Hacker News Reader

Comment by cperciva | Hacker News Reader

The story should end there. However, we'd separately come up with the name "PayDemon" and had already purchased both paydemon.com and paydaemon.com (we just couldn't let go of our UNIX references, apparently). Despite being so common, the word "Stripe" was interestingly free of any existing brand associations. And everything it evoked was at least vaguely positive — racing stripes, striping across a RAID array, the magnetic stripe on a card. But we had to decide whether a nice name was worth the price we'd have to pay, whereas we'd already spent the $20 to register our PayDemon domains.

paydaemon.com seems like it would be an awesome domain for a directory of BSD operating system projects in need of funding. "BSD is free, but it can be much better if you pay the daemon!"

View on HN

outside of the linux nerd bubble, demon would not have positive connotations for a large swath of the populace. the religious uproar would not be a quiet one.

Yep. My eldest's boyfriend's parents won't buy Apple products because there's a bite out of the Apple. Imagine what FreeBSD would do to them!

Edit: I was winding them up the other day about how everything in their house is made by godless communists in China.

I was trying to understand why this would be. Is it an adam and eve and the serpent thing? because the apple has a bite out of it?

Sorry if this is a dumb question, but I've never heard of that aversion to apple and want to check I'm understanding right?

Probably and I have heard that same thing from certain strains of evangelical. The irony is that the "Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge" (that Adam and Eve ate in the story) isn't said to be an apple anywhere in Genesis. That's just something that artists did when they depicted the scene later. They should have chosen a much more decadent fruit like a fig imo.

Interesting. Wikipedia[1] suggests that the Jewish tradition has fig as one of the possibilities, alongside grape, wheat and etrog. It says there is some possibility that the use of an apple in art and literature later is a pun because the latin noun for "apple" (malum) is also one of the forms of "malus" or evil (opposite of "bonus", meaning good). So by eating the malum, they unleashed malum (evil). Or something like that[2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_of_the_knowledge_of_good_...

[2] https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/04/30/526069512/pa...

Yes, I'm inclined to say that they dodged a bullet there. The BSD community has been dealing with this for decades (which is one of the reasons Beastie is FreeBSD's mascot but not our logo).

So interesting to see the early days of startups when even $20 is a considerable sum to lament about. I love these kinds of stories.

I thought that part was just a joke.

Presumably they’re talking about what they’d have to pay to buy stripe.com, not what they already paid to register the two forms of payda?emon.

> In total, I sent several hundred emails that day. Of the plausible responses I received, stripe.com was the clear winner.

> whereas we'd already spent the $20 to register our PayDemon domains.

You either inadvertently or cleverly cut out the first part of that sentence:

> But we had to decide whether a nice name was worth the price we'd have to pay, whereas we'd already spent the $20 to register our PayDemon domains.

Sounds like a good name for a debt collector.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com