but can a function which is basically "name -> gender" really be honest with its users? It's claiming something that would require much more information to pred

but can a function which is basically "name -> gender" really be honest with its users? It's claiming something that would require much more information to predict with any reasonable chance of success (even excluding lgbt folks). If you look at the files it is based on, it looks like there are only a tiny number of names defined anyway - what hope does the user have of accomplishing the goal they want? Now, I might accept an API in which machine learning was involved and tons of historical data was included as input before predicting the value. Even then, it would of course have a decent potential of being wrong, but at least the result would be a more realistic claim. The current API feels a lot like this sort of thing: boolean isHappySentence(String sentence) { return sentence.contains(":)"); } Sure, it might get it right some of the time, but it's not effective enough to be useful.