[HN Gopher] Find a good available .com domain
___________________________________________________________________
Find a good available .com domain
Author : Tomte
Score : 593 points
Date : 2022-06-08 07:39 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (sive.rs)
(TXT) w3m dump (sive.rs)
| paxys wrote:
| My advice for those looking to name a company/product is to think
| of a single distinct word that is _not_ in the dictionary.
| economist420 wrote:
| Make .com domain $200 a year, then this won't be as much of a
| problem.
| _andrei_ wrote:
| But is it a good one? There are better methods for finding an
| actually good domain name, you just have to think outside the box
| and come up with new ideas constantly.
|
| For example these domains should be available _wink_ _wink_ :
| editormag.com geekyglossary.com infiniteiterator.com
| infographics365.com minutequestions.com museumology.com
| onlinehistorian.com webdesigndaily.com
| donateyourcomputerpower.com lazysites.com scorchingearth.com
| thechronoscope.com 24hourdigitalclock.com adfunkr.com
| aircontroltower.com aracina.com artistreferences.com
| athletelite.com askaboutamerica.com audiofeedr.com australers.com
| babysnooker.com beercounting.com bipabit.com bonfirekids.com
| bookinthebag.com cactusportal.com californiculture.com
| cheerfulservices.com complimentopia.com crocotin.com
| dreadpirateradio.com egoarbitrage.com firsttimebuyeralert.com
| gardenomat.com gigaspeakers.com hipsterian.com kateke.com
| messingwithyourmind.com myfitnessdoctor.com mypassword123.com
| orgasmatron5000.com panonyx.com propmakerz.com ricefactor.com
| thrillerdomains.com ulugulu.com
| mdrzn wrote:
| Literally all already squatted.
| mritchie712 wrote:
| I think OP owns these which is why they posted this
| _andrei_ wrote:
| Not true at all.
| ntoskrnl wrote:
| Not all -- orgasmatron5000.com is still available! I'm
| surprised, I thought that would be the first one to go.
| alainchabat wrote:
| Love your creativity!
|
| Requesting a domain name just in case: would love a domain name
| for a side project:
|
| It will allow users to list what they own (maybe a photo or
| video, idk yet), and they'll be able to consult it, but other
| people can also check what they have.
| pwdisswordfish9 wrote:
| yawnshoppe
| SamBam wrote:
| Is this just for bragging rights, or like a sharing website?
| The site neighborgoods used to do that, for sharing tools,
| kayaks, whatever.
| Loughla wrote:
| >but other people can also check what they have.
|
| breakingandentering.com or ilovereplacingmybrokenwindows.com
| or anentirecatalogueoffreestufftosteal.com?
|
| What would be the purpose of your side project? I'm very
| confused by it. Not trying to be disrespectful, but it just
| sounds like an easy way to case a home for a burglary.
| ldoughty wrote:
| Not the parent poster .. but...
|
| I have over a hundred board and card games... Total value
| on resell market is not that great (especially factoring
| the value per trip into the house, and relative low value
| per cubic foot of storage it claims in your car/van)... but
| having such a list outside google sheets would be helpful..
| tells people what we already have if they want to gift
| items, could have running discussions on games, etc.
| _andrei_ wrote:
| Well, then these could work: -
| collectiblesquare.com - mystuffpage.com -
| sellsomecrap.com
| Tyr42 wrote:
| Boardgamegeek lets you mark your collection, including "Want
| to trade"
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| All taken by squatters in 3.. 2.. 1...
| xingped wrote:
| Dang dude, love your creativity! Let me know if I can contact
| you for some personalized domain suggestions for ideas I have
| but cannot come up with domain names for?
| _andrei_ wrote:
| Hey, sure! Check my profile for contact.
| _andrei_ wrote:
| *Dropped some more (~120) here:*
| https://gist.github.com/3rd/b2d0b2b26493de07ebb2a5ad5e67db1e
|
| Maybe someone finds a name for their blog/project/something.
| andai wrote:
| Did you make these manually, ie. with your imagination? Good
| stuff.
| _andrei_ wrote:
| I'd say 50% of it is manual work.
| valleyjo wrote:
| yucktastic.com - wonder what would be on such a site ha
| addandsubtract wrote:
| /r/TIHI (Thanks, I hate it)
| dylan604 wrote:
| a web forum for Amazon users to discuss the products they
| received instead of the product the ordered
| bell-cot wrote:
| Products that were inspired by Nickelodeon's green slime?
| Izkata wrote:
| Green slime twinkies: https://img.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeed-
| static/static/2016-06/2/14...
| [deleted]
| CodeSgt wrote:
| > you just have to think outside the box and come up with new
| ideas constantly.
|
| This is something that, to my great shame, I've always
| struggled with. Any recommendations for improving in this area?
| chillfox wrote:
| Buy a thesaurus, then use it.
| airstrike wrote:
| or visit thesaurus.com
| coffeeblack wrote:
| On YouTube search "John Cleese on creativity in management"
| latexr wrote:
| Or check out his book "Creativity: A Short and Cheerful
| Guide". It's pretty short and the contents are pretty much
| that video.
| rileyphone wrote:
| https://jamesaltucher.com/blog/the-ultimate-guide-for-
| becomi...
| dj_mc_merlin wrote:
| Drugs. Bad for generating ideas, but makes your ability to
| generate them when you're sober better.
| dspillett wrote:
| Sometimes now, if you are careful about dose. It can free
| the doubts and writers block. Hence the phrase a few
| write-y friends of mine like to repeat: write drunk, edit
| sober. Or to put it a little more prosaically: you can edit
| a bad page, you can't edit a blank page.
| [deleted]
| foobarbecue wrote:
| Take long showers or baths and let your mind wander. Do
| sports where you're alone for a long time, like running or
| surfing.
| anticristi wrote:
| I can't find a good reference, but there was a "standard"
| process for being creative:
|
| Step 0: Get yourself in front of a paper or whiteboard.
| Eliminate distractions.
|
| Step 1: Get all of the BS out of your head. Whatever comes
| out. Do not try to discuss, assess, etc., just get it out of
| your head.
|
| Step 2: Take a step back and start assessing. Is there
| anything valuable? What if you pair things together?
|
| I heard people applying this to ideate on a new start-up,
| brand, domain name, etc.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| That's brainstorming, basically; just come out with ideas
| and say "yes and" instead of "but", save any judgments and
| but what ifs for later.
| xcambar wrote:
| > you just have to think outside the box and come up with new
| ideas constantly.
|
| This is the problem, not the solution.
| [deleted]
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Thought no one would notice the orgasmatron5000 eh? I'm onto
| you.
|
| My family once manufactured a sex toy that was popular enough
| for someone to quit their job, so that brought back memories.
| Sadly the popularity dried up when their YouTube video stopped
| being recommended as much.
|
| It was a real DaVinci-workshop type operation. I'm still amazed
| how much logistics went into it. Also art ability and
| sculpting. You have to be able to make molds, which are the
| inverse of the shape you want to cast. It's really difficult.
| dtgriscom wrote:
| Are you saying that the product sold enough so that someone
| involved could quit their job to produce it, or that someone
| enjoyed the product enough that they decided to go all in on
| using it?
