[AndrewDucker]

Please just don't.

There is no point antagonising people by guessing information about them wrongly - particularly if it's something they've become sensitised to by it occurring frequently.

If you need to know someone's gender (and largely, you don't), then ask them.

[vdaniuk]

It certainly doesn't have to be user facing. Gender may be used to make user behavior modeling or prediction more accurate.

[AndrewDucker]

Fair point. For aggregate statistical analysis this may well be useful.

[jonahx]

I would think this would be by far it's most likely use case. It was the first thing I thought of when I saw the link.

[sambeau]

It also assumes two distinct genders which is a fallacy.

[clarkm]

Sure, but that doesn't preclude it from being a useful metric for something like ad targeting.

[mrottenkolber]

It does exactly that. Don't look for natural metrics in an artificial universe.

[quesera]

Many would argue that "being a useful metric" for an inherently non-useful purpose is worse than a waste of time.

[mrottenkolber]

This.

[spuz]

It doesn't necessarily need to be 100% accurate to be useful. For example, you might use something like this to choose the gender of randomly generated NPCs in a game. In that case, it probably doesn't matter that the gender of names is always correct but it would add to the realism if it was. I'm not sure why you would generate a NPCs from a single list of names rather than one of male and one of female names but I'm sure there are other examples of problems where this kind of service could work well.

[Kiro]

Think outside the box. This has many other use cases.

[eksith]

This is not thinking outside the box. This is painting the interior of the box with refractive ink and calling it innovative.

[hartror]

This. A thousand times this.