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Comment by prepend | Hacker News Reader

Meanwhile my four letter domain, lwei.com, gets no offers and is appraised at like $1000.

There’s still stuff available for reasonable prices but it’s just a lot of work so it’s easier to get some random tld.

Well sure you can also run a random string generator and get a short .com TLD, but that's not the point.

No 3 letter.com domain is available to register (all combinations are registered, can only be bought). 4 letter mixed numbers letters are sure available. I am not sure of 4 letters only is available. 5 letters only sure is available.

I bought a three letter domain at one of the original TLDs for $3k or so, they can be surprisingly reasonable depending on your use case.

Pretty sure all 4 and 5 letter .com domains have been taken since at least a decade.

4 letter ones are all taken, but there are still 5 letter domains available. I wanted a short domain for personal use and bought xlmpq.com

A fellow ascii art enjoyer :)

And very few of them will ever serve anything useful.

So many random 5 letter, letters only domains are available. If you add numbers & hypen to mix, it baloons to thousands.

Today I realized how xkcd prob got it's name

There’s a faq on this on the site (find it yourself). It was created as an unpronounceable “acronym” (although it doen’t stand for anything) and the domain came later when Randall was still an unknown. It’s old enough that a lot of “normal” domain names were still available, but the name itself was one of the jokes.

Possibly, although the official explanation is that it's "just a word with no phonetic pronunciation". There's a "What does XKCD stand for?" section on the About page. https://xkcd.com/about/

Randall wanted a unique short string associated with all his work. That way he could Google "xkcd" and find everything he ever did online. I believe he had a script that generated all possible 4-letter combinations and filtered out ones with any search results, and settled on "xkcd". But he became a victim of his own success when the comic became so popular and "xkcd" is now synonymous with the comic.

Source: talk by Randall, might be this one but I'm not sure: https://youtu.be/zJOS0sV2a24.

That's Iwei robbery!

"our company is called Iwei, and you can reach us at Lwei dot com"

Appraised by whom? What's a domain's value if no one wants to pay for it?

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