Hacker News

Top stories

Live mirror
30 storiesupdated just nowView source snapshot
  1. Android 17 is the first since 3.x to add new APIs without releasing to the AOSP(grapheneos.social ↗)
    120comments
  2. Claude Code now reads AGENTS.md if there is no Claude.md(claude.com ↗)
    14comments
  3. Cloudflare Quick Tunnels(cloudflare.com ↗)
    199comments
  4. Saving another 100TB of RAM(cloudflare.com ↗)
    16comments
  5. Xcode 27.1 Beta Release Notes(developer.apple.com ↗)
    44comments
  6. Cache-to-Cache: Direct Semantic Communication Between LLMs (2025)(arxiv.org ↗)
    8comments
  7. Photon-Emission-Guided Laser Fault Injection Enables RP2350 Secure Debug(ledger.com ↗)
    37comments
  8. Show HN: Cactus Needle 3: 8-29MB automation models can match DeepSeek V4 Flash(cactuscompute.com ↗)
    64comments
  9. How to Write with an LLM(sockpuppet.org ↗)
    218comments
  10. The Implications of Linguistic Illegibility for LLM Security(arxiv.org ↗)
    12comments
  11. OpenJev(openjev.com ↗)
    234comments
  12. C++26: Trivial infinite loops are no longer undefined behaviour(sandordargo.com ↗)
    145comments
  13. Our brain evolved from two primitive nervous systems that merged: Study(newscientist.com ↗)
    41comments
  14. The first new cat species discovered in 100 years(nationalgeographic.com ↗)
    23comments
  15. Border agents can search cellphones without a warrant or reasonable suspicion(lawandcrime.com ↗)
    91comments
  16. Korea raises data breach fines to 10% of revenue(koreajoongangdaily.com ↗)
    42comments
  17. From Geometry to Algebra and Back Again: 4000 Years of Papers (2023) [video](youtube.com ↗)
    discuss
  18. Cyclomatic Complexity in C#(ndepend.com ↗)
    discuss
  19. I vibed a proof of Conway's conjecture(overreacted.io ↗)
    169comments
  20. How SpaceX streamlined the Raptor engine(construction-physics.com ↗)
    15comments
  21. Minimal Phone 2(minimalcompany.com ↗)
    118comments
  22. A search-and-inference database from scratch in pure Zig(antfly.io ↗)
    11comments
  23. Inside ZCode: Silently uploading your Git history to the cloud(ferstar.org ↗)
    86comments
  24. Warez: The Infrastructure and Aesthetics of Piracy (2021)(archive.org ↗)
    8comments
  25. Cekura (YC F24) Is Hiring(ycombinator.com ↗)
    discuss
  26. Show HN: Ax-check.com – Can agents use your product?(ax-check.com ↗)
    23comments
  27. North Korean nuclear test sets off years of earthquakes(science.org ↗)
    140comments
  28. US Military had close call after using AI for hallucinated intelligence report(cnn.com ↗)
    238comments
  29. Mathematicians Build Long-Awaited Graph Sandwich(quantamagazine.org ↗)
    15comments
  30. Show HN: Scry, programmable internet search w/ congestion pricing(scry.io ↗)
    16comments

Fake Name Generator

397 pointsby 12y agofakenamegenerator.com
159 comments
12y agoHN ↗

I am highly amused that this requires a google+ login. Do they detect their own fake names?

12y agoHN ↗

It does not require a G+ login for 99% of the features.

12y agoHN ↗

Super useful. Now if it only were to auto-create a G+ profile and scrape to find some profile pics.

12y agoHN ↗

Is this legal? Unless those faces are fictional drawings, using someone else's face for a fake profile seems way over the line.

12y agoHN ↗

That was my confusion as well. They are using actual photographs of people for a randomly generate profile!

12y agoHN ↗

If it had checkboxes for all of the social networks, free email providers, and so on it would go a long way toward setting up false identities.

If it could comb death certificates for names and demographic data rather than randomly generating it, that would be even better.

You'd probably make a fortune selling SaaS contracts to criminals in Russia and Washington.

12y agoHN ↗

Very useful resource!

