This will be our second kid, and at least for us figuring out a name that we both love is hard. There are literally tons of baby-name apps out there, most of them more fully-featured and polished than Nom de Bébé and you should probably use one of those. However a lot of them include a disturbing amount of tracking or for any number of reasons just didn't work for my wife and I (bugs, subscriptions, lack of names, etc). So in continuing the tradition of "An app can be a home-cooked meal" [1], I built my own for us to use. You're welcome to use it too.
Indeed. Especially if you want to piss off potensial users/customers.
> There's a difference between asking a question, making a suggestion and shoving ideals down somebody's throat.
Unfortunately, the "ideal" for many is to have an app for their - well - app, or service, whatever it might be. Usually it's just a perfectly functioning responsive web service that is turned to a native app instead of just going for a hybrid app (at least to start with).
In this specific case, there's is _absolutely no reason_ it should be provided as an app, at least not a native one.
Because:
The user already has everything installed on his phone to use the service; a browser.
To me, _as a (potential) user_, having to install this app would have been showing something down my throat. To solve that problem, the developer could have created it as a responsive web application first, and maybe made an hybrid app, and then decided if it is worthwhile creating a native app.
Why the desparate need to create native apps and have to maintain two totally different projects when there's no need to?
All your arguments hold if this was something the developper was trying to grow (commercially or not). Given this is clearly just an app made for their own use and scratch an itch... Taking about pleasing potential users/customers and how you'd have to be forced to install this app is more or less off-topic.
But how do you know if it should be an app? It seems like we need a ShouldThisBeAnApp app where you can upload screenshots, descriptions, API diagrams, etc. and allow AI + community input to make the determination.
What if you don't want an app and you just want to consume an API? I'm thinking a better name would be ShouldThisBeAMobileAppOrWebAppOrNativeAppOrAWebService.
In this case it's very easy: if all the functionality can be run in the browser, which already is an app installed on my computer, don't make it an app. At least not a native one.
"Static site" is a bit of a misnomer, it refers to the webserver's view not the clients view. The client can still dynamically request chunks of information, favorite things, sorts things, save things between sessions, and form dynamic connections (though you'd need to point to a 3rd party signaling server for the WebRTC connection to come up).
I.e. it's not the web page that is static rather the files to host the web page are static vs say being a php site dynamically generating responses based on user/session/request information.
* I make enough web-based things for my job, and I enjoy developing in Flutter / Dart (what this was built in).
* I’m never realistically going to be looking through names on a desktop; I use the app when I have a few minutes to kill in line or something where I can pull out my phone, decide on a few names, and then go back to what I was doing. I could build it as an offline web-app that gets saved to my device but then why not just build an app in the first place?
* I like using SQL for retrieving data, and I don’t want to have to jump through hoops to do so.
Projects like this one are excellent for scratching an itch or learning a new platform. Low-pressure / "oh well" failure mode, fairly constrained scope, nothing too fancy, but enough of a "product" with utility to push you through the boring parts to the end.
It's also interesting how this question shifted over time! It used to be that people would ask why you made a Perl CGI or PHP app when you could've just made a desktop app.
Exactly! The development actually languished for many months and I almost scrapped it. Only in the past week or two did I decide to revive it when I once again felt the need for it (9 months go by fast).
You're not thinking of the potential here. Just imagine a baby name generator that tracks its users preferences and automatically registers domains and social media accounts which it then tries to sell you.
...it sounds horrific, I'm glad OP went with this model.
Might be nice to deploy the Flutter app on the web too. Flutter web support is pretty decent now. SQLite on the web is probably going to be tricky though (sqflite doesn't support it).
Because you can already `shuf -n 1 /usr/share/rig/fnames.idx` (or mnames for male ones) or `vis-menu /usr/share/rig/fnames.idx >> momlikednames.list`, and `cat {mom,dad}likednames.list | sort | uniq -d` to find names both parents like.
`shuf /usr/share/dict/words` was how I picked my HN username.
The list is biased. Not only does it only have U.S. births, but also only those where the individual has a Social Security Number. I wonder how many the latter rules out.
For privacy, it also drops names that are rare, with fewer than 5 births in a given year.
Long before I considered having a child, I built the first baby names app for iPhone with my buddy Dave. [1]
Believe it or not, we had a beef going with another app developer over who truly had the first / best baby names app. App game has been competitive since the get.
That's impressive! Around that time my brother was desperately trying to get me to build his app ideas so we could partner together. I dismissed him as I was busy focussing on school and thought there was no real money in mobile apps. I still regret it today..
TBH, opt-in statistics would be interesting, so you can say "Most popular baby name of 2021 was...".
Although I guess you'll have a lot of bad data suffering from selection bias, it'll be the most popular name of the parents who used this app and chose to opt-in...
Congratulations on both the baby and the launch of the app!
There's actually a need-gap for 'Suggest unique pronounceable baby names' posted on my problem validation platform[1].
Although I'm not sure how the uniqueness metric could be added to app, You're welcomed to post Nom de Bébé there in the comments to reach out to those who need it.
Edit: Since the main goal of a unique name seems to be email id, social media handle etc. Measuring availability of those from the selected name is actually possible.
That depends upon where the person with that unique name lives, If the vocabulary is from the native language and the person lives in the same region then they don't have much of a trouble.
