harvestmoon

Competition isn't necessarily a bad thing, imo. A lot of companies and successful businesses enter a field where there is a proven demand and need and find a way to stand out.

Find out what tools and services the startups/projects are using. You can then put a link to those services and get a commission.

:)

Thanks, the kind words mean a lot. To be honest, I am not sure why the website has done so poorly in terms of search, but that is a good idea to reach out and try/get it on some top lists of web 2.0 name generators.

Thank you. Actually, in testing, the Namebird has been able to generate multiple names that are actual medication names. So there is something there, maybe I could modify it and make a version for use by pharmaceutical companies.

Thank you! Now that's the reaction I was hoping to get, hehe. Glad it helps and hope you find the perfect names for your projects!

Thanks. Verisign is kind enough to let you sign up (for free, iirc) to get their list of taken .com domain names.

The hosting isn't too bad, but I'm paying for a somewhat powerful server as I am a bit of a perfectionist and only want to run the software at maximum capacity, so to speak. It's not much, but over the years, it adds up.

Oh, cool! Glad it helped.

I designed a new name generation software called namebird: http://shobia.com/namebird

It allows you to make words that are fairly awesome and are great startup brand names. It even let's you make words via regular expressions - r.* im .* a creates words like retima and rimbra. (no spaces)

It didn't get a great HN response and in the 2 years since launch, I have spent a large amount on hosting and gotten no return whatsoever. I keep it up because it is incredibly powerful software and I hope it is helping at least some people.

Personally, I am a huge fan of Guy Noir. I wonder if he ever found out the secrets that the city was trying to keep from him - or if he found the answers to life's persistent questions... Guy Noir, Private Eye.

Yes, and as the wise narrator of this parody series points out, "What is most remarkable about this story is not that the dolphin knew the woman was sick, but that it knew she didn't know already."

If anything, I think lowering the barriers to entry should result in higher quality hit songs. For a hit song to occur, it has to become popular, which means a certain amount of oomph.

So with 1000 songs to choose from for the hot 100, you'd expect OK songs, but with 100,000 to choose from, you'd expect in a meritocracy much better songs.

Of course, the hot 100 is hit and miss. An example of a song which was made using affordable DAW software is, I believe, Crank That by Soulja Boy which is a song I personally dislike, take that as you will.

I don't. I think the dragon and angel references are there not because of an understanding of the game but rather to make it sound like what a powerful card should be. Obviously, to the reader who doesn't know MtG a rare dragon is more powerful than a rare flower, after all.

Case in point The Simpsons. What season are we on, the 25th?

Reddit is a great site in what it does. And due to its nature, it has tremendous amount of niches, some of which are worth a lot of money if handled properly.

For instance, /r/watches is an active area for discussion of watches. The people who post there often share their new Rolex or their treasured Patek Phillipe. /r/watches is just one of many, many such niches on the site which have a lot of potential value.

My thinking has been that reddit could focus on developing the value in its many product oriented subforums.

Also, interestingly enough, reddit has already sort of created its own new cybercurrency - dogecoin. Though it may not be doing well, I think most of the value in dogecoin was how easy it was to use on reddit.

reddit does need to find a way to monetize. I think it could do so quite successfully due to the nature of it having many high value niches.

I say all this as a big fan of the site and have even been considering making a subreddit finder (so that someone who is a fan of the TV show Suits, for instance, can know that there is /r/suits to discuss the show, which they would have simply no way of knowing if they just landed on reddit's homepage with pictures of Very Round Eggs, to use a current example).

It's an odd argument. Many technologies were dominant but their fall from the top generally has a reason.

I'd also like to hear more. This is HN - a great place to discuss your product/tool (at the right time, of course)

Java doesn't seem too popular here but used right it can work pretty well, imo.

For instance, I use Java for the backend of a name generator web app. It's astonishingly fast and displays results almost instantaneously despite running a good amount of backend calculations.

This speed became an issue because you'd push the go button and the names would update - but it seemed like nothing happened. So I ended up adding an artificial delay twice (the first time it wasn't enough of a delay).

On the other hand, its structure and methods can at times be frustratingly complex.

Fun article, thanks - gave me a good laugh!

Ensuring quality when you randomly generate things is hard.

I made a word generator tool. In doing so, for just 6-14 letter words, I had to develop a large amount of quality regulation formulas that would detect unnatural patterns ("xamxo" for instance might be a questionable pattern to have in a word).

Anyway, the thought of coming up with a generator to make a whole book (at least one that is coherent) is an interesting one - and much, much more challenging.

I was biking down a hill about 10 years ago. Hit a bump or curve or something - either way, I flew off the bike about 5 feet forward and hit the ground directly head first almost as if I were diving into a pool of paved road.

The helmet took all the impact and my head was perfectly fine (my knees then hit the ground and got scuffed up a bit). Had I not been wearing it...

So yes - please wear a helmet.

Interestingly, a quite high amount of breakthrough treatments were discovered by accident. Antibiotics, the original antidepressants, antipsychotics, lithium, viagra and others were all found initially that way.

Which may imply that our discovery approach has benefited from happy accidents which are hard to replicate and where the basics have been found already.

Actually, the sweater covered in eyes at 2:52 is subtly reassuring. It represents how the device is always looking out for you.

Agree. This really seems like it could be the start of a futuristic, dystopian horror movie.

I think what makes it even more unsettling is that the people's voices are recorded naturally (the microphone several feet away) while the device sounds like it is coming from your computer directly.

Not to mention these people are in bed together while this HAL-like robotic cylinder is listening to everything they are doing with a blue ring lighting up...

Good catch (used Patio11 because off the top of my head can't think of other popular users by their handle).

Anyway, to me it seems that, with the rare exception, HN is pretty good in each submission being judged on its own.

This may be the case, but it surprises me. In the 3-4 years I've used HN, I haven't noticed it.

If you are a very well known user like patio, it's possible that you'll get a good amount of upvotes more easily. For most users, however, it seems to me to be a matter of good title, good content and luck as to whether or not your submission does well.

Thank you! Would very much like to see what you come up with when it's ready/hope you'll post it to HN.

Hehe, launching something new you made is hard/takes persistence. Hope I'm not being annoying; seemed to be appropriate here and the other time I mentioned it in a comment on HN.

Sorry to hear that. There actually is a tutorial/guide referenced a bit lower on the page but not many people seem to see it, may need to emphasize it more!

Maybe try the basic word maker to make words starting with 'arb,' 'orb' or 'mar'? I've found the words those generate are fairly nice as an idea for what it can do. Also maybe try shorter words?

Dunno. To be honest, having used the other name generation tools, this is the one I'd use to get a new domain name and a good amount of people have found names they like through Namebird (someone put in starts with 'pay' and got paydrow for instance and I used it to name itself too :P).

Bustaname is pretty nifty and useful. I'm also a fan of Namebird, a name generator that uses probability algorithms to make names that are catchy and memorable http://shobia.com/namebird (and only partly because I made it!)

This article raises some refreshing points on the startup naming process.

It can be quite tough - and I ran into the naming problem many times over the years. Over 100,000,000 com domains are registered, iirc. It reached the point where I would spend days trying to come up with something that was a) good and b) available.

Frankly, I ended up feeling that finding a good name for a new project of mine was quite unlikely to happen. Which lead me the idea that the only way I'd be able to find usable (let alone high quality) names was by making a tool to help make it easier.

So I built Namebird - http://shobia.com/namebird

For it, I came up with a variety of probability based algorithims to generate names that are catchy and memorable. It works pretty nicely, imo. And, in making it, it has been able to help me find a large amount of domain names that would be good for startups.

Perhaps some here might find it of value.