I'm curious though, where did you get your Hispanic names from? Seems like they come from a database of funny, weird and probably offensive names. No one is called like that in Spanish-speaking countries, and yes, I know the names are supposed to be fake, but just comparing the Hispanic with the American ones, you can tell there's a big difference.

Whether or not is intentional, it could be even more helpful if you use "normal" names.

Disclaimer: I'm Hispanic.

12y agoHN ↗

Yeap, i can confirm. Hispanic surnames are more or less correct, but first names are bizarre.

12y agoHN ↗

Indeed. Tried like 15 times and not a single Hispanic first name didn't make me wiggle.

12y agoHN ↗

I’m from Argentina and also find that the names are very unusual. The usual names vary a lot by country, but I could not even recognize a most of them, and I had to retry about 10 times to get a realistic name.

12y agoHN ↗

Same thing for French : I have not heard of anyone named Brigliador in France, or maybe in some medieval poetry.

12y agoHN ↗

The England/Wales names are weird too, lots of unusual first names.

Also, Wales seems way over-represented. It has a population that's tiny compared to England, but half the names generated seem to be Welsh names such as Cerys.

12y agoHN ↗

Also, I don't know any English/Welsh people who drive a 1992 Pontiac Sunbird.

12y agoHN ↗

That was the first thing I noticed. My random German drives a

1996 Buick Roadmaster

which is about as likely as him riding around on a Unicorn.

12y agoHN ↗

The first thing I noticed was that the vehicle field doesn't seem to be sensitive to the products available domestically for the person's address. And for bonus points, it could even consider demographics of the address versus price of the car (I got a Bentley while living in the middle of nowhere in the rust belt, which seems a bit suspicious).

12y agoHN ↗

The addresses it generates are generally non-existent (if they do exist, it's a coincidence)

12y agoHN ↗

Ya, I think the car databases are backwards... I have never seen a Peugeot in America. I'm sure there are some, but I've never seen one.

12y agoHN ↗

My Eritrean living in Sweden was 170cm / 5'6" weight 112kg 246lb. Bit unusual but possible I guess.

Random name factoid: In England, J is a valid first name and A is a valid surname. So someone's full name could be J A.

I wonder how many databases would accept that.

12y agoHN ↗

I've got a colleague who's legal first name is "G". He's listed as "Gee" in about 50% of the places he needs to register (including some important places where there might be future legal ramifications of not using his proper legal name - I'm looking at _you_ Crazy Domains web/database programmer!)

12y agoHN ↗

The car generation is really strange. I just generated an occupational therapist aide who drives a 2001 Ariel Atom.

12y agoHN ↗

Same for French names. Last names are okay, but first names aren't French at all for most of them. I think maybe you had a list of all possible names, but you didn't take into account that some of them are more frequent than others ?

12y agoHN ↗

I tried the generator with gender:random; nameSet:England+Wales; country:UK.

All but one of the names is a forename of someone I know - that name is Scarlet and it appeared twice in my sample of 20. Only one of the names was 'foreign' though. In my area there would be several Asian names in that sample.

12y agoHN ↗

Yes, I was about to say the same. I tried a few "Hispanic" names and they looked absolutely weird. On the other hand the notion of a "reasonable" Hispanic name can be quite broad. Names in Spain can be very different from names in Argentina (where Italian surnames are quite common) or from US (when it's not uncommon to have an English name with a Spanish last name)

Not sure about that, but other name set can have the same problems if they try to cover a language shared by lots of people (like Arabic)

12y agoHN ↗

Yeah, I live in Southern California and I've never heard of 99% of these Hispanic first names.

12y agoHN ↗

Curious what you find this useful for? Filling out online forms instead making stuff up off the top of your head?

12y agoHN ↗

Same for Polish.

Most of names sound Polish, but I never ever heard of anyone called that name.

Also lastnames seem to be missing Polish characters sometimes

12y agoHN ↗

Hispanic here: tried the same thing and had the same reaction. Dampne is not a hispanic name...

12y agoHN ↗

Same in Dutch-Belgium setting. None of the names sounded realistic and when van de/van der or variants were used it was always in lowercase which is a thing from the Netherlands. In Belgium it'll be in capital letters.

12y agoHN ↗

Hmm no API available (unlike randomuser). We need automated faking!