Then again non-unique names from native regions cannot be pronounced by non-native speakers, My name is far from unique and native English speakers have refereed to it as 'Ab...followed by several other syllables'.
It's also a dead give-away class marker of the lower classes.
Also, the number of people who hate their "unique and quirky" name they got from their parents is much, much, much, much higher than the number of people who hate their normal name.
In some countries if you have a weird name people it means that you are either a foreigner or you parents are complete morons. Some names strongly imply the later.
> Plenty of upper- and middle-class babies with unique, or at least unusual, names.
Such as?
In my experience, upper and upper-middle class kids get common names, usually a bit on the conservative side, nothing that sticks out too much. Never crazy spelling, never unique names.
If your first name is really henrik, that would be pretty unique in the English speaking world. I think what you say might be true for your country but not really in others. Many upperclass people have unique names in the United States (and also in Britain I think ). In fact it used to be quite fashionable with some upperclass people to have a vaguely foreign sounding name especially one hinting at some kind of European connection.
Unlike the other examples in this thread, I'll give you credit for that one.
Interestingly the article shows a way for upper-class people to signal upper-class-ness through names. The other kids all have a normal given name, and can easily fly under the radar. But once you start saying all of their first names, it's a clear signal.
(Because it is in line with how many European royals name their children.)
In the usual sense used in the US, they’d mostly be above the upper middle class and into the upper class.
In the more theoretically grounded system otherwise used when discussing capitalist societies, they’d still all be, at birth, be at least petit bourgeois, so the idea that such names are clear indication of membership in the “lower classes” is only even possibly true of capitalist classes in the narrowest possible sense (“not of the haut bourgeoisie”, though even that is a stretch), or maybe if you are speaking of vestigial pre-capitalist class systems, and still just as narrowly (“not the titled nobility”).
I have a unique name and it’s served me well in life, for what it’s worth. People tend to remember you, although that’s perhaps going to change with more children having unique names.
I concur. I have a unique first name that's simply two common names concatenated with a dash. If I'm worried about the impression or pronunciation I can simply use half of it.
I like a common first name and uncommon middle name.
The first name gives anonymity. The middle gives uniqueness that is rarely used except when you want the full formal name and want to be sure you have the right person.
Thank you, I've been running needgap for over 2 years.
You do have a point regarding security implications of the unique names, Considering people get swatted and have even died for their unique social media handle it might not be worth to pursue a unique name for that.
Interesting, I haven't had any trouble with concatenating my first & last name for my public handles like email and had never thought this was a problem. Perks of having a relatively unique last name I guess. My sympathy goes out to all the "John Smith"s of the world!
Thanks! She mostly humours me and tries to keep the eye-rolling to a minimum. Her feedback drove most of the features and bug fixes and we're actively using it right now.
Congrats! The mutual agreement part is fun stuff. And yay for overkill software! I 100% used my ForceRank.it tool to try to align on names. For us we wanted 2 middle names so there was real combinatorial explosion ;)
I was actually in the process of writing an app when we were expecting, so I downloaded the US Census CSV of names to import, and when I perused the file I saw a couple names I liked, asked my wife, and we picked one before I ever had to write any code!
We went from trying 5 or 6 apps that we didn't really like, then downloading the CSV of names, then getting overwhelmed by all the names, the making the bone-headed decision to kill a bunch of time building an app instead of just slogging through things.
I completely forgot I had done this, but I also got the census CSVs and wrote a script to spit out 10 random selections at a time, with optional middle name and our last names appended to each. I also included optional stats for each name on their popularity ranking for certain years. I came up with a short list of five or ten, compared lists with my partner, and the one name that our lists had in common was the winner.
The script and CSVs ultimately ended up not making a big difference in the decision (it was a significant name from my family) but the process was fun and yielded some interesting results.
I was scrolling through your app, looking at the names, and I was like “this is cool, but a popularity graph would be cooler.” Then I started wondering why some names were blue or red, so I tapped one, and it brought up a popularity graph.
Well done. You’ve officially made a baby name app that doesn’t suck. Quite the opposite — haha, I just noticed there’s a dark mode too. Ok, between the custom dark mode and the hilarious name, this is the best damn baby name app on the planet.
Thank you!
Oh yeah, congrats on the kiddo. :)
(A feature request: it’d be nice if the explore list could be filtered by decade. The decade filter doesn’t seem to update it right now, only the swiper.)
Thank you so much! I had left the “explore” list completely unfiltered so you could always see all names, but it would be trivial to add a checkbox or something to apply the active filters; I’ll definitely add that!
Congrats! A friend of mine did the exact same thing and built namesilike.com. Looks very similar in fact but uses a machine learning model to help rank the names.
There is. On the sharing screen there is a matches section that shows the intersection of your lists, sorted based on a combined sorting of your favourites.
It does let you see your partners lists too however, so it’s not completely hidden.
> full name with given name, to see how it reads, sounds
This was a critical step when naming my kids. You really need to see how yelling the full name sounds. If it is too awkward or has syllables that don't fall together easily, that can make it difficult when you (eventually) need to yell at them for doing something stupid.
Same with the first + middle combination -- those need to flow together well for occasions that require less than full yelling.
My daughter was almost named “to be determined”. We went out for lunch one day and this woman at a table beside us was talking about her granddaughter. Her granddaughter sounded like a great kid and when she (finally) said her granddaughter’s name, my partner and I gave each other a look. That was the name…
I wish your app had existed then - it would have been easier than the grand email list o’ names we shared with everyone even remotely related to us.