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| The former. They were a single-income household at the
| time, so it was a big decision. But they sensed that it was
| their only chance to get wealthy, so they went for it. I
| really respect that.
|
| It's unfortunate it didn't work out, but that's life. They
| regretted leaving their job and ended up losing the family
| house, but they recovered after a time. They're now in a
| job they like renting a house they like.
|
| The molds were the heart and soul of the project, since
| they were the only irreplaceable component. They ended up
| throwing those into a dumpster. As a final twist, a family
| friend happened to be _working at the trash center_ and
| spotted the molds as they were coming through. So even when
| they were trying to get rid of it like it was a monkey 's
| paw, it still didn't go out without being noticed one last
| time.
|
| One of ya'll should try your hand at it. As with
| programming, the problems are tough but solvable
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31667798) and as far
| as I know there's still nothing like it on the market, with
| plenty of demand.
|
| At one point they were selling multiple color varieties,
| and people would buy all three colors. I asked if there was
| any other difference, and he said nope, just color added
| via dye. So there's a real opportunity for an enterprising
| sculptor that happens to be reading this.
|
| (I don't know much else and I do ML nowadays, so good luck!
| But feel free to DM for advice I guess. https://www.smooth-
| on.com/product-line/dragon-skin/ was part of the materials
| they used, but apparently it was too rigid for the skin. It
| was for internal support.)
| dash2 wrote:
| I now have a clear image of the Family Sillysaurusx. Dad is
| hard at work designing dildos. Mum and the kids have got a
| production line going. The littlest sculpts the wavy lines on
| the Cliterminator Pro. Finally, Benjy the dog carries the
| finished product over to the delivery parcel (unmarked brown
| paper) and drops it in. Mmmm! What's that cooking in the
| oven? Do I smell cherry pie?
| rendall wrote:
| _The retailer, clearly at a loss for words manages to gasp,
| "That's quite a company. What do you call yourselves?"_
|
| _The staff all strike a pose and shout "The
| Aristocrats!!!"_
| latexr wrote:
| For those unfamiliar with the reference:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Aristocrats
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| It was actually for guys, not a dildo. Basically a silicone
| bag you could fill with water. Getting the shape right was
| the hardest part, since if you think about how to mold
| something like that you'll run into a bunch of problems.
|
| Your description wasn't far off, by the way! Thanks for the
| laugh.
| dotancohen wrote:
| > Getting the shape right was the hardest part, since if
| you think about > how to mold something like that
| you'll run into a bunch of problems.
|
| Shape of the part that interfaces with the guy's anatomy?
| I wonder what types of problems?
|
| How pliable is the silicone bag? Human women and men come
| in a variety of interface shapes yet it usually works
| out. Could different size bags be manufactured?
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Bingo.
|
| I wasn't involved directly, so unfortunately this is a
| game of telephone. This was also back in 2012 through
| 2015, so it's been some time. But here's my understanding
| of it.
|
| Suppose the problem is to make a silicone bag that you
| can fill with warm water. That wouldn't be _easy_ , but
| it'd be much easier.
|
| To make something like that out of silicone, you have to
| pour some material into a mold, and let it sit. (I think
| the material was called Dragon Skin, but I'm not sure.)
| Think of it like cooking pancakes: You could imagine
| pouring this silicone into a frying pan and letting it
| sit, and you'd end up with a flat disc of silicone. So to
| make a bag, you'd want it to be a bowl. But of course if
| you pour it into a bowl, you'll end up with a spherical-
| ish disc of silicone that's flat on top, because it all
| pools to the bottom.
|
| So your next attempt might be to put one bowl into
| another bowl, and then pour the silicone between the two
| bowls. That way the top bowl fixes the problem of it
| coming out like a flat disc. The silicone is sandwiched
| between the two bowls, and so you end up getting a shape
| that looks like the bowl on the bottom. Progress! That's
| closer to something that can hold water.
|
| (Someone just told me that the shape wasn't actually the
| hardest part. The hardest part was materials. Dragon Skin
| was just one component. She said it was for the spine,
| whatever that means. But it wasn't the primary material,
| which needed to feel right and be easy to work with. I'll
| just note that here and continue on where I left off
| above. Basically, it needs to feel like skin, not
| rubber.)
|
| But to get something that can actually hold water, you
| need it to be something closer to a flask shape. You
| could imagine a bowling ball inside another, smaller
| bowling ball, and then pouring the silicone inbetween the
| two and letting it sit.
|
| Question: How do you get the silicone out? The silicone
| is now wrapped around the inner bowling ball. Hmm.
|
| Once you solve all of those problems, _then_ you start to
| focus on the dynamics of man-woman interaction and
| anatomy. That requires a mold which you can shape very
| precisely. I believe they ended up sculpting the molds
| out of clay, then turning it into something stronger
| through a process I don 't understand.
|
| To get the silicone out of the damn molds, they needed to
| invent a whole contraption that was like a giant lever.
| It would hook onto the inner mold and pull real hard on
| it, and pop! The whole thing comes out. It'd be totally
| impossible to pull it out with your bare hands.
|
| Then you run into problems like, there are bubbles in the
| material, so this needs to be done inside a vacuum
| chamber to get all the bubbles out.
|
| Finally there's the whole problem of putting a bow on it
| and making it look nice. You need packaging, a manual,
| and a reliable velcro strap that won't leak water. It
| needs to look professional. And all of this needs to be
| scalable so that when you suddenly get 200 orders because
| your vagina hot water bag went viral, you can fulfill
| those orders in a reasonable timeframe and get paid.
|
| There's a bunch of funny stories from that era. The
| postal delivery people got super curious about what we
| were up to. (At this point they'd moved into an actual
| building, not the family house.) One day he found an
| excuse to come in, strutting around with a big smirk on
| his face. Then next time they went to drop off the
| packages for delivery at the post office, the lady there
| was like oh, you're the people that make the sex toys!
| They were like yeahhh, that's us.
|
| It was a very interesting experience. It's a shame the
| business ended up folding due to lack of financing for
| all the production issues.
| _andrei_ wrote:
| This is why I love HN, stories like this.
| LegitShady wrote:
| the orgasmotron5000 developed from their previous invention,
| babysnooker.com
| KineticLensman wrote:
| "orgasmatron5000 cannot be reached"
| rdrey wrote:
| Your domain ideas are pretty good. You could sell your
| creativity as a service. 50 bucks for 3-5 name options for
| someone's side project, if you're that good at coming up with
| them you'd save everyone some time.
| dannyw wrote:
| > messingwithyourmind.com
|
| Yoink, thank you. Seems perfect for my new email.
| [deleted]
| nuker wrote:
| Author please put domains.db file on torrent.
| indigodaddy wrote:
| Imo, .net domains are also just fine, and often just
| look/feel/sound better than the .com counterpart. They also kind
| of feel more personal. For my personal domain name I chose .net
| even though the .com was available because the .net just felt and
| sounded right, and more personal.
| slackfan wrote:
| Why would I trust a service promoting finding "good" .com domains
| that uses .rs as its domain? Were they unable to find one for
| themselves?
| rapfaria wrote:
| This is quintessential HN, rushing to comment before opening a
| blog post by someone called Sivers
| smlacy wrote:
| This isn't a "service", it's someone's personal blog.
| matyasrichter wrote:
| Is it so hard to open the link before posting a snarky comment?
| It takes five seconds and you'll avoid looking like a fool.
| Peak HN.
| [deleted]
| ahnick wrote:
| Something similar that we created a while back is Mashword
| (https://mashword.com). It enables you to create word mashups of
| two words or find unique spellings of one word quickly. It will
| also do its best to determine domain name availability. We are
| currently in the process of improving the speed of the algorithm,
| so apologies if it takes a while to return.
| grifball wrote:
| $ cat com.txt | sed 's/^\(\S*\.com\)\.\s.*/\1/' | sort | uniq
|
| A bit easier than a ruby script
| gouggoug wrote:
| cat com.txt | cut -d' ' -f1 | sort | uniq
|
| Would work as well since there's no whitespace in the first
| column
| [deleted]
| bitpow wrote:
| reminds me of how ninite came up with their name:
| https://ninite.tumblr.com/post/620277259/how-ninite-was-name...
| kulor wrote:
| I find nameql.com great for this task of finding a good available
| dotcom but you have to have a seed word.