12y agoHN ↗

My thoughts exactly. After seeing the names it generated, along with the the addresses and so forth, I immediately started looking for the link to buy or download the code, database or whatever was on offer. To my disappointment, there was nothing available.

12y agoHN ↗

Quite useful but the site has ignored about 17.5% of the world population - Indian names are missing.

12y agoHN ↗

"How very coincidental"

Colour me surprised too. Just 5 minutes ago I was searching for a false name generator. My heart leapt with fright on seeing my recent history at the top of HN.

12y agoHN ↗

Interesting to see this come up. A couple years ago I started and then mothballed a system for generating realistic fake people (which I called golems) using deterministic and reversible algorithms instead of random numbers (it has a bunch of advantages). Got to love heroku's free tier, cause it's actually still on line:

http://golems.herokuapp.com/person/random.json

If anyone's interested in learning more let me know.

12y agoHN ↗

  # aptitude install rig

RIG (Random Identity Generator) is a free replacement for a shareware program out there called 'fake'. It generates random, yet real-looking, personal data. It is useful if you need to feed a name to a Web site, BBS, or real person, and are too lazy to think of one yourself. Also, if the Web site/BBS/person you are giving the information to tries to cross-check the city, state, zip, or area code, it will check out.

  $ rig
  Adolph Cline
  739 Anton Dr
  Mentor, OH  44060
  (216) xxx-xxxx
  $
12y agoHN ↗

Is there a reason to use either of those systems over homebrew? Since homebrew seems to have a lot more community support now.

12y agoHN ↗

I could be wrong, but I believe MacPorts has more ports in the default repository at the moment. Not sure about Fink.

But yes, arguably, `brew` is moving forward very quickly.

12y agoHN ↗

MacPorts is full of useless junk. MacPorts will install a new sandboxed python, ruby, perl, etc when just want to get wget (the built in versions are fine!). The libraries are all broken out where brew keeps them simple and a lot of the packages are old silly packages that no one on the Mac really cares about (every single GNOME library for example).

brew isn't just moving forward quickly, it has really just out right replaced MacPorts and anyone still using MacPorts is living in 2007.

12y agoHN ↗

MacPorts does not use system libraries for good reasons:

"There are several reasons why MacPorts uses its own libraries. It makes ports more consistent across different versions of Mac OS X. For example, if we can rely on openssl 1.0.0 from MacPorts, we don't have to test every port that needs ssl for every available openssl installation. Apple's software tends to break from time to time (e.g. openssl refuses to build with an old zlib, but for awhile Apple shipped the old headers of the vulnerable zlib version). Even if Apple's versions aren't broken, they're rarely up-to-date. Apple has a habit of not updating the libraries in Mac OS X until absolutely necessitated by a security vulnerability." [1]

[1] https://trac.macports.org/wiki/FAQ#ownlibs

12y agoHN ↗

I used all three at one point in time. What I love about homebrew is that the tedious work of maintaining a sane package repository is distributed over many shoulders (3429 at the moment) - and those who contribute most of the time do really care about the packages they are watching over.

I haven't found an easy way to add/update packages to finc or macports, but I could contribute to homebrew within 5 minutes.

I wish we would see more work distribution patterns like this in fields outside code/programming.

12y agoHN ↗

Once you start piling up some dependencies (vs. self-constained apps), I found homebrew more of a mess, while MacPorts more or less worked as I'd expect. The thing that drove me off Homebrew was dependency-hell with different versions of Python packages, while MacPorts pulled in the right versions of all the dependencies (it can even handle needing multiple versions of NLTK/SciPy/etc. installed in parallel, if different ports depend on them). This is perhaps the flipside of the reason many people prefer Homebrew: it tends to build against the base OSX stuff, while MacPorts tends to pull in its own parallel world of dependencies. IME the latter works more reliably, though it takes up more diskspace.

But, Debian's package management works better than either of them, so I've sort of been moving towards doing any kind of unixy work in a VM and treating OSX as just a desktop.

12y agoHN ↗

It's possible to end up in a different circle of dependency hell with macports, where it insists on installing 10 different versions of everything at great length, when you already had a perfectly good one. If I'm not a python or perl developer, I don't want to compile many different point releases of those language ecosystems just to run some little utility scripts. And then of course everything is connected to everything else, so you can end up trying to solve graph theory problems when you're meant to be working.