But also, I wonder if that woman had any idea that she would inadvertently name my only child just by bragging about her grand baby. And in a sense, that gets to be your honour now. You built something that will be responsible for naming humans. That’s truly profound.
Lauren is five years old now. She started kindergarten in September. She loves numbers, math, reading, learning French and space. She is an absolutely wonderful little person, she is the love of my life and it is truly an honour being her dad.
Given my propensity for turning temporary names into permanent names, if this happened to me I'm fairly certain the baby would end up being named Toby.
My son was born on a friday and we didn't have to finish the paperwork until monday, so naturally the indecision continued through the weekend. We called him 'Buddy' until Monday, when we ended up going with the name we were leaning toward anyway.
Great app, however I'm not sure "pink for girls, blue for boys" should be the only colour combination. After all, just less than a hundred years ago the colours were reversed.
pink was common for men, being associated as a shade of red to show masculinity
numerous articles and books on the subject (some other tidbits, FDR wore a dress when he was young as it was common for boys at the time until age 6/7)
There was an app where each one of you had to left-swipe/right-swipe through a list of randomly selected names, and the app would tell you when both of you liked the same name.
First, congratulations, hamaluik. This especially made me smile because I went through a similar experience - in the early 2000s, inspired by kids’ births I had the itch to evolve the manual process of a 'game' with our extended family—gathering/compiling their guesses at a name and other birth stats.
So I designed a free (and no ads) web app[0] for me and so others could automat their own pools.
It also has “bebe” in the app name :)
Just as an historical point: There were just two other 'baby pool' type web apps on The Internet at the time (2003~2005). One of those two disappeared a few years ago. This was before conventional wisdom would be that facebook integration was a prerequisite for mass audience success for this kind of app. I was never interested in hitching my wagon to FB or any other third party. I’m happy it’s an independent piece of old school web 1.5 / 2.0 that still kicking a decade and a half later. I hope your app has a long life as well.
Hi, this is awesome! As a heads up, my partner is on Android and the sharing function does not seem to work. Even so, this app is great. Thank you for sharing.
First off, congrats on the kid. I love the app, and my wife and I are using it now.
Two things I've noticed so far that seem odd to me:
1. If you have a preference selected on Sex, open it back up and click off without making a selection, the selection is saved as "no preference," however, on other filters, clicking off cancels the changes.
2. When I selected the top 300 names from 2010, Masculine Only, I expected to see the top 300 Masculine names, but instead, it looks like you are returning the first 300 names then filtering from there.
back in 2016 when we had a kid born in our immediate family, i wanted to geek out fully with a excel list of popular names and i wanted a way to do "let me randomly pick a name out of the list by say 5000 random tries and the final outcome would be selected. unfortunately excel proved to be difficult, = tried randbetween and some more stuff but could not get it working. in the end, the selection was done like cavemen, by using a book, uh
My wife and I used a similar app for our second and third baby. It was helpful and we only matched on one name for our second kid, and that is indeed her name.
There is an app called Kinder that is this. You and partner both swipe names independently and it lets you know of any matches. It actually serves a social function of removing the factor of who's initial suggestion the name is.
> Over 110,000 names from over a century of records
Does it do something smart to filter the names? Because showing all of them is too much.
Is there a third option or only heart vs thumb-down?
Is there an option to show variants of spelling? All my children have names with the traditional Spanish spelling [Hi from Argentina!] but here it's somewhat common to use the English or Italian spelling too.
You can filter names by first letter, sex, and decade of popularity, as well as limit to the most popular N names in that list.
No, only like / dislike. This was intentional for me, another app we tried had a "maybe" list that just filled up with names that I would never realistically go for.
No easy way to show variants of spelling. Not something I needed, but I could definitely see that being helpful for others, and would be a good feature to add.
Would be interesting if you could filter to include / exclude similar sounding names / syllables.
When we had our kid, I had to come up with names and my wife would try to "break them"(think of every way in which some "mean kids" might twist the name to something else).
For e.g. when I suggested Dakshith which is a very popular name in India, she countered "Do you really want other kids to call him "shi*?"
Yea I purposefully made the explore mode keep al the names. Next release I’ll make sure to add a toggle on whether to apply the filters or not because in hindsight this is confusing.
My wife and I have a game to spell out things with baby name initials (our last name starts with a T, which helps). We aren't tied to the idea, but it's sort of like an improv game, where constraints get the ideas flowing. We've learned a fair bit about what each of us do and don't like in a game
Thanks! I've found that the vast majority of software I get hired to write boils down to just a frontend to a database / spreadsheet, and the rest is just window dressing.
In the 90s there were a bunch of db/programming products like clarion, fox pro, and eventually access. It was surprising the stuff people made with them.
The cost model for stuff like airtable doesn’t lend itself to the same products.
if you look for french names I've done this dashboard [1] that shows popularity of french names in France from 1900 to today. It is very slow to load, due to database loading and because heroku is free I guess.
Github (french) repo is [2]
Apparently the workaround has been to 'move' to Denmark for a couple of days, have your child named and registered in your new home country, and then move back to Iceland.
It’s sort of true. Strictly speaking, it’s true, but it’s mostly to prevent weird people from naming their kid “X Æ A-12” or “Brfxxccxxmnpcccclllmmnprxvclmnckssqlbb11116” (yes, really).
