We've developed the mechanisms for time travel, and are showcasing how to do so on our website...er, sorry, have to make a minor CSS adjustment <clicks refresh on browser> ...Um, ok, wait, maybe now; try it now! Hmmm...well, it works on my firefox, what version of Safari are you on? Interesting. Have you refreshed your local cache?
...Meanwhile. lab assistant hops into time travel booth (while lead scientist fiddles with css), going back in time, and removing css from history, and pushing gemini as main "web platform" instead of the web that we know today. ;-)
Anyway, I think the website can still be improved a bit:
It just recommended me another domain OverSteerable.com. Of course the domain itself was unregistered, but then I looked up a similar one OverSteer.com and this one turned out been registered in 1994.
I think similarity like this should be taken into account. Because when you tell people to go to "OverSteerable", they may end up misremembered it as "OverSteer".
This is super neat but also sorta defeats the whole purpose of domain names, which is to have memorable names that point to hard to remember IP addresses. This creates impossible to remember hashes that point to difficult to remember IP addresses.
This is essentially content addressing + location addressing.
If you're not familiar, IPFS does content addressing in a really cool way.
To be fair, I've never had a problem remembering IP(v4) addresses, much like with phone numbers and (physical) addresses. The real advantages of using domain names is that it associates a word or phrase with the site, can remain the same while the IP changes, and also allows for virtual hosting.
Imagine a world in which the Internet grew and commercialised before DNS ever appeared --- we may have ended up with IPs being as common knowledge as phone numbers.
Well, if the phone book gets too big, we can always add a unique human readable name to each, and then synchronise everyone's phone book world wide so everyone can share their notes. People could apply to have a human readable name associated with their IP address thats easy to remember.
But what's preventing squatters from squatting all the valuable hashes? eg. pizza.com is valuable, so with the same logic you can also squat hash(pizza).
Hopefully this site will pump fake some domain squatters into buying these..? Jk of course I’m sure these are direct Whois queries, and I know namecheap doesn’t practice that if the site is using them for the searching/ai.
Very curious to hear about the training set for these. If I had to guess, someone scraped GoDaddy/Google Domains/Namecheap for the "premium domains" that are being squatted on and then trained a language model on that corpus. Hopefully the OP can provide details!
It looks to me like it is finding nonsense words that are pronounceable to English speakers and then checking if that nonsense word is available. I assume a linguist programmer could create an algorithm to come up with pronounceable words.
Is there a word for a nonsense word that is pronounceable? A potential word?
There's more to it than just pronounceable. e.g. I got tranclitic, mysothelium, gurnt,
1. tran- looks like reanalysis of words that begin with trans-, and we often pronounce the -s with the start of the root word. Clitic is a word in and of itself.
2. myso- is a rare Greek prefix, thelium means nipple. Unfortunately, together it would suggest nipple of dirt.
3. There's a low-scored urbandictionary entry for gurnt, but that's about it.
I think there's some knowledge of morpheme-like objects in the AI.
If you are looking for more control over the domain name generation process, then you may be interested in trying out a tool we recently built called Mashword (https://mashword.com).
The approach is different from this tool as it does not blindly suggest domains, but rather keys off of the words you enter. Mashword takes entered words, determines the pronunciation of the words, and then generates unique spellings and combinations using a variety of algorithms. It will also quickly run domain name availability checks and provide quick links to register the domains if they are available.
What I'd really want is this service but put "software", "capital", "health", "app", etc. at the end of each domain. I bet there are some pretty interesting company names available if you add a suffix.
If anyone still wants a simple cool TLD .com, try out names with hyphens. They're almost completely unexplored and I personally see no downside (except typing the domain in a mobile keyboard but who types domains anyways).
Typing a domain or having a preference for a browser, perhaps more IT in background, is a huge generational gap. EDIT as I seem to be a computer! Let me explain a recent conversation, one of several, that illustrated this. /EDIT
Chatting with a friend that wants an app for his small business, just a 3 page app with a contact form: His clients are mainly 20s, mainly early 20s, not particularly technical. Most (so, around 60% of his client base) comment "Why no app." Most would have never have much recall of RSS.
He's 35, I'm around the same generation "Why do they need this? It's a front page and contact form, all communication then goes by email or Facebook." He said all about discovery and stickiness. Smart guy, certainly has a plan to increase stickiness with push notifications of articles/promoting his business. An interesting conversation.
Not a second language. But spent the last decade largely speaking a second (or third) language and/or with ESL speakers. Perhaps that's starting to rub-off! Oh dear.. Not sleeping right for the past few days may also be a factor. GPT-3 paranoia may also be a thing.