Battle-hardened *NIX admins rightfully laugh at this attitude, but for a lot of web developers who use their laptops as a "sharp tool" and do all the heavy lifting in linux vservers, it makes sense to have a slightly laxer approach to package management.

(and then there's the increasingly common cases of build scripts just being broken on macports, because it receives less and less community attention now. this can combine with the above dependency graph problems to produce situations where it's easier to just nuke /opt/local and start again.)

12y agoHN ↗

I'm a *NIX admin and actually, when it comes to OSX I'd rather go the VM route than homebrew/macports (either way, I don't run OSX daily).

12y agoHN ↗

There's a pull request open here: https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew/pull/26075

If you absolutely can't wait, you can run this to install it:

  $ brew install https://github.com/adnissen/homebrew/raw/110c278d3a6ce6edae6208f4033bd3508530f29d/Library/Formula/rig.rb

Voilà.

  ############################################## 100.0%
  ==> Downloading http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/rig/rig/1.11/rig-1.11.tar.gz
  ############################################## 100.0%
  ==> make
  🍺  /usr/local/Cellar/rig/1.11: 10 files, 96K, built in 5 seconds
  $ rig
  Jewell Harrison
  984 Lowel Rd
  Galveston, TX  77553
  (409) xxx-xxxx
12y agoHN ↗

You may also enjoy the Faker rubygem, a port of perl's Data::Faker.

12y agoHN ↗

rig is free software to create fake credentials on your local machine without the need of a internet connection to access an online service.

12y agoHN ↗

The wonderful thing about fakenamegenerator is the email coming with it. While mailinator is often blocked this one is less so.

12y agoHN ↗

I just generated an icelandic hobbit and it GAVE ME MY OWN NAME! I actually WTFed out loud.

12y agoHN ↗

"Privacy concerns on the raise. A hobbit accidentally outed by a web service."

12y agoHN ↗

There are no hobbits in Iceland, duuuh!

Elves, on the other hand...

12y agoHN ↗

My Hobbit name was from my home town (I'm from a suburb of Palm Springs, not a normal place to randomly generate). What is going on in the Shire?

12y agoHN ↗

One of the "hobbit" names it gave me was "Haiduc". I don't think there were ever many hobbits engaged in highway banditry in the Balkans.

12y agoHN ↗

As an Indian I am a bit sad to see Hobbit, Klingon and Ninja in there but no option for Indian names.

12y agoHN ↗

Selecting "Hobbit" also adjusts the generated height to around 3 feet!

12y agoHN ↗

Just as well, probably. If they had Indian, you'd get a Punjabi first name, an Urdu surname, and a 1992 Pontiac Sunbird in your New Delhi driveway.

12y agoHN ↗

Salman Rushdie has to get his story ideas from somewhere.

12y agoHN ↗

Seems to have been quite an oversight. Hard to see how that happened.

12y agoHN ↗

The Norwegian name set generates some really strange first names. Plausible surnames though.

12y agoHN ↗

Same with Icelandic names. Also, the GPS coordinates were often out at sea or on a mountain. Using openStreetMap it should be easy to generate more plausible coordinates.

12y agoHN ↗

Italian names are not realistic.

Try #1: "Dante Marcelo". Dante is a very strange name for an italian, I guess it is used in the US. Marcelo lacks an "l" (it is Marcello) so it sounds Spanish instead.

Try #2: "Berto Trentino". Trentino is realistic but Berto sounds a lot like an abbreviation of "Alberto", so not a real name even if I guess there are people actually named "Berto".

Try #3: "Pupetta Rizzo". Can't imagine somebody called "Pupetta", it is something you say to small children as "Little Doll" or alike.

12y agoHN ↗

Hey! I actually know a "Dante Marcelo"! (but both as given names, he's known as Marcelo). But he's from Argentina (where Marcelo is a relatively common name), not from Italy

12y agoHN ↗

I think its fair to say that scenarios where a service cancels a user account because his/her name was not "realistic sounding" are few and far between. (Assuming you're not entering names like "Doorknob Toothbrush")

12y agoHN ↗

Well, the site did generate Iva Lavallée as a French female name for me. I had never heard of someone called Iva, but it seems it's been given to exactly 100 persons in France since 1900.