Speaking of names is it really true than in Sweden you have to get a baby name approved by some government office
Basically. The Swedish IRS is responsible for keeping the register of all Swedish citizens and they have the power to refuse to register a name. The main rule is you are not allowed to give a child a name that can be seen as provocative, insulting or has a high risk of causing the child problems or humiliation in the future. The core legal principal behind is that parents are not allowed to cause their children potential harm with their choice of name and since the child cannot act their own advocate in this matter, the State has to.
Edit: The other type of name you are not allowed to give are names that are considered 'obvious' last names, as well as names that are primarily titles like "King", "Admiral" or "Captain".
Wow, some names on the list seem innocuous. "Masen" for instance. A few others seem fine too.
They would have a field day with a lot of names people give their kids in America. I went to school with kids with names like "Cadillac" which sounds like they wouldn't be allowed there.
I don't know about Sweden, but it is the case in my native Poland.
In fact, I think it's much more common than full liberty in this regard.
As for the level of strictness - it's always a bit arbitrary, and there are no fool-proof guidelines, nor a predefined whitelist.
Generally speaking, however, the name cannot be ridiculous, humiliating, offensive, it must be in a full form (not affectionate) etc.
Among the rejected ones there have been "Rambo" and "Joint".
There were parents who tried "Wiedźmin" (Witcher), to no avail, but they succeeded eventually with a compromise, a slightly altered "Wiedzimin". Not a real name, but kinda sounds like it might be (sort of similar to Lithuanian Giedymin), and by itself not a popculture reference, which apparently was what the office considered frivolous/inappropriate.
In France this goes in front of a judge. Names that seem harmful to the child won't be accepted.
Famous occurrences are "Nutella" (ended up "Ella"), "Megane Renault" (a brand of car, ultimately accepted because it's old enough not to mean anything to kids), "Mohamed Merah" (same name as a terrorist who killed 7).
Evidence shows that some parents are just too dumb to be trusted not to set their child up for ridicule and bullying.
I've always loved the term "baby name". Makes it seem like you grow out of it eventually and have to switch to an adult name like "Roger" or "Raymond".
Haha, I love it! Our first kid was code-named “baby thunder” before being born (we delayed telling some friends so we wouldn’t steal their “baby thunder”). The name stuck around for a couple months after she was born before we trailed off using it, so it really was her “baby name” :p
We did a similar thing. Early on, our toddler proposed the name Bin-ban for his upcoming sister, and it stuck.
We have a lovely video of the toddler explaining to Grannie a few hours after the birth 'her name is Bin-ban'. 'Oh <long pause>, yes, but she has a real name'.
We called her Bin-ban for a few more weeks until she sort of grew into her 'real' name. That beautiful little original name is a very fond memory for us.
Our son proposed “Caterpillar Pop” for his looming sister which I always liked. “Mustard” was the codename for another unborn child (my sister’s, I think).
When I was a child I used to ask my mother what her name was when she was a child too. I just couldn't imagine/believe someone would have that/her name as and be 10 years old at the same time.
I don't really like my name and I think adults should be able to choose their names without big hassle. Not choosing where you're born is already too much of a control-giveup haha
This just seems like we’d be fixing a cultural issue with a band aid solution. The reason changing a name is difficult shouldn’t be the bureaucracy, but the fact that you exist in an interpersonal network of individuals indexed by name.
> I think adults should’ve able to choose their name without a big hassle
So my question for you would be: what hassle are you referring to? The cultural norm or the bureaucracy/paperwork?
Same! I always thought I was alone in feeling this way. When I first heard the phrase "baby names", I first understood it as that: a name used for people while they are still a baby. I was confused for many years until I realized that it was just a query for popular names for your newborn. I feel there should be a more descriptive phrase for it, or simply refer to it as name popularity. I'm not familiar with a culture where people legally change their name as they get older, but I don't think it would make a statistical dent. Almost all people keep the name they are born with, correct?
Speaking as a "Joseph", there was a definite "Joey" phase as a kid, followed by an ongoing "Joe" phase, while "Joseph" is retained for Very Adult/Formal contexts. But maybe not everyone has such multifunctional names.
I did almost the exact same thing (minus scrabble score!), and am convinced there's at least a few interesting blog posts or even research papers left that can come from these records.
Maybe because it was all too contrived, it fell by the wayside when my wife came across something she really liked in a poem, and we basically used the closest name that embodied the phrase.
For the next child I'll probably just try asking a transformer model.
Thank you, I downloaded both apps to try them out- don't plan on having a baby anytime soon, though :)
And thank you for using an Open Source license!
I always look for utility apps like these in fdroid first, so I know if I were just out looking for something like this, I would be more likely to download it versus another app if it were in fdroid!
I considered it and maybe I still should, but ultimately I found when sending the sharing code I would just copy / paste it rather than type it in so for my needs it is fine. Wouldn’t be very much work at all though so I should probably just stop being lazy!
You will run into mountains of issues with USA systems if you insist on using the è. You will fill out physical paperwork at the hospital. How will it be translated by the typists and OCR? Passport matching against the airline information. Will it match? School enrollment: will all the username systems be ready for the UTF-8 character?
This would also work well as a pet or animal name generator. You could apply many more filters (Species -> breed -> colour -> gender)
My SO and I acquired some new pets during covid for added company and we scoured through websites that were pretty plain, simply names as a list in bullet form. Your app is more fun, interactive, and memorable of an activity. People appreciate that!
