is identifying the gender of the person as it was assigned to them at birth, which is usually based on visible biological sex characteristics.

No one is suggesting this should be done in actual production software - even the author says it's just "an easy project to learn machine learning".

I appreciate the point you're trying to make, but it's kind of a straw man argument.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com