Iva Lavallée sounds like He's gonna swallow it, really.

12y agoHN ↗

My guess is that it's just randomly selecting from a list of names with equal probability, rather than weighting them based on how common they are. So all of these long-tail names are coming up way more often than you'd find in a phone book.

12y agoHN ↗

Yeah, similar is when you get names from Canada and look at the cities.

The first one I get is from Weagamow, ON, which is a North Caribou Lake Indian reservation, with like 900 people in it.

The second I get is from Cornwall, ON, a small city of 45k people, the next is from Orangeville, ON another town of 30k people. Then Wawa, ON, a town of 3k people.

Meanwhile, Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal are all unrepresented.

I just got a person from Byemoor Alberta, a hamlet of 35 people. It says she lives on 1304, 90th Ave, but there's a 1 Ave, a 2 Ave, a 1 St, and a 1 St North. Definitely no 90th Ave.

12y agoHN ↗

It's a pretty old project. I know that it's been used quite successfully plenty of times for social engineering purposes.

12y agoHN ↗

Yeah, it is an old project. I would have posted a long time ago if I knew HN didn't know already.

The most useful tool besides this is http://10minutemail.com/

Edit: Doing a HN search this was posted about a year ago. That is why I probably didn't post it. Should we start submitting reposts of old stuff? I probably missed "cool tools" from years ago.

12y agoHN ↗

I've been using this for testing webapps for years

12y agoHN ↗

Me too, and when I do I always blindly copy and paste and end up with very fake looking data... Which doesn't matter to me at all!

12y agoHN ↗

Don't know where you live, but the Dutch government publishes spreadsheets with testdata. It contains names, middle names, addresses, domestic and foreign names, etc. No need to generate your own. I haven't had to use it yet and I didn't have a very good look, but I'd think it contains all sorts of exceptional cases which your system needs to handle. If it successfully processes that spreadsheet, it probably handles anything.

12y agoHN ↗

Hmm, in my experience, 85 yo Dutch women are unlikely to drive a Mazda Miata. Although maybe mine examiners are more thrill-seeking than the average 85 yo. Fun!

12y agoHN ↗

While this is very interesting, the profiles may need to be "tweaked" a bit to be realistic. For example, the first profile it generate for me was a:

-Female

-Fitness instructor

-Weighing 205.9 lbs

-Standing 5 feet 1 inch

Individually, any of these things might be ok. Any three could even be possible. All four, however, just doesn't seem to work.

12y agoHN ↗

The occupations do seem the most likely to cause suspicion. Some of them are trades where you have to be licensed or registered to have that occupation, so a quick search would prove the person does not exist, or at least is lying about their job.

Then there's the automobile, which could also raise red flags. A Fiat Tempra driven in the USA would probably be suspicious to anyone who knows that Fiats probably weren't sold in the US in 1994, for example. And it might be weird for a clerk to be driving a 2010 Infinity...

Back in the BBS days there used to be programs written to auto-generate identities in bulk, for reasons i'm not aware of. They were designed to minimize scrutiny because there might be humans actually looking at the data you used, since there was less automation in terms of processing accounts back then.

12y agoHN ↗

I'm not sure why National Auto Parts would needs a Perianesthesia nurse who runs a website called SuicideLaws.com, but they seem to be paying him well enough to drive 1992 Ferrari 512 TR.

12y agoHN ↗

Pretty awesome - although I keep on getting Ferraris and type two Diabetes. I guess it goes to show that you really can't have everything.

12y agoHN ↗

Surely it shows precisely the opposite! You have a Ferrari AND diabetes! Very lucky indeed!

12y agoHN ↗

Russian first names (not Cyrillic) are very strange: "Innocent Korovin" - really? Russian (cyrillic) seem more realistic though.

12y agoHN ↗

There's a problem with Belgium: it generates street names in flemish for cities in the french speaking part of the country. Makes it obvious the address is fake.

12y agoHN ↗

Noticed it too, and it looks city-street are unique combinations (one street by city).