I would love something like this that returns the intersection of names found in two cultures. E.g. I am British and my partner is Finnish, if/when we have kids we'll have to have to pick names that sound good in both languages.
For this particular combination girl names aren't too rare but there's very few boy names that come to mind.
That's a great idea! Though I think it would take an awful lot of data-munging to get there. Friends of ours struggled with this exact thing, but with English & French.
The trick with English and French names is to move outside of Anglo-Saxon sounding monosyllables towards more Anglo-Norman names.
Henry (Henri), Michael (Michel), Oliver (Olivier), Julian (Jules), Anton (Antoine), Bernard (Benoit, ou seulment Bernard), Dominic (Dominique), Alexander (Alexandre), even William. The really French names, though, are going to be pretty rough if it's a dominantly English speaking enviro. It's rare to come across an English speaker named Guy or Guillame.
I'm continually shocked at how many solutions there are in this whole baby-naming space. I think there's something so personal about it that especially drives people to do it for themselves.
Believe it or not a good source of those is the Bible. Every language knows what do with them, either pronounce natively or a direct analogue; Ivan/John and so on.
This depends on your concept of how names work. Some people (often dependent on native language of those people) think names should be translated, but to me they're more like a token than other words.
If your name is Xinyi, your name in English is Xinyi, some people would disagree and say your name in English is Joy; whilst xinyi means joy (IIRC) that's not how names [should] work [IMO].
This might relate in part to how we use a lot of foreign language words for names in UK English. Like how Charis (biblical Greek) is a different name to Grace (modern English) but d both derive from the same meaning.
Yes, for sure, in the end you should call people what they want to be called. I know lots of Chinese people who chose an English name rather than put up with hearing their Chinese name horribly mangled all the time, and I know other Chinese people who prefer to go by their Chinese name and coach people how to say it properly. Or as close as we can get.
In my case sometimes people have trouble with 'Sean' (Irish for John), so I just tell them to say whatever style of John they're most comfortable with. Since it's a biblical name they'll have heard John before in their own language and have access to something familiar.
Have #2 on the way and a short list of names we like, but awesome! Good way to grab new suggestion in the case that one catches my attention more than the names we already like. Also, agree with the your comment elsewhere that this is something to do "when you have a few minutes to kill"
>In England, Northern Ireland and Wales, the law requires you to register a birth within 42 days (GOV.UK, 2019a). In Scotland, a birth needs to be registered within 21 days
We couldn't think of a name that we both liked and went well over the 42 days to register the name, we got a court order around 120 days.
Jokingly I said to my partner you're the one that'll be going to court not me. She replied that's ok I'll name the baby after the first person I see.
We settled on a name and registered the (not very new) baby the next morning
>In England, Northern Ireland and Wales, the law requires you to register a birth within 42 days (GOV.UK, 2019a). In Scotland, a birth needs to be registered within 21 days
My parents would have been in jail.
They were both Old World immigrants and very traditional (though, from different countries). So I wasn't named until I was almost a year old.
Also I didn't have a haircut until after 1yo, supposedly a cultural tradition. Didn't wear pants until I was 2yo, again supposed to be a cultural thing.
Here's the one that blows a lot of young people's minds: I didn't have a Social Security number until I was 17. And the only reason I got one was so I could get a passport.
These days you can't function, even as a child, without a Social Security number. Back then, you were still considered a human being and an American citizen even if you weren't constantly enumerated, tabulated, and tracked.
A lot of the features being suggested below, such as origins, spellings, saving names, etc, are available on https://babynames.com/. However, they only have the site and not an app.
Not trying to detract from the project. I was just curious if there was something that covered these that was already out there
I really wanted that in the app (and more filters besides), but the data source was the US Social Security administration (the easiest to access list of names I could find) [1], and it really only includes the number of people with a given name and sex for each year. To include the region / language would be a lot of data processing work that I sadly don't have time for.
If you really want it, you could create a github repo with an alphabetically-sorted CSV list of baby names (one file per first letter). Describe the expected format, add a CI for validation and we (the people from the internet) will fill it out for you, according to the old open-source style :)
When deciding on a name for my 2nd child, I wanted them to go together. I looked up which years were the most popular for my oldest, and looked at lists of names that were popular in that timeframe.
I think you could also use years to suggest names that neither parent has on their list. Based on names that the parents have liked, find out which decade was most popular. (Geometric Mean would probably be most useful to combine scores between parents).
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 292 ms ] thread[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22332629
Could even have the data in a repo to accept pull requests for new names.
Indeed. Especially if you want to piss off potensial users/customers.
> There's a difference between asking a question, making a suggestion and shoving ideals down somebody's throat.
Unfortunately, the "ideal" for many is to have an app for their - well - app, or service, whatever it might be. Usually it's just a perfectly functioning responsive web service that is turned to a native app instead of just going for a hybrid app (at least to start with).
In this specific case, there's is _absolutely no reason_ it should be provided as an app, at least not a native one.
Because:
The user already has everything installed on his phone to use the service; a browser.
To me, _as a (potential) user_, having to install this app would have been showing something down my throat. To solve that problem, the developer could have created it as a responsive web application first, and maybe made an hybrid app, and then decided if it is worthwhile creating a native app.