| aembleton wrote:
| I've never seen that before, but it has a great way of letting
| you visualise how it is has come up with its suggestions.
| jjnoakes wrote:
| I stumbled across namy.ai on HN a while back and found it quite
| useful. No affiliation, it just worked well for me.
| karlerss wrote:
| I wish someone just distributed a recent .com zone file.
| superasn wrote:
| Hopefully with a way to patch it from the last download so you
| don't have to download the whole thing over and over. I
| wouldn't mind paying $5 / month for a service like this - for
| helping me avoid the red tape.
| dontbenebby wrote:
| I appreciate the craftmanship, but domains should be ideated on
| offline, and only after years of thought, not crawled by machines
| to by hoarded by those with more wealth than others.
|
| I own two domains right now -- one for this nym, one for my legal
| name. I actually put off getting the .org and .net for the
| former, because hackers used to have a sense of honor.
|
| (But some might argue I was never a hacker, just a phone
| phreak[1] that was very late to the scene.)
|
| [1] I'm from the generation that "Redbox" meant something...
| different https://phonelosers.com/redbox/tonedialer/
| thunderbong wrote:
| One of the best things I like about Derek Sivers' blog is the URL
| is always short and very memorable!
| admp wrote:
| He wrote about this recently: https://sive.rs/su
| the_duke wrote:
| Under what license is that file?
|
| Could one make a webservice based on the data?
|
| Edit to clarify: I'm envisioning a open source service that uses
| an in-browser sqlite database [1] so you don't have to worry
| about a predatory middle party reserving the domains you searched
| for.
|
| [1] https://sql.js.org/#/
| marban wrote:
| You can, but you're ~25 years too late.
| the_duke wrote:
| Sure, I'm aware that there are lots of domain search sites.
|
| I edited my comment to clarify what I envisioned.
| infinityio wrote:
| You might struggle to use an in-browser service with a database
| that big? Not sure though
| waplot wrote:
| I just use dig or whois to see if the domain exists
| dochtman wrote:
| Alternatively, use instantdomainsearch.com (disclosure, I'm the
| CTO), which packages most of these things up in a fast web
| interface and also enables searching in a bunch of other TLDs.
| ghoomketu wrote:
| Your site is really great.
|
| Please consider creating an API with possibly a free tier.
| Right now I have to use godaddy api and it's so darn slow (plus
| I don't like using godaddy for many of the reasons for which
| they are so infamous).
| dotancohen wrote:
| I just tried the site. In Firefox I searched for "led lighting"
| and this is the page I saw:
|
| https://il.godaddy.com/en/domainsearch/find?checkAvail=1&tms...
|
| However, I did notice the flash of something else loading and a
| redirect, so I hit the browser's back button and this is where
| it took me:
|
| https://instantdomainsearch.com/?q=led+lighting
|
| Something on that page is causing an immediate redirect to
| Godaddy.
|
| I just tested on Google Chrome and had slightly different
| results. Instead of a redirect, the Godaddy page opened in a
| new tab (which was focused) yet the instantdomainsearch.com
| page remained in another tab.
| dochtman wrote:
| I think that's what happens if you hit enter from within the
| search bar. We search as you type, so no need to hit enter in
| order to search. Not our finest bit of UI, will bring that
| back to the team to see if we can improve on it.
| NKosmatos wrote:
| Wow, blazing fast search with many options and very light/clean
| interface. Well done ;-)
| isthisnametaken wrote:
| Why is it offering up .gb domains, when you can't register
| them?
| Cd00d wrote:
| I like your site, but are you marking prices up massively?
|
| A url in the domain search took me to a purchase page for
| $99/yr. I see the same domain on Hover for $14.... Are you
| bundling a bunch of additional services or something?
| ecornflak wrote:
| I genuinely thought instantdomainsearch had been consumed by
| GoDaddy
| dochtman wrote:
| Nope! In fact, we've started work on our own ICANN-accredited
| registrar under the Instant Domains brand.
| ajonit wrote:
| Just wanted to say thank you for this service. Have been using
| this site for several years now. Perhaps the first place I
| visit whenever I need to research a domain name, have
| recommended it to tons of people already.
|
| Do you have any write up on its tech stack?
| dochtman wrote:
| It's running on GCP, the backend is written in Rust (with a
| smattering of legacy Go) and the frontend is written in React
| + Next. Any other questions?
| night-rider wrote:
| RIP Domains for the Rest of Us
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24538758
| Tabular-Iceberg wrote:
| What bad things would happen if the zone file was made available
| for everyone without any approval?
| jacquesm wrote:
| Whatever marketeers can come up with.
| srmarm wrote:
| You can compare to get newly registered domain names so it's
| sometimes used for Spam to target new companies - I've not
| noticed that so much lately though.
|
| I suppose you could identify recent NS changes to create a list
| of servers/hosting that might not have been locked down or
| secured yet.
|
| But on the whole I can't personally think of anything too bad.
| phgn wrote:
| I believe you have to sign an agreement to not use the domain
| names list for DDoS attacks, specifically against WHOIS
| services. Not saying that this stops anyone, but that's what
| they probably had in mind.
| mysterydip wrote:
| I've found some good available .coms for some of my projects, the
| problem is they're all "premium" and cost thousands of dollars to
| register.
| joshstrange wrote:
| Honestly I think domain names should be the least of your worries
| when building something. You can always add a "get" prefix or
| "app" suffix (or a bunch of other options). If you are sold on a
| company name then by all means, grab the domain but don't confuse
| "buying a domain" with "making actual progress".
|
| When I was younger I used to snap up domain names for every
| little idea I had. I executed on less than 1% of those ideas and
| ended up letting the domain expire 1-2 years later when I could
| finally admit to myself I was never going to pursue it. Literally
| hundreds of dollars flushed down the toilet all to get a
| temporary rush.
|
| I know that I have issues with thinking "spending money" ===
| "making progress" (be it on home improvement projects or web
| apps) and I know I'm not alone. If all you need is a domain to
| launch your product then go ahead and start looking, otherwise
| it's just a dopamine distraction.
| omoikane wrote:
| See also: "Change Your Name" -
| http://www.paulgraham.com/name.html
| tmp_anon_22 wrote:
| > The problem with not having the .com of your name is that
| it signals weakness.
|
| Spending money on trivialities is not how you project
| strength. If your business is so fragile it rests on the
| reputation of its TLD, you are already weak.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| > The problem with not having the .com of your name is that
| it signals weakness.
|
| That was wrong in 2015 and it is wrong now.
|
| What is seen as validation to users in Europe is different to
| North America is different to Asia. You can run a whole
| business in a group chat back then, and North America is just
| catching on to that, barely moving off of the concept of a
| .com presence and being okay that other TLD's are good enough
| too. When you don't even need a website.
|
| Do the thing that makes revenue.
|
| At this point its simple to me: if you are relying on an
| audience that instinctively types .com or if you think you
| need a .com for a search result or ad campaign, _that 's_
| what you're doing wrong. Like, are you intentionally selling
| to pensioners? Is that the audience you want? People that had
| the same 30 years as you did to figure out to use a computer
| but made 30 years of excuses instead?
| 867-5309 wrote:
| it doesn't change the fact that .com is and will forever be
| the de facto TLD
|
| even if you succeed with appthatslaps.millennial, you're
| still going to redirect appthatslaps.com to it
| yieldcrv wrote:
| its more like an optional tld that wont do anything for
| your engagement, actual revenue, or air of legitimacy
| 867-5309 wrote:
| it will help all of those, by the people who couldn't
| remember your novelty tld autonomically trying .com
| picture wrote:
| The default for people who couldn't remember seems to
| have become typing it into google. It helps that most
| browsers support omnibox type search
| yieldcrv wrote:
| people reach your site by clicking through on social
| media and chatting apps - and referencing those places
| again if they cant remember
|
| unless you specifically have targeted and proven that an
| audience is going to bring value to you, and they use
| .com and search engines to find you, then there is no
| reason to cater to these luddite and elderly people. Its
| a deprecated assumption only relevant to deprecated
| people.