12y agoHN ↗

It uses non-USA cars for the USA. We don't have the Chevrolet Matiz or Holden Senator here.

12y agoHN ↗

On first glance, the whole thing looked very shady to me, since the web pages it generates look like this:

BakingBrokers.com

but it seems they are all non-registered domains, so it is indeed not a scam (and Baking is not quite Banking).

Would be a funny trick, though. Get a lot of people to use your identity generator in order to produce some backlinks.

12y agoHN ↗

I was wondering about that, especially because of the call out to activate your fake email address.

12y agoHN ↗

I imagine the block is in place because spammers and fraudsters might take advantage of it. Still kind of silly though.

12y agoHN ↗

Unfortunately the English names don't really work as they haven't taken account of name clustering in Ethnic minorities.

"Mohammed Bennett" is possible but highly unlikely.

12y agoHN ↗

Emergency care nurse for Champion Auto. Priceless.

12y agoHN ↗

Occupation: Funeral attendant

Company: Food Giant

12y agoHN ↗

Suggestion: Have a 'profile basket' so I can recover the birth date the next time a service asks for security questions.

Actually, generating the "first boyfriend" and "my first car color" would be great too.

Actually, what about generating a facebook and linkedin profile for the fake names?

12y agoHN ↗

Could need some tweaking with the age. You mostly don't want information for a 60-90 year old person.

12y agoHN ↗

I wonder what database they are using for the ZIP codes. I tried googling around a bit and only found a bunch of "pay X$ to get all US ZIP codes". I'm pretty sure I've found these before for an ERP project I worked for...maybe the CIA? database (I distinctly remember they had some pretty good stuff)

12y agoHN ↗

You can download the database that is used to update Wikipedia (bots do that job):

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProjekt_Georefere...

3.54 million entries in 273 languages with Cities, GPS coordinates, ZIP codes, and a lot of more - all free and up-to-date. It's a project of German Wikipedia, but the website is in English and the data is used by all Wikipedia instances.

12y agoHN ↗

The fascinating thing about fake names is that they often seem to be a little off, somehow, even when they draw from real names. Hard to put my finger on it.

12y agoHN ↗

Brazilian names are perfect! Names, cities, phones, etc, everything so realistic!

As people are complaining of weird spanish, french, italian names, I wonder if the person who did this is brazilian.

12y agoHN ↗

The names are indeed realistic, but some details are not.

First are cars: most tests I made produced cars that are not sold in Brazil, althought some did.

The lack of apartment or similar data in most addresses will not raise suspicion in the US, where most people live at houses, but it will surely jump to the attention of anyone looking at the database in Brazil. Not to say, it won't test most DBs properly as we commonly store apartment numbers in a dedicated column.

The English name of the companies also won't help.

12y agoHN ↗

The German names are all rather convincing, except for the sometimes lacking umlauts. (interestingly, only in the surnames) No one is called Jager here, unless they anglicized their name for some reason (Jäger is German for Hunter).

12y agoHN ↗

I don't need this website. I can go through the thousands of pages of wiki spam I've been hit with. I don't know why they think my wiki would have pages describing random teenagers from Germany who enjoy horseriding in their spare time and were medical equipment mechanics. Presumably these spammers must be using a similar database to this website.

The lack of unemployed people generated seems a bit unlike real life, however.

12y agoHN ↗

First was a female dietitian, 5'7" and pushing 200lbs. Sounds like a great dietitian.

Next one had a hometown right down the road from me. Cool. She's 53 years old but her SSN starts with 180. PA's SSN range is 159 to 211, and everyone else my age has SSNs starting with 178. SSNs are assigned in-order. See the problem? Her SSN ought to be in the 160s I reckon.

Next was a 70-y/o timber and logging worker. I don't believe it.

12y agoHN ↗

Maybe she has a glandular disorder, or she's a special kind of dietitian who works mainly with sumo wrestlers, or she's 7' tall.

12y agoHN ↗

Interesting...one of the choices is Eritrean. Small country in East Africa. Names are pretty close to the region as well so I'm surprised.

12y agoHN ↗

I love it! ;) Just afraid that many trolls will use it...

12y agoHN ↗

Why are social security numbers generated? That seems necessary for supporting only dubious kinds of behavior.