Why the desparate need to create native apps and have to maintain two totally different projects when there's no need to?
Then why make an app out of something that would work just as well with something I have already installed on my phone?
In this case it's very easy: if all the functionality can be run in the browser, which already is an app installed on my computer, don't make it an app. At least not a native one.
I said: don't _create_ apps that shouldn't be apps.
I.e. it's not the web page that is static rather the files to host the web page are static vs say being a php site dynamically generating responses based on user/session/request information.
* I make enough web-based things for my job, and I enjoy developing in Flutter / Dart (what this was built in).
* I’m never realistically going to be looking through names on a desktop; I use the app when I have a few minutes to kill in line or something where I can pull out my phone, decide on a few names, and then go back to what I was doing. I could build it as an offline web-app that gets saved to my device but then why not just build an app in the first place?
* I like using SQL for retrieving data, and I don’t want to have to jump through hoops to do so.
It's also interesting how this question shifted over time! It used to be that people would ask why you made a Perl CGI or PHP app when you could've just made a desktop app.
ps: congrats on the new baby!
Thanks!
For the father at least...
Congrats!
You could track whether specific locations, or time of day/week, result in liking certain types of names. Version 2.
...it sounds horrific, I'm glad OP went with this model.
`shuf /usr/share/dict/words` was how I picked my HN username.
The list is biased. Not only does it only have U.S. births, but also only those where the individual has a Social Security Number. I wonder how many the latter rules out.
For privacy, it also drops names that are rare, with fewer than 5 births in a given year.
(App is open source, so it’s easy to discover that’s where the names come from. See https://github.com/hamaluik/nomdebebe/blob/main/app/NAMES.md)
I trust the browser sandbox a million times more than I trust the phone app sandbox.
Long before I considered having a child, I built the first baby names app for iPhone with my buddy Dave. [1]
Believe it or not, we had a beef going with another app developer over who truly had the first / best baby names app. App game has been competitive since the get.
[1] https://www.prweb.com/releases/2008/09/prweb1332494.htm
That's impressive! Around that time my brother was desperately trying to get me to build his app ideas so we could partner together. I dismissed him as I was busy focussing on school and thought there was no real money in mobile apps. I still regret it today..
Although I guess you'll have a lot of bad data suffering from selection bias, it'll be the most popular name of the parents who used this app and chose to opt-in...
There's actually a need-gap for 'Suggest unique pronounceable baby names' posted on my problem validation platform[1].
Although I'm not sure how the uniqueness metric could be added to app, You're welcomed to post Nom de Bébé there in the comments to reach out to those who need it.
Edit: Since the main goal of a unique name seems to be email id, social media handle etc. Measuring availability of those from the selected name is actually possible.
[1] https://needgap.com/problems/259-suggest-unique-pronounceabl...
Unique names though… there’s a certain safety in numbers that a common name affords. A unique name is very easy to target in searches.
source: I have a very rare first name.
Then again non-unique names from native regions cannot be pronounced by non-native speakers, My name is far from unique and native English speakers have refereed to it as 'Ab...followed by several other syllables'.
Also, the number of people who hate their "unique and quirky" name they got from their parents is much, much, much, much higher than the number of people who hate their normal name.
Plenty of upper- and middle-class babies with unique, or at least unusual, names.
Such as?
In my experience, upper and upper-middle class kids get common names, usually a bit on the conservative side, nothing that sticks out too much. Never crazy spelling, never unique names.
X Æ A-12 Musk?
Never say never.
Here's a good resource if you want to read up on how class works in the US: https://siderea.livejournal.com/1260265.html
There is a big difference between uncommon names but with deep roots like the above mentioned Sixtus and completely unique names X Æ A-12.
The former is very common in the upper classes, the latter not so much.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/jul/05/jacob-rees-...
Interestingly the article shows a way for upper-class people to signal upper-class-ness through names. The other kids all have a normal given name, and can easily fly under the radar. But once you start saying all of their first names, it's a clear signal.
(Because it is in line with how many European royals name their children.)
Moon Unit, Dweezil, and Diva Thin Muffin Zappa.
Raddix Madden
Lyra Antarctica Sheeran
Kal-El Coppola Cage
Pilot Inspektor Lee
Blue Ivy Carter
Rosalind Arusha Arkadina Altalune Florence Busson
Aleph Portman-Millepied
Bear Blu Jarecki
Kulture Kiari Cephus
Sparrow James Midnight Madden
Exton Downey
Seargeoh Stallone
North, Saint, and Chicago West
Rumer, Scout and Tellulah Belle Willis
In the usual sense used in the US, they’d mostly be above the upper middle class and into the upper class.
In the more theoretically grounded system otherwise used when discussing capitalist societies, they’d still all be, at birth, be at least petit bourgeois, so the idea that such names are clear indication of membership in the “lower classes” is only even possibly true of capitalist classes in the narrowest possible sense (“not of the haut bourgeoisie”, though even that is a stretch), or maybe if you are speaking of vestigial pre-capitalist class systems, and still just as narrowly (“not the titled nobility”).
The first name gives anonymity. The middle gives uniqueness that is rarely used except when you want the full formal name and want to be sure you have the right person.
You do have a point regarding security implications of the unique names, Considering people get swatted and have even died for their unique social media handle it might not be worth to pursue a unique name for that.