| ivan888 wrote:
| I have been doing the same thing for years, and just last week
| I finally executed a personal project I had been thinking about
| for months, and I just used the free subdomain that came with
| the hosting provider I used. Also, https://freedns.afraid.org/
| is a great source for interesting names
| codegeek wrote:
| I pretty much stopped obsessing over domain names after seeing
| the success of "google". Ultimately it is the
| product/service/business that matters. Sure, we all try to get
| a domain name that we want/like but no need obsessing over it.
| It sucks that most of us didn't know what to do in 1994 when
| lot of dictionary words were available. But it is what it is.
| BbzzbB wrote:
| What's wrong with Google? I'm sure the origin (googolplex) is
| lost on most people, but it seems like a decent brand name to
| me. On top of which, consider if Yahoo! had won the search
| market, i don't think their brand would've become a universal
| verb.
|
| Granted, I don't believe it was an explicit choice to have a
| "verbale" brand-name.
|
| But you (and many others in this thread) are right that names
| often don't matter that much. A better product will normally
| win regardless of the name, and once it does it's name will
| become "normalized". Duckduckgo might be such an example..
| terrible name (IMO), yet respected by many as a Google-
| alternative.
|
| Your product likely won't fail because of a bad name, but it
| doesn't hurt to have a good one.
| jackblemming wrote:
| The OP didn't say anything was wrong with Google and you
| repeated exactly what they were getting at.
| rco8786 wrote:
| Everything you say is generally reasonable (though business and
| domain names can very much matter) but
|
| > Literally hundreds of dollars flushed down the toilet all to
| get a temporary rush.
|
| Is that really so bad? We pay hundreds of dollars for temporary
| rushes all the time.
| aliswe wrote:
| I am making an Open Source CMS optimized for the cloud, in
| .NET. I got the domain cloudy.net. Needless to say I'm pretty
| stoked!
| bhartzer wrote:
| >> You can always add a "get" prefix or "app" suffix (or a
| bunch of other options). If you are sold on a company name then
| by all means, grab the domain.
|
| I totally agree, you can always "upgrade" later to a better,
| shorter, or more appropriate domain later. The TLD doesn't
| matter, either. The only potential exception to this would be
| if you're building something "local", whereas you'd want to get
| the ccTLD domain if you're targeting users in one particular
| country.
| TAForObvReasons wrote:
| That assumes such a domain is available. There's an entire
| cottage industry around snapping up short or interesting
| domains and renting them to customers. https://venture.com/
| it looks like their entire business model involves squatting
| on domains and renting to interested people.
| l5870uoo9y wrote:
| Having the actual .com domain for your business signalise
| quality and authenticity, difficult to imagine Amazon having
| getamazon.com.
|
| That being said, I also spend many (good hours) dreaming away
| while buying all sorts of domain names for my fictitious
| startups. I found that when using the startup niche as suffix
| or prefix, the domain is sometimes available. Had plenty of
| luck buying "git-what-ever".com domains, like git18n.com
| (though I am not sure how clever that naming really is).
| tspike wrote:
| Facebook used to be thefacebook.com. It only changed after
| they were already successful.
| fndex wrote:
| But Facebook was actually called theFacebook back then, so
| not sure if this is a valid comparison.
| runjake wrote:
| Step 1: Obtain gethotdogs.com
|
| Step 2: Make billions.
|
| Step 3: Buy hotdogs.com with your massive amounts of VC
| funds^W^Wcash.
|
| This is what Facebook (thefacebook.com), Dropbox
| (getdropbox.com), etc did.
| johndough wrote:
| Counterpoint 1: Steam could not buy steam.com.
|
| Counterpoint 2: Domain scalpers will demand ridiculous
| prices if they believe that you are affiliated with a
| similar-sounding domain or company.
| bombcar wrote:
| Steam hasn't been really slowed down by not having
| steam.com however - even Valve itself doesn't have
| valve.com
|
| Ever since URL bars defaulted to a web search instead of
| just adding www.com to the word the value of a one word
| dot com has dropped.
| xmprt wrote:
| Valve isn't buying steam.com because they don't want to,
| not because they can't.
|
| > Domain scalpers will demand ridiculous prices if they
| believe that you are affiliated with a similar-sounding
| domain or company
|
| Anyone sitting on steam.com right now, thinking that
| Valve is more likely to buy it tomorrow than they are
| today is delusional. Domain names and TLDs are becoming
| less relevant day by day and especially with
| Valve/Steam's computer savvy, gamer userbase, I don't
| think they really need steam.com. It could be helpful but
| if they've already decided they don't want it today then
| they probably won't change their minds tomorrow.
| nwiswell wrote:
| This only works if you are trying to go hyperscale. Most
| side projects do not qualify.
| durpleDrank wrote:
| steampowered.com
| nicwolff wrote:
| Do only us old farts remember the canonical example of having
| to buy your .com after you've made it very valuable? [0]
|
| [0] https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/compaq-
| buys-...
| bombcar wrote:
| I remember altavista.digital.com from back when people
| thought subdomains were really going to matter - but
| eventually they went away and Google took over.
|
| Ha! The current owners still have altavista.digital.com -
| it has some history thing.
| jszymborski wrote:
| Wordle is a pretty good example of how much success you can
| have with an unremarkable and unmemorable domain name.
| Jack000 wrote:
| Wordle is a great name - it's short, only two syllables and
| relates directly to the product.
|
| A better example of a bad name might be Ycombinator. It's not
| immediately obvious what it means, and if you say it aloud it
| sounds like a question. Doesn't seem to matter much if you're
| successful enough though.
| daemontus wrote:
| Wordle is a great name. But strictly speaking, at no point
| there was `wordle.com` or anything similar. Wordle always
| lived as a humble page on a larger domain. Which I believe
| was the point of the original comment: That if your product
| (name) is good, domain is secondary. The vast majority of
| users can just google at this point (which might not have
| been true 20 years ago).
| gregmac wrote:
| For context, the original URL was
| http://www.powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle
|
| Now it's https://www.nytimes.com/games/wordle/index.html
|
| It's never been wordle.com (or even at any TLD), and despite
| that:
|
| > Over 300,000 people played Wordle on January 2, 2022, up
| from 90 players on November 1, 2021, a figure that rose to
| over 2 million a week later. [1]
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wordle#Rise_in_popularity
| paulpauper wrote:
| Agree 100% about domain names. The only exceptions could be for
| a personal blog perhaps or a brand.
| ryan29 wrote:
| Something brandable is worth holding on to IMO, especially if
| it's distinctive enough to trademark which likely means there
| isn't a lot of search competition either.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| re: "When I was younger I used to snap up domain names for
| every little idea I had.":
|
| I am 71 years old and I am still do this. Good for you
| stopping!
|
| Concerning the article: a clever idea but I think it is better
| manually thinking of words that match your idea and searching
| for similar free domain names - that doesn't take much time.
| olivermarks wrote:
| Agree.
|
| I have a couple of fairly high value domains I've kept I'm
| interested in selling, but there isn't a great market I've
| found for this instead of letting them go?
| 256DEV wrote:
| One of my hobbies is the diametric opposite of this approach, I
| enjoy trawling domain auctions for short .coms that don't include
| any dictionary words but still sound fun. I love names like Quora
| that are meaningless but still somehow feel like they should be a
| real word! I believe the academic category for these is "lexical
| gap". During the pandemic I got a little too much into it and so
| now I'm actually busy working on a site to list them for sale -
| https://wuzmo.com - the plan is to make it essentially a cheap
| brandbucket.
