It's useful for estimating demographics in large datasets from limited information, i.e. just a name.

It's also fairly good at separating given name and family names across a wide variety of languages and contexts.

Contains a standalone binary, embeddable shared lib, and a python wrapper.

Examples

CLI:

user@box » ./build/name-classifier -j -c "Carlos Eduardo Fernando Salazar Montemayor" | jq .

{ "input": "Carlos Eduardo Fernando Salazar Montemayor", "script": "latin", "components": [ { "token": "Carlos", "role": "given", "index": 0, "surname_score": 0.009 }, { "token": "Eduardo", "role": "given", "index": 1, "surname_score": 0.001 }, { "token": "Fernando", "role": "given", "index": 2, "surname_score": 0.01 }, { "token": "Salazar", "role": "family", "index": 3, "surname_score": 0.998 }, { "token": "Montemayor", "role": "family", "index": 4, "surname_score": 0.975 } ], "attributes": { "gender": { "male": 0.9938, "female": 0.0062, "neutral": 0 }, "origin": { "english": 0, "french": 0, "germanic": 0, "nordic": 0, "iberian": 1, "italian": 0, "eastern_european": 0, "arabic": 0, "east_asian": 0, "south_asian": 0, "southeast_asian": 0 } }, "calibrated": true, "model_version": "embedded", "provenance": { "gender": { "lexicon": 0.598, "ngram": 0.302, "neural": 0.101 }, "origin": { "lexicon": 0, "ngram": 0, "neural": 0 } } }

Python:

from name_classifier import NameClassifier

nc = NameClassifier(args.model_dir)

nc.classify("Kateryna Olha Mykhailivna Shevchenko")

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47198318

Points: 2

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Incidentally, millenials also used the "no caps" style but mainly for "marginalia" (at most paragraph-length notes, observations), while for older generations it was almost always associated with a modernist aesthetic and thus appeared primarily in functional or environmental text (restaurant menus, signage, your business card, bloomingdales, etc.). It may be interesting to note that the inverse ALL CAPS style conveyed modernity in the last tech revolution (the evolution of the Microsoft logo, for example).

Special relativity however seems possible.

It does seem like in-person pen-and-paper exams would hold the line pretty firmly with respect to competence. It's a simple solution and I haven't heard any good arguments against it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect

What remains after is something like the social status games of the aristocratic class, which I suspect is why there's a race to accumulate as much as possible now before the means to do so evaporate.

PS--to add one thing as a criticism, the "retreat" into "grassroots groups" has also long been viewed as a false solution to the problem. Politically, this "solution" emerged in various forms: the 19th century's utopian socialism (especially in the US!), late 19th-early 20th century syndicalism, 1960s communes and "turn-on, tune-in, drop-out," up to now with the stubborn idea that communal living is somehow "revolutionary" and various other guises. It's there in less "radical" forms too, like when liberals say we just need to restart the bowling leagues. It's fine as an individual respite, but will never really get at the problem, not least because there are many other (and better!) ways of getting some "relief".

E.g. there would be enormous difficulty in replacing the Dewey Decimal System with something else, if only due to its physical inertia, but with a computer system a curious clerk can invent an alternative categorization and retrieval system which inevitably touches on mathematical topics.