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nt_mark

14 karma · joined January 27, 2011

Co-founder nametoolkit.com
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nt_mark··on Lean Domain Search: Two Weeks After the HackerNews Launch
Shameless self-promotion but as opposed to lean, how about beautiful domain search courtesy of nametoolkit.com and Twitter Bootstrap?
nt_mark··on Namecheap to Double EFF Donation if 25,000 Transfers Made Today
Yes, please do give it a look, we're currently A/B testing a new theme and we could use feedback. Namecheap are certainly better than Godaddy but they're still nowhere near as simple as using our service.
nt_mark··on Google Awarded Driverless Vehicle Patent
1. Google is NEVER going into the auto business, but they'll licence or even donate their software to run on any auto manufacturers car.

2. The auto manufacturers will only tepidly roll this out very with tons of regulatory and legal tiptoeing.

3. The end user will have to sign away any legal rights to recourse and/or the government(s) will have to amend statutory rights accordingly before the first cars hit the road.

4. It will happen, eventually. It will save hundreds of thousands of lives/year.

nt_mark··on Twitter: It's time to open source your Android app
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1683185/android-listview-...
nt_mark··on Twitter: It's time to open source your Android app
I haven't checked this out, all I'm saying is it looks a LOT like http://mobile.twitter.com. Same border, same pull down to refresh. Mobile web FTW.
nt_mark··on JQuery plugins site accidentally deleted - last backup one year old.
Can't wait for the announcement that they accidentally deleted all of the lines of code for IE-specific hacks.
nt_mark··on The Unintended Effects of Driverless Cars
(cough) Public transport (cough)
nt_mark··on How One Missing `var` Ruined our Launch
Exactly why we moved to CoffeeScript, without it you need to rigorously enforce coding conventions. This entails watching for missing vars, using jslint, having a script that searches for accidentally declared globals, only declaring vars at the top of a function, among other best practices. With CS you get all of that just by using it. If you can write high-standard code using a simpler, terser syntax, why avoid it?
nt_mark··on Turn Your Smartphone Into A Robot
Great idea, love the simplicity of the interface (audio jack), just bought one. Best of luck guys
nt_mark··on Which domain registrar is best?
Exactly why we created http://nametoolkit.com, I've used Gandi and they're not bad, but even their interface is a bit clunky, makes you click twice (to commit the DNS change you've just submitted).
nt_mark··on How many .com domains are available?
I believe ICANN is looking to reform zone file access as part of the new gTLD system it's initiating.

http://securityskeptic.typepad.com/the-security-skeptic/2010...

nt_mark··on How many .com domains are available?
ycombinator - 11 facebook - 8 Wikipedia - 9 googleusercontent.com - 21

Shorter domains definitely make sense, but probably not a good predictor in itself though they have aesthetic value.

nt_mark··on How many .com domains are available?
That's hard to analyse, however web traffic follows a power law distribution, http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/idl/papers/ranking/adamicglot.... So, outside the top 100k sites in terms of traffic you could expect it's either parked or idle domains.
nt_mark··on How many .com domains are available?
Verisign com zone file, available for free upon request
nt_mark··on How many .com domains are available?
Indeed, same can be said for good usernames
nt_mark··on Why Naming Your Company Sucks
http://nametoolkit.com - We use several of the mentioned approaches to provide domain suggestions.

- The "freshfunk" method of applying prefixes and suffixes, which we call wordmixer (works well for one-word names).

- Vowel/syllable replacement (phoneme)

- Thesaurus (works best with word pairs)

- domain hacks

- ngrams (word pairs taken from a large corpus sorted by frequency descending)

nt_mark··on Ask HN: What do you think of our new domain name generator?
I'm not old till I hit 30 man...ages away
nt_mark··on Ask HN: What do you think of our new domain name generator?
Hi Rich, I've never seen your site before, I have very little free time, and I use it to code more than read the news. Your site isn't bad.. it's not the best I've seen and not the worst either, which is similar to how I'd currently rate ours.

domaintyper.com is one of my new favourites and I was aware of domai.nr but found it too minimalist to be useful to me, and some minor ones you'll get through Google , or DuckDuckGo :).

Actually one of the things I learned on the project was how poorly I'd initally researched the market. There are far more competitors than I thought in this space. Many are proof of concept or prepend adjectives, some are more advanced. We are trying to be creative and we're coming up with most algorithms and UI concepts from scratch out of necessity as we're not hugely impressed with what we've seen elsewhere.

Yes we have made sales, I won't divulge the number, safe to say, not enough for me to quit my day job but we're moving on much faster than expected. Being an affiliate, as you probably know has it's drawbacks in terms of not being able to track user behaviour once they disappear into the registrar's site.

Name Toolkit doesn't merely attach words to other words randomly, or prepend random words, but if that's how it looked, then we're not doing well enough. We're working to make our search better daily and we hope that will become apparent if you re-visit.

All the best with your efforts.