| Tepix wrote:
| how is this not squatting and thus deplorable?
| halJordan wrote:
| Squatting has an intention behind it. You don't call ancient
| coin collectors deplorable squatters because they are taking
| limited stock off the market.
| lijogdfljk wrote:
| But they're not collecting or w/e, they're searching and
| buying for the purpose of reselling. Which.. is squatting,
| no?
| halJordan wrote:
| No they're collecting interesting domains, and then they
| said it got out of hand during the pandemic, and now
| theyre selling their collection.
| cupofpython wrote:
| so you're squatting domains, cool
| almog wrote:
| > _I believe the academic category for these is "lexical gap"_
|
| Lexical gap refers to potential words that, with regards to the
| language morphology or semantic rules, could have been part of
| the language.
|
| I think it's systematic gap that might apply to some of the
| domains you're squatting.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accidental_gap
| ntoskrnl wrote:
| I think DALL-E would be a good way to come up with these. The
| nonsense text it adds to images is usually pronouncable and
| somehow always seems to match the theme you give it.
| GilaWhamm.com, anyone?
| cxr wrote:
| Domains for the Rest of Us. September 2020. 347 points. 200
| comments. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24538758>
|
| Now dead.
| overthemoon wrote:
| Has it ever turned out that one of these words means something
| dirty or profane or something in another language?
| 256DEV wrote:
| Interesting question! Well no one has complained so far, but
| I should definitely run them all through Google Translate to
| see. I could see this happening quite easily.
|
| The one issue I did have was buying a domain on Namecheap
| auctions only to find it had been used _very_ aggressively by
| spammers before going to auction. It made me think of the
| recent top HN post about how you could push a suspect domain
| to someone within a registrar and then implicate them without
| their knowledge. The Namecheap auction system happily let me
| buy the domain, but then as soon as it was in my account it
| got suspended and I got various emails from their security
| team about how many blocklists it was on and how I 'd have to
| submit extensive documentation to get it unsuspended etc.
| Thankfully the support was helpful and now I check domains
| more thoroughly before I buy them...
| darrenkopp wrote:
| Yeah. At my last job we made a pivot table tool feature into
| our project and we named it Pito after Pito Salas, thinking
| we were so clever and finally came up with a slick little
| branding for a feature. But that's slang for penis in
| Spanish... name lasted for a couple of years before it was
| replaced.
| eterm wrote:
| Quora is a real word, it is the plural of Quorum.
| belter wrote:
| It seems it's not how the site got the name:
|
| https://www.quora.com/Does-Quora-come-from-the-plural-
| versio...
| saint-loup wrote:
| The most upvoted answer seems totally made up.
|
| https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-
| b-d&q=%22Quora+...
| 256DEV wrote:
| Well well, I did not know that.. Thanks for expanding my
| vocab! Maybe a better example would have been the similar
| Zuora!
| duffyjp wrote:
| Actually, Zuora is the plural of Zuorum (according to many
| poorly OCR'd PDFs I found on google). :D
| rexreed wrote:
| Do .com domains still matter? Especially expensive "good" ones?
| Does a mortgage company really need to be known as "better.com"?
| Does a screen recorder really need to be known as "loom.com"? Yes
| these are short and expensive English words, but they are also
| unintuitive and honestly as a result unmemorable. There are times
| I see a company with englishword.com and it has nothing to do
| with their company and therefore I can't remember it.
| Lemonade.com? Oh yeah, insurance.
| wcedmisten wrote:
| Does choice of TLD affect SEO? Some articles claim it shouldn't
| matter, but I do wonder if less common TLDs get penalized.
| paulsutter wrote:
| Domain name requirements depend on your customer base and the
| business that you're in (eg, enterprise software, crypto, or
| developer tools? completely different expectations). There are
| no general rules
| jreynoldsdev wrote:
| Do registrars still hike up the price/purchase domain names they
| notice people searching? I feel like I haven't seen any reports
| on that in awhile. If it's still happening this could be a nice
| way to avoid that.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| This seems more for bulk searches than secrecy.
| rootsudo wrote:
| Everyone beat me with the one liners :) surprised someone had a
| file.open loop while cat and awk would work. More surprised to
| see Ruby used.
| julianeon wrote:
| Sometimes performance considerations are irrelevant, because if
| your data is small enough, slow mainstream programming
| languages can blaze through the workload in an instant. This is
| one of those cases.
| sideproject wrote:
| Domainy.io - lets you search (and monitor) for domain names that
| either become available or registered.
|
| It also lets you quickly search for available domain names
| related to
|
| - baby names - animal names - planet names etc etc via templates.
|
| https://domainy.io
| santa_boy wrote:
| Is there a good API to check for domain name availability and
| expiration?
| phgn wrote:
| Unfortunately not every domain that has no DNS record is
| available for purchase: some people configure no records, others
| are reserved by the registry (many short words for nTLDs). If
| something isn't in the DNS zone you can do a live DNS and WHOIS
| check to be more certain.
|
| A while back I tied together this DNS zone + live false positive
| check into a website (for all TLDs and with price info):
|
| https://domain.garden
|
| AWS credits are still paying for this, so feel free to use it!
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| Great website, but it spammed by back button history. If you're
| using pushState, I'd recommend changing it to replaceState.
| edumucelli wrote:
| Congrats! The interface is just super neat, how it gets updated
| when you hover (I imagine it caches the information about that
| specific domain for the next user).
| phgn wrote:
| Yep, the more people use the website the more accurate the
| database gets.
| pyryt wrote:
| Would the same process work for other tlds?
| AndrewStephens wrote:
| It does. Here is someone who lists all of the .horse domains
| just in case you would want such a thing [0]
|
| https://every.horse/
| m00dy wrote:
| yes, but you need to request it
| samwhiteUK wrote:
| Why wouldn't it?
| paulgb wrote:
| Because different tlds are operated somewhat differently and
| afaict this seems to be a secondary service that isn't
| fundamental to routing or other required operations of a
| registrar.
|
| In this case it seems to work with "participating tlds",
| whichever those are.
| phgn wrote:
| All DNS zones on CZDS have the same format, and AFAIK all
| nTLDs are required to use it.
|
| But you're right for ccTLDs -- everyone uses their own
| format and most don't even allow you to get the zone file.
| There are some companies though that provide similar lists
| from crawling data (e.g. https://zonefiles.io/).
| ramraj07 wrote:
| A tip I discovered - use hyphens, and suddenly very small nice
| domains become available. No one types domains anyway.
|
| Also does anyone know how to get a shady domain parking service
| to give up on a domain they've been holding for decades? I'm
| actually happy to pay 500 but not thousands and it's not even a
| domain that a company or commercial interest would want to
| purchase.
| wartijn_ wrote:
| By offering them a low amount. They'll counter with a
| ridiculously high amount. Make clear that there's no way you'll
| ever pay anything close to that amount and stop with
| negotiating if they don't come up with a reasonable price.
|
| They might come back to you in a few months with a better
| offer. Or they might not, but it has worked for me two times.
| Termitiono wrote:
| You get a good and potentially expensive com domain for easy of
| use and not landing in spam folders.
|
| I prefer *.io domains for non critical things.
| koolba wrote:
| The renewal fees for .io domains are a scamola. Last I
| checked it was $50+/year.
| Termitiono wrote:
| I was referring to the initial price of a good .com domain.
|
| That will cost you a few thousand dollars if you are not
| lucky, which you are not if you need to use a hyphen
|
| But a renewal price for 50$/year for a business doesn't
| matter.
| helloguillecl wrote:
| I've done just that.
|
| I own currency-calc.com, which I find even better than the non
| hypen version of the name name.