I mostly work and socialise with people who have English as a second language. I have noticed myself simplifying sentences a fair bit too, reducing idiom use, and so on. But perhaps not to the same extreme :)
I think my problem is that many of your sentence fragments are not complete sentences. You keep dropping the Subject and/or Verb of the sentence.
In the above post, "But spent the last decade... ESL speakers.", you dropped the "I".
In your original post, you wrote: "Chatting with a friend that wants... not particularly technical." You dropped the "I" and the "was", and it was a long sentence, so it was difficult to figure out who was chatting and with whom.
You also leave out the commas before quotations, making it difficult to figure out who's saying what.
Another example: "He said all about discovery and stickiness." I'm still not sure what this means. Did he literally say, "all about discovery and stickiness"? Or do you mean that he said "all" (i.e. a lot of stuff) about the topic of "discovery and stickiness"? Or did you drop the "it is", and mean that he said, "It's all about discovery and stickiness."
Is your second language one of those languages where the Subject is often implicit in the context? I find that in written English, dropping the Subject and Verb does not work so well. I find it interesting that this would affect your written communication so much.
Many of my friends and most of my coworkers speak/spoke English as a second language. When speaking to them, I would find myself using simpler words and simpler grammar (e.g. simple past tense instead of past perfect progressive tense). But when writing to them, most of them can read English perfectly well, and often know the rules of English grammar better than me, so I did not have to simplify my written communication.
You have lots of small sentences, and some of them lack the words to make it a complete one.
For example, instead of starting a sentence with "Smart guy, ...", most people would write something like "He's a smart guy". Or instead of "An interesting conversation", people would write "We had many interesting conversations" or something along those lines.
It's a staccato speaking style with articles/embellishment removed, but written in text. I like the effect, personally, and use it sometimes when speaking and rarely when writing.
Often people respond with Office reference: "Why use many word when few word do trick". Amusing. Novel reference. Haven't heard before.
Except that this is not true. The people you know use google, but there are many people that don't, and just type the full url or use bookmarks, and are not particularely knowledgeable about the web. If they belong to your target group, then you'll miss some visits to your website.
the argument of "everyone will Google" might as well suggest there's no reason for .com even. You could just assume the address is completely irrelevant. As long as Google knows that "Flameswipe" should go to flame-swi.pe it's fine.
As others emphasized, besides people not always using Google, it's a tragic short-term idea to defer your traffic to a search engine and all their power. You really should want people to go directly to you and not to any middle-man.
I consult for a business with a hyphen in the name. Not recommended, as its a constant source of confusion for customers.
It might be fine for a personal site etc, but be mindful that lots of people still don't understand that websites other than .com exist (i.e. don't get a .io domain if you want to sell to the general public).
I say "dash" and I honestly rarely have issues getting folks to our page. The worse part is getting people to understand the letters over the phone (half my customers don't understand what a phonetic alphabet is so I can't just use that every time... "How do you spell Sierra?").
My boss, on the other hand, seems to have the worst time telling people about the dash. He tends to fall back on our second domain (which just redirects to the main one), and even then still has issues (I think he just talks too fast).
I recently had daily-board .com registered for a hobby project. I thought it was a fun way to represent Daily "Dash"board, but everyone I told it to was confused.
Also brings to mind my first email address, which used an underscore! In my defense, it was a hotmail address created circa 1998, before there were strong norms for such things...
> If anyone still wants a simple cool TLD .com, try out names with hyphens.
You mean the minus sign? Few know how to type the actual unicode hyphen with the keyboard. Not to be confused with dash, but short or long one?... and here start your problems.
206 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 293 ms ] threadmost of these are trash but just stick around and it delivers
Ah you are correct
Food addicts support forum, or cookbook. Or both.
Cool idea, wish I could make out what the domains I was getting said.
No matter how far you advance in the field you will still need to google how to center a div
...Meanwhile. lab assistant hops into time travel booth (while lead scientist fiddles with css), going back in time, and removing css from history, and pushing gemini as main "web platform" instead of the web that we know today. ;-)
It’s considered courteous to disclose any affiliations you have, when self promoting.
Not sure why that showed up in my first try :S
Anyway, I think the website can still be improved a bit:
It just recommended me another domain OverSteerable.com. Of course the domain itself was unregistered, but then I looked up a similar one OverSteer.com and this one turned out been registered in 1994.
I think similarity like this should be taken into account. Because when you tell people to go to "OverSteerable", they may end up misremembered it as "OverSteer".
The basic idea was that we should be able to use anything as a routable domain name, and not just limit it to short words or phrases.
This is essentially content addressing + location addressing.
If you're not familiar, IPFS does content addressing in a really cool way.
https://ipfs.io/
Imagine a world in which the Internet grew and commercialised before DNS ever appeared --- we may have ended up with IPs being as common knowledge as phone numbers.
In other words, google would be even more dominant.