Aren't SSNs only useful for banking/credit-type services? (Perhaps someone can enlighten me.)

12y agoHN ↗

I can think of several good reason, but the two main ones are: Testing and to use at registration-burden websites that collects personal information as their business model.

12y agoHN ↗

My guess is because they are also geo-dependent. Your fake person gets a valid SSN for where they are from.

12y agoHN ↗

Eh, SSNs aren't linked to location in any usable way. Obviously your SSN will not change when you move cross-country (so they're not linked to current address), and I think they're only based on the mailing address entered when the card was applied for, which may not even be where you were born.

12y agoHN ↗

Geo-dependent, as in across the otherside of the globe maybe...

12y agoHN ↗

Nope; I moved out of the US 8 years ago and my SSN remains the same. My daughters both have US SSNs and they've never lived there; the younger one hasn't even visited the US once yet. If they do live there someday, they'll still have the same SSNs.

12y agoHN ↗

A lot of the vehicles make/models are not typical cars you'd see on British roads i.e. the marketing name is for another country, even if the vehicle itself is largely the same.

12y agoHN ↗

French Canada names are not typical. Here are examples: François Tremblay Marc Gagnon Diane Côté Line Dion

12y agoHN ↗

I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic or not. The first three are pretty common French Canadian names. The last one isn't.

Francois Tremblay is the name of a goalie from Baie-Comeau.

Marc Gagnon is the name of an Olympic gold-medal winning speedskater from Chicoutimi.

There are a couple of dozen Diane Cotes from Canada on LinkedIn.

12y agoHN ↗

At least with Russian names, the algorithm seems to apply a uniform probability distribution over all names in its database. It results in way too many extremely rare names. In other words, a batch of Russian names generated using this program would not look statistically realistic.

12y agoHN ↗

Yes, a lot of archaic names which are very rare. Also, Russia is multinational country, so Russian (as in ethnicity) and Russian (as in nationality/citizenship) names are different things. A lot of names (but not family names) are actually Tatar, Armenian etc. A combination of that name with typical Russian family name is not unheard of, but pretty rare to attract the attention which is the last thing you want if you use fake name for any serious purpose.

12y agoHN ↗

Russian names - Ramiro? Rice?? Nicodemus???

Where the hell did they get those from:)

12y agoHN ↗

Finnish names were very good. Only thing that was a little off was the car models, which seemed very US centric. Car models have lot of regional variants (big differences in naming US vs EU vs Asia)

12y agoHN ↗

I wrote a library in JavaScript for the browser and Node.js called Chance to generate user info and other random things:

http://chancejs.com/

I don't have as much internationalization, and it doesn't generate a full user like that (it's in my todo) but perhaps it would be helpful for anyone looking for this kind of stuff.

12y agoHN ↗

The author must think highly of American women. A random sample showed nearly all of them between 65-69" and over 200lbs.

12y agoHN ↗

This has helped me many a time to generate test data-set.

12y agoHN ↗

This is interesting, but the names are probably just pulled from US census data. If you want something to generate new names, try

https://elliottslaughter.com/names/rand

which uses (admittedly simple) machine learning algorithms to generate new names.

12y agoHN ↗

Well that's creepy: The address of my randomly generated person is 1 block from an place I stayed at (same street name, just one block down).

12y agoHN ↗

Go say hi! And deliver a certificate of congratulations for being included in the exclusive fakenamegenerator.com!

12y agoHN ↗

I am too afraid to realize I have been created in a random generator to use this service.

12y agoHN ↗

This seems like it would be more accurately referred to as a real name generator :)

12y agoHN ↗

So, I need a new dust filter for my Hoover MaxExtract PressurePro model 60 - can you help me with that?

12y agoHN ↗

i'm only modestly talented when it comes to design and layout, but i feel strongly enough about this to make a suggestion: cover this thing in more ads.

12y agoHN ↗

I have used a similar service while preparing a lab assignment for a CS course this semester in my uni. But this one, whooa, just generate random users for your newest service and maybe with a little AI you can overcome the famous coldstart problem.

12y agoHN ↗

Major issue here is that the site is linking to www.ssnregistry.org which is pretty obviously a honeypot for SSN numbers...