
Sex Machine: Get gender from first name in Ruby - _pius
https://github.com/bmuller/sexmachine
======
te_platt
As a man named Tracy I would just throw out a caution to anyone thinking of
using this. At this point in my life I don't really care about people calling
Ms. Tracy Platt. But what it does do is immediately signal that I don't really
need to pay attention. Fake familiarity doesn't usually work too well.

As a side note I would like to mention that having a girl's name does have
some benefits. For example my wife can handle bank account issues over the
phone for me. Also some near misses - I was assigned a locker in the girls
locker room in junior high but they caught on before I could use it, and once
a telemarketer called to offer me a spot in an all woman's resort spa. The
only time I said yes to a telemarketer and I got rejected.

~~~
nostromo
Me and my significant other frequently impersonate each other when dealing
with banks and hospitals over the phone (we're a gay couple). It honestly
never occurred to me that straight folks can't get away with this. How
unfortunate; it's quite a time saver!

~~~
chadillac83
We can, it's just a little more tricky... example being while looking up plane
ticket information for an S.O. I'm usually her "personal assistant".

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chriseppstein
Gender identity is actually a quite tricky topic and should be approached
carefully. I would discourage anyone from trying to use this library, the real
world doesn't fit neatly in your multiple-choice view of gender. For more
information, please watch this great talk: <http://vimeo.com/61172068>.

~~~
galvanist
I can't imagine making a dating site these days: "I'm (name text field), a
(sexual identity text field) interested in meeting (sexual identity text
field) for the purpose of (dating/friendship/sex/swinging/whatever text
field)." Good luck with that business logic. Maybe we do need intelligent
agents for this stuff.

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ig1
Without knowing what data it's been trained on it's of questionable use. What
maybe a 18 year old american girls name may be a 60 year old german mans name.

The gender of a name can vary heavily by culture and time-period, it would
make much more sense for the api to return the data in the form of ranked
probabilities.

As an aside it's worth noting that as this library is GPL3 it means you can't
use this code in any non-GPL product.

~~~
mbell
> Without knowing what data it's been trained on it's of questionable use.

Literally the very first line of the README has a link to the source data. It
contains name frequency data for a number of countries and the README clearly
indicates you can provide a country of origin when doing lookups.

> As an aside it's worth noting that as this library is GPL3 it means you
> can't use this code in any non-GPL product.

The source data is GPL, there wasn't much option.

~~~
tingletech
The data is GPL documentation license; why/how would that affect the code?

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regis
Frankly, it is none of your business what the sex or gender of a user is. I
understand that sometimes there is money to be made by collecting this
information but it is also alienating and just plain irrelevant (and I think
there is also money to be made in recognizing that people can be fluid.)

You can give your users an option to provide you with these details but
guessing/requiring is not a good practice.

On a side note, it's interesting that the most common gender neutral title is
Dr.

~~~
icambron
I think you're looking at this through too narrow a use case. I agree you
shouldn't be taking individual people and guessing what their genders are. And
you should minimize the instances where gender is even relevant in your
application.

But what if you have a whole bunch of data and want to do some aggregate
statistics? "Do women use our product?" is a perfectly reasonable question to
ask yourself. You don't need it to be exact, and it's certainly not reasonable
to ask every user. So you use some heuristics and you get some useful data.

~~~
regis
I agree I'm mainly concerned about cases where gender follows you around a
website when you're logged in.

"Good Morning Mr. _" and stuff like that should be avoided unless supplied by
the user. For your own stats using this library is probably better than asking
users for that information.

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heelhook
Shouldn't this be called "Gender Machine", they get it right on the project
description but not on the project name, weird.

~~~
advisedwang
I had a friend who insisted "gender" should be used for linguistic use (for
example cheese being masculine in French) and "sex" for the boy/girl-ness of a
person.