|
| I think for generic name domains are fantastic, but maybe not
| for a brand.
| amelius wrote:
| > use hyphens, and suddenly very small nice domains become
| available.
|
| Bad idea. The owner of the corresponding domain without hyphens
| might steal your visitors.
| Beltalowda wrote:
| By accidentally forgetting a "-" is how I once ended up on a
| porn site in front of the entire company, since that's what
| the version without a "-" was.
|
| It wasn't a big deal, but I was very young, and I had a very
| red head.
| bradstewart wrote:
| Oh man, I did something similar in class. In 4th grade (+/-
| a year). whitehouse.com (I don't know what it is now, but
| it was a porn site) instead of whitehouse.gov.
| probably_wrong wrote:
| > _No one types domains anyway._
|
| Only as long as you don't plan to offer e-mail under that
| domain.
| paxys wrote:
| My company's email domain has a hyphen in it (xyz@company-
| corp.com). Works perfectly fine.
| beardyw wrote:
| That begs the question do you need a .com anyway?
| dsr_ wrote:
| No, you just need something that has reasonable management
| and reputation and is familiar-enough for your potential
| users.
|
| Some country codes are happy to have unrelated users, and
| some are not. .ninja was polluted by spammers so fast that
| many email servers just drop the entire TLD on sight. If most
| of your users speak something other than English, you might
| find any number of good words going unused.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| >No one types domains anyway.
|
| I do, at least the first letters until the browser completes
| the rest.
|
| And if no one types domains, why do you need a short domain
| name anyway?
| gtirloni wrote:
| Aesthetics.
| weird-eye-issue wrote:
| The very fact you want to buy it and are willing to pay $500+
| means there is a commercial interest in it. That's like saying
| no company wants to own a house because they won't live in it.
| True, but they rent them out.
| ramraj07 wrote:
| It's my first name, and unfortunately there's an underwear
| company of the sAme name, but I know for a fact they're
| misers (I know, I get their emails sometime).
| weird-eye-issue wrote:
| Any company of sufficient size will get negative emails.
| The only companies that don't simply aren't big enough
| subpar wrote:
| using zomba* domains as an example is a real missed opportunity
| to feature zombo.com
| stevenjgarner wrote:
| Left out two very important steps:
|
| a) which of those available names are already trademarked and in
| which industrial classification [1]. I am amazed at the number of
| LIVE trademarks that have no registered domain (or worse the
| registered domain is not held by the trademark registrant).
|
| b) which of those available names has the lowest search engine
| competition and/or the highest organic search traffic [2]
|
| Also, stripping off the top level domain (TLD) during the search
| process means one does not find good/great available domain names
| that may be available on alternative TLD's (that are also not
| trademarked etc).
|
| [1] https://www.uspto.gov/trademarks/search
|
| [2] https://ads.google.com/intl/en_au/home/tools/keyword-
| planner...
| stevenjgarner wrote:
| Not affiliated with Ryan Stout's bustaname domain search site
| [1], but I love using the word combiner and thesaurus features.
| Also has good video tutorials [2], including one for his tool
| "for making fake words that sound like they could be real" [3]
|
| [1] http://www.bustaname.com/
|
| [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmhSgMXwUQY
|
| [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQYaUkNxT7A
| iampivot wrote:
| What about those edgy names with a spelling mistake?
| akmittal wrote:
| Let's create a dictionary with all the edgy words.
| Noughmad wrote:
| I call dibs on dikshnr.io
| mouzogu wrote:
| maybe stupid question. but don't some registration services front
| run you?
|
| also isn't the value of a domain related to how closely it
| matches search queries.
| productceo wrote:
| Programmatic land grabs like this is why people today must suffer
| from lack of remaining .com domain names.
|
| Nothing wrong with the writer of this post. I think this is a
| rational behavior that should be considered "expected". Whoever
| designed domain name registration/ownership model is to blame for
| failing to create a system which can efficiently give right
| domain names to people who actually need them and can use them
| for good (aka actually hosting businesses or contents instead of
| scalping).
| jliptzin wrote:
| Domains should cost $500/yr
| revolvingocelot wrote:
| Some years afterward:
|
| "Human-readable domains should not be the sole province of
| the rich! Sign the petition at, *sigh*,
| c12a:d1e0:ae77:dff5:2260:c017:26a9:b447"
| rileyphone wrote:
| .ai costs $70 a year and that seems to be enough to keep most
| squatting from happening. Some available domains:
|
| thirty.ai topsy.ai hierarch.ai bisect.ai branching.ai
| saline.ai spume.ai cadr.ai
|
| I'm sure using the dictionary method you could find a ton
| more.
| ahnick wrote:
| The inability to find any available domain names was one of the
| primary reasons for us to create Mashword.
| (https://mashword.com) You can enter the name you are looking
| for and it will quickly suggest similarly spelled or sounding
| names to the one you entered.
| 256DEV wrote:
| Some newer TLDs like .dev or .app have a tiered pricing
| structure. So it becomes less economically feasible to squat
| the best names. They also released them in stages when the TLD
| first went live.
|
| This guy (https://medium.com/@amd_2793/my-million-dollar-
| domain-hobby-...) actually used Google's rankings of domain
| value from .app to then squat domains on two other flat priced
| TLDs - io and ai!
| moffkalast wrote:
| Realistically this problem will never be solved while we only
| support fixed domain extensions and act like some are more
| legit than others. Like what gives DNS providers the right to
| say what's a valid extension or not? Just support any string
| ffs.
|
| Not to mention the country restricted ones that you can only
| get if you're a resident, like bruh.
| donohoe wrote:
| There are pros to the current system.
|
| That said, part of the issue you flag is just perception.
| It's like going with a financial services firm that has a
| Wall Street or "Fifth Avenue" address in New York City
| versus a firm that has an address in Hoboken, New Jersey.
|
| Both might be fine but we often attach significance to an
| address (even if its just a mailbox).
|
| To your last point, I think its ultimately good that (many)
| Country restricted TLDs have geographic restrictions.
| platz wrote:
| OP says you want .com
|
| What's wrong with .org?
| dspillett wrote:
| Nothing inherently, it doesn't have the "full of spammers"
| stigma of .xyz and so forth, though some seem to think it
| inherently means non-profit/non-commercial (sort of true,
| it was defined as for organisations not fitting in other
| tlds where .com was one of those and intended for
| commercial use) and think .com therefor looks more serious.
|
| Also: if you take the .org and the .com is already in use,
| be ready to have the name taken off you if they get
| successful, or for some of your users to mistakenly go to
| the wrong place. To avoid one of those things happening
| later if the .com is available now you could buy both, but
| then the availability of the .com becomes the deciding
| factor again not the .org and you are paying for two
| domains.
| rmdoss wrote:
| Most new companies now are on generic TLDs ( or .nets, .orgs,
| etc). Don't think .com matters as much anymore
| vintaclectic wrote:
| I just bought boxyfans.com...goig to sell a bunch of box fans.
| Kthx.
| dubswithus wrote:
| Should be possible to expand the gz file a bit at a time in the
| Ruby script? Would prefer that since I don't have the space
| available.
| TowerTall wrote:
| > If you're on Mac, Linux, or BSD, you should have a dictionary
| of words at /usr/share/dict/words
|
| Why do they come with a dictionary of words?
| jacquesm wrote:
| Password generators, spell checkers, password crackers, textual
| analysis, the 'look' program. Probably more than that!
| CydeWeys wrote:
| Spell checker is an obvious use case. You can then add terms to
| the system dictionary and now they're valid systemwide in all
| apps that use the dictionary for spell checking!
| StreamBright wrote:
| There are some legit use cases: words is a
| standard file on Unix and Unix-like operating systems, and is
| simply a newline-delimited list of dictionary words. It is
| used, for instance, by spell-checking programs. The words file
| is usually stored in /usr/share/dict/words or /usr/dict/words.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Words_(Unix)
| Tempest1981 wrote:
| Are there other languages besides English and British?