I was actually in the process of writing an app when we were expecting, so I downloaded the US Census CSV of names to import, and when I perused the file I saw a couple names I liked, asked my wife, and we picked one before I ever had to write any code!
We went from trying 5 or 6 apps that we didn't really like, then downloading the CSV of names, then getting overwhelmed by all the names, the making the bone-headed decision to kill a bunch of time building an app instead of just slogging through things.
The script and CSVs ultimately ended up not making a big difference in the decision (it was a significant name from my family) but the process was fun and yielded some interesting results.
Well done. You’ve officially made a baby name app that doesn’t suck. Quite the opposite — haha, I just noticed there’s a dark mode too. Ok, between the custom dark mode and the hilarious name, this is the best damn baby name app on the planet.
Thank you!
Oh yeah, congrats on the kiddo. :)
(A feature request: it’d be nice if the explore list could be filtered by decade. The decade filter doesn’t seem to update it right now, only the swiper.)
* https://apps.apple.com/us/app/babyname-find-it-together/id95...
* https://apps.apple.com/us/app/kinder-find-baby-names/id10684...
It does let you see your partners lists too however, so it’s not completely hidden.
EZ 5-star review for me.
- initials with full name, in various orders (country differences), and
- full name with given name, to see how it reads, sounds, feels.
This was a critical step when naming my kids. You really need to see how yelling the full name sounds. If it is too awkward or has syllables that don't fall together easily, that can make it difficult when you (eventually) need to yell at them for doing something stupid.
Same with the first + middle combination -- those need to flow together well for occasions that require less than full yelling.
Subscription seems like a curious choice of business model for a child naming app.
Congrats on the app.
I wish your app had existed then - it would have been easier than the grand email list o’ names we shared with everyone even remotely related to us.
But also, I wonder if that woman had any idea that she would inadvertently name my only child just by bragging about her grand baby. And in a sense, that gets to be your honour now. You built something that will be responsible for naming humans. That’s truly profound.
Great hack…:)
pink was common for men, being associated as a shade of red to show masculinity
numerous articles and books on the subject (some other tidbits, FDR wore a dress when he was young as it was common for boys at the time until age 6/7)
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/025300117X
https://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/08/pink-wasnt...
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/when-did-girls-s...
So I designed a free (and no ads) web app[0] for me and so others could automat their own pools.
It also has “bebe” in the app name :)
Just as an historical point: There were just two other 'baby pool' type web apps on The Internet at the time (2003~2005). One of those two disappeared a few years ago. This was before conventional wisdom would be that facebook integration was a prerequisite for mass audience success for this kind of app. I was never interested in hitching my wagon to FB or any other third party. I’m happy it’s an independent piece of old school web 1.5 / 2.0 that still kicking a decade and a half later. I hope your app has a long life as well.
Anyway, cheers!
[0] https://bebepool.com
Any chance this will be included in the Fdroid marketplace?
Two things I've noticed so far that seem odd to me: 1. If you have a preference selected on Sex, open it back up and click off without making a selection, the selection is saved as "no preference," however, on other filters, clicking off cancels the changes.
2. When I selected the top 300 names from 2010, Masculine Only, I expected to see the top 300 Masculine names, but instead, it looks like you are returning the first 300 names then filtering from there.
Does it do something smart to filter the names? Because showing all of them is too much.
Is there a third option or only heart vs thumb-down?
Is there an option to show variants of spelling? All my children have names with the traditional Spanish spelling [Hi from Argentina!] but here it's somewhat common to use the English or Italian spelling too.
No, only like / dislike. This was intentional for me, another app we tried had a "maybe" list that just filled up with names that I would never realistically go for.
No easy way to show variants of spelling. Not something I needed, but I could definitely see that being helpful for others, and would be a good feature to add.
For e.g. when I suggested Dakshith which is a very popular name in India, she countered "Do you really want other kids to call him "shi*?"
Back in my day we had to use Google spreadsheets.
The cost model for stuff like airtable doesn’t lend itself to the same products.
As for the name of the app.. well names are hard ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Its tag line was "So good it named itself".
Doesn't seem to be around any more.
[1]: https://dash-naissances.herokuapp.com/ [2]: https://github.com/Elie-B/dash-naissances
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_Naming_Committee
It does look like there's a similar thing in Sweden though
Atleast it was the case until few years back. Not sure it changed recently or they need to go through an approval process.
Basically. The Swedish IRS is responsible for keeping the register of all Swedish citizens and they have the power to refuse to register a name. The main rule is you are not allowed to give a child a name that can be seen as provocative, insulting or has a high risk of causing the child problems or humiliation in the future. The core legal principal behind is that parents are not allowed to cause their children potential harm with their choice of name and since the child cannot act their own advocate in this matter, the State has to.
Edit: The other type of name you are not allowed to give are names that are considered 'obvious' last names, as well as names that are primarily titles like "King", "Admiral" or "Captain".
And I found this list of all names that have been rejected over the past few years: https://www.motherhood.se/bebis-och-smabarn/namn-man-inte-fa... (scroll down to "Förnamn som fått avslag hos Skatteverket")
They would have a field day with a lot of names people give their kids in America. I went to school with kids with names like "Cadillac" which sounds like they wouldn't be allowed there.
In fact, I think it's much more common than full liberty in this regard.
As for the level of strictness - it's always a bit arbitrary, and there are no fool-proof guidelines, nor a predefined whitelist.