Awesome.
Rothole.com another one.
Second is for news.
It's disturbing, yet sophisticated.
I am more impressed that hasn't been bought.
Has potential
(five letters is the shortest I got: rohvy.com)
I offer up these domains to my fellow HNers, to utilize in the pursuit of billion dollar dreams.
Is there a word for a nonsense word that is pronounceable? A potential word?
1. tran- looks like reanalysis of words that begin with trans-, and we often pronounce the -s with the start of the root word. Clitic is a word in and of itself.
2. myso- is a rare Greek prefix, thelium means nipple. Unfortunately, together it would suggest nipple of dirt.
3. There's a low-scored urbandictionary entry for gurnt, but that's about it.
I think there's some knowledge of morpheme-like objects in the AI.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jabberwocky_sentence
0: https://multicians.org/thvv/gpw-js.html
The approach is different from this tool as it does not blindly suggest domains, but rather keys off of the words you enter. Mashword takes entered words, determines the pronunciation of the words, and then generates unique spellings and combinations using a variety of algorithms. It will also quickly run domain name availability checks and provide quick links to register the domains if they are available.
Well, time to start a new pitch deck I guess
Chatting with a friend that wants an app for his small business, just a 3 page app with a contact form: His clients are mainly 20s, mainly early 20s, not particularly technical. Most (so, around 60% of his client base) comment "Why no app." Most would have never have much recall of RSS.
He's 35, I'm around the same generation "Why do they need this? It's a front page and contact form, all communication then goes by email or Facebook." He said all about discovery and stickiness. Smart guy, certainly has a plan to increase stickiness with push notifications of articles/promoting his business. An interesting conversation.
No, I am not a computer.
I guess everyone is more suspicious since GPT-3 came out and a bunch of people made ML generated blog posts etc.
FWIW I found your comment understandable.
In the above post, "But spent the last decade... ESL speakers.", you dropped the "I".
In your original post, you wrote: "Chatting with a friend that wants... not particularly technical." You dropped the "I" and the "was", and it was a long sentence, so it was difficult to figure out who was chatting and with whom.
You also leave out the commas before quotations, making it difficult to figure out who's saying what.
Another example: "He said all about discovery and stickiness." I'm still not sure what this means. Did he literally say, "all about discovery and stickiness"? Or do you mean that he said "all" (i.e. a lot of stuff) about the topic of "discovery and stickiness"? Or did you drop the "it is", and mean that he said, "It's all about discovery and stickiness."
Is your second language one of those languages where the Subject is often implicit in the context? I find that in written English, dropping the Subject and Verb does not work so well. I find it interesting that this would affect your written communication so much.
Many of my friends and most of my coworkers speak/spoke English as a second language. When speaking to them, I would find myself using simpler words and simpler grammar (e.g. simple past tense instead of past perfect progressive tense). But when writing to them, most of them can read English perfectly well, and often know the rules of English grammar better than me, so I did not have to simplify my written communication.
For example, instead of starting a sentence with "Smart guy, ...", most people would write something like "He's a smart guy". Or instead of "An interesting conversation", people would write "We had many interesting conversations" or something along those lines.
Often people respond with Office reference: "Why use many word when few word do trick". Amusing. Novel reference. Haven't heard before.
Are you thinking that everyone only gets to sites from actual hyperlinks rather than via human speech?
I feel like everyone around me will Google whenever they hear about a cool app, website, store, product etc.
or we're charting online or talking on Zoom and they'll just send me the link directly
I'm not sure what the purpose of a URL is anymore... unless you're this guy [1]
[1]: https://www.deepsouthventures.com/
It’s called confirmation bias.
Once you start exploring outside your circle, it might not hold true.
As others emphasized, besides people not always using Google, it's a tragic short-term idea to defer your traffic to a search engine and all their power. You really should want people to go directly to you and not to any middle-man.
It might be fine for a personal site etc, but be mindful that lots of people still don't understand that websites other than .com exist (i.e. don't get a .io domain if you want to sell to the general public).
I say "dash" and I honestly rarely have issues getting folks to our page. The worse part is getting people to understand the letters over the phone (half my customers don't understand what a phonetic alphabet is so I can't just use that every time... "How do you spell Sierra?").
My boss, on the other hand, seems to have the worst time telling people about the dash. He tends to fall back on our second domain (which just redirects to the main one), and even then still has issues (I think he just talks too fast).
Oh well, it was fun for a year.
Seems like about ~1% of the top 500 websites use a hyphen in domain.
Also brings to mind my first email address, which used an underscore! In my defense, it was a hotmail address created circa 1998, before there were strong norms for such things...
You mean the minus sign? Few know how to type the actual unicode hyphen with the keyboard. Not to be confused with dash, but short or long one?... and here start your problems.