| capableweb wrote:
| There is indeed. Usually you chose what lists to install as
| part of installation, otherwise it's just one package
| install away.
| chipaca wrote:
| $ apt-cache search 'words for /usr/share/dict' | sed -e
| 's/^[^ ]* - //; s/ dictionary words.*//' | sort -u
| American English British English Bulgarian
| Canadian English Catalan Esperanto
| French German medical Irish (Gaeilge)
| Italian Manx Gaelic Polish Spanish
| Swedish Ukrainian
| jwilk wrote:
| Not every word list package has "words for
| /usr/share/dict" in the description. $
| grep-aptavail -wF Provides wordlist -s
| Package,Description | tbl-dctrl +=================
| ==+======================================================
| =+ | Package | Description
| | +-------------------+----------------------------
| ---------------------------+ | wbulgarian |
| Bulgarian dictionary words for /usr/share/dict |
| | wbrazilian | Brazilian Portuguese wordlist
| | | wdanish | The Comprehensive Danish
| Dictionary (DSDO) - wordlist | | wdutch
| | list of Dutch words |
| | wesperanto | Esperanto dictionary words for
| /usr/share/dict | | wogerman |
| Traditional German wordlist |
| | wngerman | New German orthography wordlist
| | | wswiss | Swiss (German) orthography
| wordlist | | wpolish |
| Polish dictionary words for /usr/share/dict |
| | wfaroese | Faroese dictionary / wordlist
| | | wgalician-minimos | Wordlist for Galician
| (minimos) | | wukrainian
| | Ukrainian dictionary words for /usr/share/dict |
| | wportuguese | European Portuguese wordlist
| | | wgerman-medical | German medical dictionary
| words for /usr/share/dict | | miscfiles |
| Dictionaries and other interesting files |
| | wnorwegian | Norwegian word list
| | | wamerican | American English dictionary
| words for /usr/share/dict | | wamerican-huge |
| American English dictionary words for /usr/share/dict |
| | wamerican-insane | American English dictionary words
| for /usr/share/dict | | wamerican-large |
| American English dictionary words for /usr/share/dict |
| | wamerican-small | American English dictionary words
| for /usr/share/dict | | wbritish | British
| English dictionary words for /usr/share/dict | |
| wbritish-huge | British English dictionary words for
| /usr/share/dict | | wbritish-insane | British
| English dictionary words for /usr/share/dict | |
| wbritish-large | British English dictionary words for
| /usr/share/dict | | wbritish-small | British
| English dictionary words for /usr/share/dict | |
| wcanadian | Canadian English dictionary words for
| /usr/share/dict | | wcanadian-huge | Canadian
| English dictionary words for /usr/share/dict | |
| wcanadian-insane | Canadian English dictionary words for
| /usr/share/dict | | wcanadian-large | Canadian
| English dictionary words for /usr/share/dict | |
| wcanadian-small | Canadian English dictionary words for
| /usr/share/dict | | wcatalan | Catalan
| dictionary words for /usr/share/dict | |
| wswedish | Swedish dictionary words for
| /usr/share/dict | | wfrench |
| French dictionary words for /usr/share/dict |
| | witalian | Italian dictionary words for
| /usr/share/dict/ | | wspanish |
| Spanish dictionary words for /usr/share/dict |
| +===================+====================================
| ===================+
| Gigachad wrote:
| Not sure the origin but I have seen it used several times where
| random words are needed. So it certainly is handy.
| andrewla wrote:
| These accounts are indeed free, but not without burdens. You need
| to give your address and agree to a bunch of terms in order to
| gain access at all, and then each time you request access to a
| specific piece of data you need to provide a justification and
| agree to another set of terms.
|
| Interestingly, among those terms are:
|
| > 1.3. not to use this Data, nor permit this Data to be used for
| any marketing purposes whatsoever.
|
| I think the intent is to prevent the data being used for bulk
| mailing, but there's another section, 1.1 that specifically bans
| this. Choosing a domain name for a business is arguably
| marketing, so it seems that a close reading would disallow this.
|
| I mean, of course, this is all unenforceable BS anyway. I'm
| surprised that someone hasn't gone ahead and taken this data and
| put it up on github or something; it all feels very theatrical.
| timdavila wrote:
| > I'm surprised that someone hasn't gone ahead and taken this
| data and put it up on github or something; it all feels very
| theatrical.
|
| It would be out of date the minute you post it.
| julianeon wrote:
| Choosing a domain name is arguably one of the core use cases
| here; I don't think they were looking for extremely creative
| readings here. What they don't want people to do is take these
| results and slap them in an ad to drive business. But using
| these results to pick your own domain name, which you
| personally plan to use, is fine and good.
| openplatypus wrote:
| Here is dirty little secret: Barely anyone types addresses
| manually these days.
|
| Don't stress about it that much :)
| logifail wrote:
| Q: Do we (still?) think that dictionary words make good choices
| for domain names?
| capableweb wrote:
| A: No, random combination of characters (ideally with some
| numbers too) both are easier to remember, looks more secure and
| is easier to pronounce.
| logifail wrote:
| :)
|
| I'm thinking of branding - think Google, Pepsi, Adidas, Nike,
| Starbucks
|
| You'd really prefer to attempt build a brand around
| SearchEngine.tld or RunningShoe.tld ?
| hnbad wrote:
| Booking.com would like to disagree.
| rjh29 wrote:
| and Hotels.com
| logifail wrote:
| which is ironically owned by ... Expedia Group
| rodnim wrote:
| And Apple.
| logifail wrote:
| > Apple
|
| Indeed, although the Beatles got there first with Apple
| Corps[0] way back in 1968, the resulting dispute with
| what became Apple Inc[1] took decades[2] and must have
| eaten up $deity only knows how much in legal fees.
|
| Some might say that one actually backs up my suggestion
| that a made-up name is easier to build a brand around!
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Corps [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc. [2] https://en.w
| ikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Corps_v_Apple_Computer
| dreilide wrote:
| as well as
|
| hotels.com trip.com
| [deleted]
| sillycube wrote:
| DarrenDev wrote:
| Or, pick two words that are not connected in any way. If you
| Google them as a phrase search you get nothing or close to
| nothing back: "word1 word2". Examples from 2 minutes on Godaddy:
|
| martianpenguins.com
|
| sallylabs.com
|
| mountainmondays.com
|
| bottlesound.com
|
| Meaningless but all available. Turn those 2 minutes into 2 hours
| and you'll turn up a gem.
| brycewray wrote:
| Now I understand why PostCSS comes from people at
| evilmartians.com.
| DarrenDev wrote:
| You could respond from goodmartian.com. Available.
| aftbit wrote:
| Last I checked, this list only includes domains with a DNS
| server. It excludes plenty of registered .com domains that have
| no domain server configured.
| gtsnexp wrote:
| I love the comment that someone dropped on the post. One could
| replace the first Ruby script by a one-liner: "cat /tmp/com.txt |
| awk '{ print substr($1, 1, length($1) -5) }' | uniq >
| domains.txt"
| [deleted]
| kouteiheika wrote:
| One could replace the first Ruby script by a Ruby one-liner
| too:
|
| ruby -e "puts File.read('/tmp/com.txt').scan(/^[^.]+/).uniq"
|
| Personally I almost never use any of the standard Unix tools
| like `awk` etc. since an equivalent Ruby script is almost
| always shorter and easier to write. (There are exceptions of
| course; and in _really_ simple cases the standard tools will
| obviously still win.)
|
| I think it's a shame that Ruby never really got popular as a
| general purpose scripting language, since it has that nice
| property that it's often as short as Perl while still being
| readable.