Generally speaking, however, the name cannot be ridiculous, humiliating, offensive, it must be in a full form (not affectionate) etc.
Among the rejected ones there have been "Rambo" and "Joint".
There were parents who tried "Wiedźmin" (Witcher), to no avail, but they succeeded eventually with a compromise, a slightly altered "Wiedzimin". Not a real name, but kinda sounds like it might be (sort of similar to Lithuanian Giedymin), and by itself not a popculture reference, which apparently was what the office considered frivolous/inappropriate.
Famous occurrences are "Nutella" (ended up "Ella"), "Megane Renault" (a brand of car, ultimately accepted because it's old enough not to mean anything to kids), "Mohamed Merah" (same name as a terrorist who killed 7).
Evidence shows that some parents are just too dumb to be trusted not to set their child up for ridicule and bullying.
The productive part comes when you actually finish the app
We have a lovely video of the toddler explaining to Grannie a few hours after the birth 'her name is Bin-ban'. 'Oh <long pause>, yes, but she has a real name'.
We called her Bin-ban for a few more weeks until she sort of grew into her 'real' name. That beautiful little original name is a very fond memory for us.
I don't really like my name and I think adults should be able to choose their names without big hassle. Not choosing where you're born is already too much of a control-giveup haha
> I think adults should’ve able to choose their name without a big hassle
So my question for you would be: what hassle are you referring to? The cultural norm or the bureaucracy/paperwork?
In either case, what would a solution look like?
I added filters for min and max popularity, gender ratio, scrabble score, number of syllables, length, etc.
Maybe because it was all too contrived, it fell by the wayside when my wife came across something she really liked in a poem, and we basically used the closest name that embodied the phrase.
For the next child I'll probably just try asking a transformer model.
And thank you for using an Open Source license!
I always look for utility apps like these in fdroid first, so I know if I were just out looking for something like this, I would be more likely to download it versus another app if it were in fdroid!
Also standardizing on capitals IMO would help.
https://xkcd.com/327
My SO and I acquired some new pets during covid for added company and we scoured through websites that were pretty plain, simply names as a list in bullet form. Your app is more fun, interactive, and memorable of an activity. People appreciate that!
For this particular combination girl names aren't too rare but there's very few boy names that come to mind.
Henry (Henri), Michael (Michel), Oliver (Olivier), Julian (Jules), Anton (Antoine), Bernard (Benoit, ou seulment Bernard), Dominic (Dominique), Alexander (Alexandre), even William. The really French names, though, are going to be pretty rough if it's a dominantly English speaking enviro. It's rare to come across an English speaker named Guy or Guillame.
I'm continually shocked at how many solutions there are in this whole baby-naming space. I think there's something so personal about it that especially drives people to do it for themselves.
If your name is Xinyi, your name in English is Xinyi, some people would disagree and say your name in English is Joy; whilst xinyi means joy (IIRC) that's not how names [should] work [IMO].
This might relate in part to how we use a lot of foreign language words for names in UK English. Like how Charis (biblical Greek) is a different name to Grace (modern English) but d both derive from the same meaning.
YMMV.
In my case sometimes people have trouble with 'Sean' (Irish for John), so I just tell them to say whatever style of John they're most comfortable with. Since it's a biblical name they'll have heard John before in their own language and have access to something familiar.
But mileage does vary indeed.
Or to filter names by ethnic group?
Overall it is fantastic but I find 100k names to be daunting!
>In England, Northern Ireland and Wales, the law requires you to register a birth within 42 days (GOV.UK, 2019a). In Scotland, a birth needs to be registered within 21 days
We couldn't think of a name that we both liked and went well over the 42 days to register the name, we got a court order around 120 days.
Jokingly I said to my partner you're the one that'll be going to court not me. She replied that's ok I'll name the baby after the first person I see.
We settled on a name and registered the (not very new) baby the next morning
My parents would have been in jail.
They were both Old World immigrants and very traditional (though, from different countries). So I wasn't named until I was almost a year old.
Also I didn't have a haircut until after 1yo, supposedly a cultural tradition. Didn't wear pants until I was 2yo, again supposed to be a cultural thing.
Here's the one that blows a lot of young people's minds: I didn't have a Social Security number until I was 17. And the only reason I got one was so I could get a passport.
These days you can't function, even as a child, without a Social Security number. Back then, you were still considered a human being and an American citizen even if you weren't constantly enumerated, tabulated, and tracked.
Not trying to detract from the project. I was just curious if there was something that covered these that was already out there
Would it be possible to filter names by regions or language as well as decades ?
I really wanted that in the app (and more filters besides), but the data source was the US Social Security administration (the easiest to access list of names I could find) [1], and it really only includes the number of people with a given name and sex for each year. To include the region / language would be a lot of data processing work that I sadly don't have time for.
[1] https://www.ssa.gov/OACT/babynames/limits.html
EDIT: Btw, here is the same file for France, with a different format, of course : https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/2540004?sommaire=476726...
I think you could also use years to suggest names that neither parent has on their list. Based on names that the parents have liked, find out which decade was most popular. (Geometric Mean would probably be most useful to combine scores between parents).
I worked on https://madaan.github.io/names/ a few years ago when my friends had a baby.
The idea is slightly different (transferring Indian names to American names etc.), but the motivation was similar.
That page is really interesting to me! I'm definitely going to spend some time this weekend going through it and learning all about it.