Determining the boy/girl-ness of a chicken is called "sexing" the chick. I see
"sex machine" as a machine that sexes by name.

~~~
Evbn
This product is used for linguistic purposes, not for deciding whose head to
cut off.

------
lkrubner
I know that most of us already know this, but it is worth repeating: sex is
biological, gender is cultural (for instance, "la montaña" - the mountain is
feminine in the Spanish language). A "sex machine" would tell you whether you
were dealing with a biological male or biological female, or something else,
but it would not tell you the gender.

~~~
obviouslygreen
Of course you're technically right, but the pedantry is out of control. In
reality, when speaking English in a professional (and pretty much any other)
setting, "sex" means "gender."

I don't think it's worth repeating. I'd say it's repeating this kind of
misplaced vernacular revisionism that's making us (in which I controversially
refer to the disparate collection of users on HN as a single group) look even
more anal and oversensitive than we actually are.

~~~
drakeandrews
A non-zero quantity of people have a gender that is separate and different to
their sex. By marking out differentating sex and gender as "vernacular
revisionism", you are contributing to making the lives of a non-zero quantity
of people worse than they need to be. Erasure sucks, please don't perpetuate
it.

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whackedspinach
This is exactly what I am looking for! I run a tech conference and am
interested in seeing what percentage of our attendees are male or female. I
only have names for historical data, so this should help give a somewhat close
approximation of sex!

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obviouslygreen
Haha, wow. It's like someone said, "Hey, what are people reacting incredibly
poorly to right now?", then took the answer, and built an almost-useful
library with a funny but obviously-destined-to-offend-lots-of-people name.

Really though, geek PC hilarity aside... with so many collisions and
uncertainties, this just isn't a practical approach.

------
dclowd9901
We tried to solve a similar problem with our app, too. We were trying to
generate questions based on person and occasion (think: "What should I get my
_boyfriend_ for _his birthday_ ).

It got interesting when occasions didn't warrant possessives ("What should I
get my boyfriend for Christmas"), and when language factors were considered
("What should I get mi abuelo for su cumpleanos"). We decided to try and crowd
source it, which worked ok: essentially we left the occasion empty, and if the
person wanted to attach the gender-based possessive to it, they could.
Otherwise, we would guess with what information we had. We figured, over time,
we could actually create a service where we could sell that information (GaaS:
Grammar as a service?).

Turns out, people just wanted to be able to write their own titles, and we
quickly trashed the idea in the early phases.

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_pius
I submitted this, but I'm _not_ the author of the library.

I agree with many of the concerns and limitations brought up here, most
notably the fluid, non-binary nature of gender. That said, thoughtful
application of probabilistic guesses about gender _can_ add value in certain
situations. For instance: [http://source.mozillaopennews.org/en-
US/learning/freeing-plu...](http://source.mozillaopennews.org/en-
US/learning/freeing-plum-book/)

------
coherentpony
Any reason you called it "Sex Machine"?

~~~
adambard
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qjHLsctLL8>

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dgreensp
How is this useful?

The answer is convention over configuration. See, if we institute a societal
convention that your gender is derived from your first name (automatically by
a Ruby program), it will save a lot of time and energy and make the world more
DRY.

~~~
ftay
Let's institute a convention to refer to everyone by a unique identifier. Oh
wait, that's prison.

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eremzeit
Ohhh the controversy that would be generated if this gem ever got big.

[http://www.confreaks.com/videos/1120-gogaruco2012-schemas-
fo...](http://www.confreaks.com/videos/1120-gogaruco2012-schemas-for-the-real-
world)

------
mikeruby
I can this being useful if perhaps your attempting to target with maybe some
email marketing..long as your content with it being 70-80% accurate.

------
spitfire
Funny. I had plans to build one of these in a month or so time. Now I can crib
the answers, Cool.

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hugi
>> d.get_gender("Álfrún")

Out of curiosity, why did you choose that name?

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nsxwolf
This gem is too clever by half.

------
Evbn
Looking forward to the upcoming submissions

1\. Rename "Sex Machine" 2\. Why Women Don't Like Rubyists 3\. Don't
Publically Shame the Person Who Suggested the Name Change 4\. Take Your 'Sex
Machine' and Shove It

------
nnnnni
Iiiiit's Pat!

