6 ms·

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

72 points by NameNickHN 11y ago

alex95 11y ago
How is this on the front page of HN? Is this something special that you have a list of names?!
tickthokk 11y ago
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 https://github.com/fzaninotto/Faker
- NameNickHN 11y ago
  > it's clearly splittable for first/last name fields. Yes, I need that for a simple script that generates email addresses and links.
nudpiedo 11y ago
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)
- NameNickHN 11y ago
  > 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.
benten10 11y ago
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.
- NameNickHN 11y ago
  > 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.
- mercer 11y ago
  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...
  - benten10 11y ago
    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? ; )
nazarewk 11y ago
Love the beginning :P
- NameNickHN 11y ago
  I edited the order of names before creating the repo on Github, to be honest. :-)
onion2k 11y ago
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-believe-about-names/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b...
- patio11 11y ago
  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?"
spdustin 11y ago
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!
- NameNickHN 11y ago
  LOL yes.
  - spdustin 11y ago
    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.
    - MuEta 11y ago
      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).
      - mccolin 11y ago
        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!
vbsteven 11y ago
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.
- NameNickHN 11y ago
  > 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.
RobertoG 11y ago
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.
- NameNickHN 11y ago
  > 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.
  - RobertoG 11y ago
    Fair enough. Can I suggest adding Iñigo Montoya at least?
    - NameNickHN 11y ago
      Can't. Haven't read the book yet and was unimpressed with the movie. Sorry. ;-)
      - tremendo 11y ago
        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.
        NameNickHN 11y ago
        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.
_mc 11y ago
Please add Phoebe Buffay & Regina Phalange .. I will send a pull request may be :D
- NameNickHN 11y ago
  Thanks. Added.
chris_wot 11y ago
You really need to add Jack Reacher.
inanutshellus 11y ago
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.
anotherevan 11y ago
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.

72 points by NameNickHN 11y ago

How is this on the front page of HN? Is this something special that you have a list of names?!

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 https://github.com/fzaninotto/Faker

NameNickHN 11y ago
> it's clearly splittable for first/last name fields. Yes, I need that for a simple script that generates email addresses and links.

nudpiedo 11y ago

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)

NameNickHN 11y ago
> 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.

benten10 11y ago

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.

NameNickHN 11y ago
> 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.
mercer 11y ago
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...
- benten10 11y ago
  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? ; )

nazarewk 11y ago

Love the beginning :P

NameNickHN 11y ago
I edited the order of names before creating the repo on Github, to be honest. :-)

onion2k 11y ago

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-believe-about-names/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b...

patio11 11y ago
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?"

spdustin 11y ago

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!

NameNickHN 11y ago
LOL yes.
- spdustin 11y ago
  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.
  - MuEta 11y ago
    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).
    - mccolin 11y ago
      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!

vbsteven 11y ago

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.

NameNickHN 11y ago
> 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.

RobertoG 11y ago

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.

NameNickHN 11y ago
> 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.
- RobertoG 11y ago
  Fair enough. Can I suggest adding Iñigo Montoya at least?
  - NameNickHN 11y ago
    Can't. Haven't read the book yet and was unimpressed with the movie. Sorry. ;-)
    - tremendo 11y ago
      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.
      - NameNickHN 11y ago
        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.

_mc 11y ago

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

NameNickHN 11y ago
Thanks. Added.

chris_wot 11y ago

You really need to add Jack Reacher.

inanutshellus 11y ago

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.

anotherevan 11y ago

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.