| Grimburger wrote:
| Classic useless use of cat?
| jacquesm wrote:
| I don't agree with the whole 'useless use of cat' meme: cat
| creates an output stream, which in turn allows you to build
| up the subsequent command bit by bit and allows you to cut
| and past chunks from useful building blocks you keep in a
| file.
|
| The first command changes all the time so by using 'cat'
| those blocks remain reusable, everything will use the piped
| input that cat sends if there is no preceding program, rather
| than to have to insert < somefile in the middle of the first
| command.
| Grimburger wrote:
| In this particular case why is cat
| /tmp/com.txt | awk '{ print substr($1, 1, length($1) -5) }'
| | uniq > domains.txt
|
| preferable to: awk '{ print substr($1, 1,
| length($1) -5) }' /tmp/com.txt | uniq > domains.txt
| kevincox wrote:
| You can do <somefile awk ... | ...
|
| The redirect doesn't have to appear "out of order" at the
| end of the command.
|
| In zsh you can even do just `<somefile` to print it
| (equivalent to `cat somefile`, very useful for reading
| files into variables) although in bash that appears to do
| nothing.
| Grimburger wrote:
| I'd agree with avoiding the _< somefile_ redirection
| because it 's sorta annoying to grok in one-liners. But in
| this case the file would just go after the awk command.
| hddqsb wrote:
| It's possible to avoid `cat` and still keep the filename
| separate from the rest of the command by placing the
| redirection at the start of the command:
| < /tmp/com.txt awk ...
|
| It might look a little odd, but it's portable.
| monsieurbanana wrote:
| I don't know about you, but I usually like seeing what's
| in the file before I spend time writing a awk command on
| it. cat myfile.txt #
| check the file because I'm not even sure that's the
| correct name cat myfile.txt | awk blablabla #
| no I didn't forget awk syntax, I swear
|
| I would be afraid of any person that after this, goes
| back and rewrites the beginning of the line to replace
| cat with a redirection.
|
| Even with "ctrl-a alt-d < alt-f alt-f ctrl-d ctrl-d
| ctrl-e" that replaces cat with < and removes the pipe,
| which any emacs user can pull off in it's sleep
| Beltalowda wrote:
| If you use zsh then just "<myfile.txt" should work too,
| which opens the file in $PAGER. Doesn't seem to work in
| bash though, with the default config anyway, but maybe it
| can be configured.
|
| I don't care if people use "cat" or "<" and the whole
| "useless use of cat" is stupid >99% of the time, but I've
| gotten in to the habit of using <file as it's shorter to
| type ("<file cmd" vs. "cat file | cmd").
| prmoustache wrote:
| I usually use head or less for that.
|
| Using cat for first look is usually looking for trouble
| if the file is huge or some binary file.
| cannam wrote:
| Totally with you there. "Useless use of cat" is usually
| good practice, not bad.
|
| It's clearer - the structure indicates right at the front
| what it is going to do, namely read a file and pass it
| through a pipeline. There is no need to read ahead to find
| out what the source material is.
|
| It's safer - "cat" is a read-only operation, once you've
| written that command up-front there is no longer a risk of
| overwriting the original file with a typo in the rest of
| the pipeline.
|
| It's simpler to construct and nicely orthogonal to the rest
| of the pipeline - you can write the "cat" and then season
| the rest to taste (as you suggested).
|
| I will occasionally remove cat from a very heavily-used
| loop, but as a default style it's fine.
| yrro wrote:
| > It's clearer - the structure indicates right at the
| front what it is going to do, namely read a file and pass
| it through a pipeline. There is no need to read ahead to
| find out what the source material is.
|
| I only found this out recently, but this works perfectly
| fine:
|
| $ < /some/file awk ...
|
| You're not wrong though, where cat improves readability
| there's no harm in using it.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| _" It's safer - "cat" is a read-only operation, once
| you've written that command up-front there is no longer a
| risk of overwriting the original file with a typo in the
| rest of the pipeline."_
|
| With zsh you can prevent such accidents by "setopt
| NO_CLOBBER"
|
| The result is that if you "foo > bar" and "bar" exists,
| zsh will refuse to overwrite "bar" and give you an error:
| "zsh: file exists: bar"
|
| This makes constructs such "foo < bar > baz" perfectly
| safe, because accidentally typing "foo > bar > baz" will
| error out when "bar" (or "baz") already exists.
|
| (PS: if you want to force zsh to overwrite the file even
| when NO_CLOBBER is set you can "foo >| bar")
| Beltalowda wrote:
| > With zsh you can prevent such accidents by "setopt
| NO_CLOBBER"
|
| Don't even need zsh for this; "set -C" will do the same
| in any POSIX shell. >| is also in POSIX. csh supports it
| as well.
| lelanthran wrote:
| That doesn't help with sed -i and similar things.
|
| Zsh stops redirection errors, it won't help even if cat
| is in the front.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| _" That doesn't help with sed -i and similar things."_
|
| Can you give an example? I don't know what you mean.
|
| _" Zsh stops redirection errors"_
|
| Which is what the post I was answering to was complaining
| about, wasn't it?
|
| _" it won't help even if cat is in the front"_
|
| Why not? "cat > foo" will error out if "foo" exists and
| NO_CLOBBER is set.
| lelanthran wrote:
| >> "That doesn't help with sed -i and similar things."
|
| > Can you give an example? I don't know what you mean.
|
| Sure. The first line below is dangerous no matter what
| zsh does to save you from yourself. The second line is
| safe no matter which shell you are using, and no matter
| what other commands are in the pipeline:
| sed $SEDOPTIONS "s/$SEARCHTERM/$REPLACEMENT/g" $FILENAME
| cat $FILENAME | sed $SEDOPTIONS
| "s/$SEARCHTERM/$REPLACEMENT/g"
|
| >> "Zsh stops redirection errors"
|
| > Which is what the post I was answering to was
| complaining about, wasn't it?
|
| That's not how I interpreted _" a typo in the rest of the
| pipeline."_ Sure, the typo could be a redirection. It
| could also accidentally set $SEDOPTIONS in the example
| above to include the '-i' flag.
|
| >> "it won't help even if cat is in the front"
|
| > Why not? "cat > foo" will error out if "foo" exists and
| NO_CLOBBER is set.
|
| Yes, "cat > foo" will error out, but "cat $FILENAME | sed
| -i "s/a/b/g" $FILENAME" won't.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| Yes, in-place editing with tools like sed is dangerous.
|
| But, in your own example you have a useless use of cat:
| cat $FILENAME | sed $SEDOPTIONS
| "s/$SEARCHTERM/$REPLACEMENT/g"
|
| could be replaced with: sed $SEDOPTIONS
| "s/$SEARCHTERM/$REPLACEMENT/g" < $FILENAME
| itronitron wrote:
| my initial reading was that they were adding 'cat' as a
| prefix to everything...
| SnowHill9902 wrote:
| You don't always need the shortest pipe.
| dt3ft wrote:
| This does not use a dictionary, spitting out everything rather
| than words which exist in said dictionary.
| marketerinland wrote:
| Making up plausible sounding words for domain names is fairly
| simple.
|
| A few methods -
|
| - Take a common surname suffix and add a new prefix to it - Make
| up something that sounds vaguely Japanese, Scandinavian, Spanish
| etc and you pretty much always find something available - Take a
| word that already exists and change (or add) one or two letters
|
| Admittedly the results of the above can border on the ludicrous
| but the idea is to come up with enough names to eliminate those.
| kloch wrote:
| Engineers are terrible at picking product names. Some of the
| company/product names (picked by marketing folks) I disliked the
| most at first turned out to be the most "brandable" and
| successful.
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(page generated 2022-06-08 23:01 UTC)