Edit to clarify: I'm envisioning a open source service that uses an in-browser sqlite database [1] so you don't have to worry about a predatory middle party reserving the domains you searched for.
I'd love to get my hands on the current version of the file, just to play with. Without having to wait days for approval. Is that something I could find somewhere?
Because different tlds are operated somewhat differently and afaict this seems to be a secondary service that isn’t fundamental to routing or other required operations of a registrar.
In this case it seems to work with “participating tlds”, whichever those are.
All DNS zones on CZDS have the same format, and AFAIK all nTLDs are required to use it.
But you're right for ccTLDs -- everyone uses their own format and most don't even allow you to get the zone file. There are some companies though that provide similar lists from crawling data (e.g. https://zonefiles.io/).
words is a standard file on Unix and Unix-like operating systems, and is simply a newline-delimited list of dictionary words. It is used, for instance, by spell-checking programs. The words file is usually stored in /usr/share/dict/words or /usr/dict/words.
$ apt-cache search 'words for /usr/share/dict' | sed -e 's/^[^ ]* - //; s/ dictionary words.*//' | sort -u
American English
British English
Bulgarian
Canadian English
Catalan
Esperanto
French
German medical
Irish (Gaeilge)
Italian
Manx Gaelic
Polish
Spanish
Swedish
Ukrainian
Not every word list package has "words for /usr/share/dict" in the description.
$ grep-aptavail -wF Provides wordlist -s Package,Description | tbl-dctrl
+===================+=======================================================+
| Package | Description |
+-------------------+-------------------------------------------------------+
| wbulgarian | Bulgarian dictionary words for /usr/share/dict |
| wbrazilian | Brazilian Portuguese wordlist |
| wdanish | The Comprehensive Danish Dictionary (DSDO) - wordlist |
| wdutch | list of Dutch words |
| wesperanto | Esperanto dictionary words for /usr/share/dict |
| wogerman | Traditional German wordlist |
| wngerman | New German orthography wordlist |
| wswiss | Swiss (German) orthography wordlist |
| wpolish | Polish dictionary words for /usr/share/dict |
| wfaroese | Faroese dictionary / wordlist |
| wgalician-minimos | Wordlist for Galician (minimos) |
| wukrainian | Ukrainian dictionary words for /usr/share/dict |
| wportuguese | European Portuguese wordlist |
| wgerman-medical | German medical dictionary words for /usr/share/dict |
| miscfiles | Dictionaries and other interesting files |
| wnorwegian | Norwegian word list |
| wamerican | American English dictionary words for /usr/share/dict |
| wamerican-huge | American English dictionary words for /usr/share/dict |
| wamerican-insane | American English dictionary words for /usr/share/dict |
| wamerican-large | American English dictionary words for /usr/share/dict |
| wamerican-small | American English dictionary words for /usr/share/dict |
| wbritish | British English dictionary words for /usr/share/dict |
| wbritish-huge | British English dictionary words for /usr/share/dict |
| wbritish-insane | British English dictionary words for /usr/share/dict |
| wbritish-large | British English dictionary words for /usr/share/dict |
| wbritish-small | British English dictionary words for /usr/share/dict |
| wcanadian | Canadian English dictionary words for /usr/share/dict |
| wcanadian-huge | Canadian English dictionary words for /usr/share/dict |
| wcanadian-insane | Canadian English dictionary words for /usr/share/dict |
| wcanadian-large | Canadian English dictionary words for /usr/share/dict |
| wcanadian-small | Canadian English dictionary words for /usr/share/dict |
| wcatalan | Catalan dictionary words for /usr/share/dict |
| wswedish | Swedish dictionary words for /usr/share/dict |
| wfrench | French dictionary words for /usr/share/dict |
| witalian | Italian dictionary words for /usr/share/dict/ |
| wspanish | Spanish dictionary words for /usr/share/dict |
+===================+=======================================================+
Spell checker is an obvious use case. You can then add terms to the system dictionary and now they're valid systemwide in all apps that use the dictionary for spell checking!
Indeed, although the Beatles got there first with Apple Corps[0] way back in 1968, the resulting dispute with what became Apple Inc[1] took decades[2] and must have eaten up $deity only knows how much in legal fees.
Some might say that one actually backs up my suggestion that a made-up name is easier to build a brand around!
I love the comment that someone dropped on the post.
One could replace the first Ruby script by a one-liner:
"cat /tmp/com.txt | awk '{ print substr($1, 1, length($1) -5) }' | uniq > domains.txt"
I don't agree with the whole 'useless use of cat' meme: cat creates an output stream, which in turn allows you to build up the subsequent command bit by bit and allows you to cut and past chunks from useful building blocks you keep in a file.
The first command changes all the time so by using 'cat' those blocks remain reusable, everything will use the piped input that cat sends if there is no preceding program, rather than to have to insert < somefile in the middle of the first command.
I'd agree with avoiding the < somefile redirection because it's sorta annoying to grok in one-liners. But in this case the file would just go after the awk command.
I don't know about you, but I usually like seeing what's in the file before I spend time writing a awk command on it.
cat myfile.txt # check the file because I'm not even sure that's the correct name
cat myfile.txt | awk blablabla # no I didn't forget awk syntax, I swear
I would be afraid of any person that after this, goes back and rewrites the beginning of the line to replace cat with a redirection.
Even with "ctrl-a alt-d < alt-f alt-f ctrl-d ctrl-d ctrl-e" that replaces cat with < and removes the pipe, which any emacs user can pull off in it's sleep
If you use zsh then just "<myfile.txt" should work too, which opens the file in $PAGER. Doesn't seem to work in bash though, with the default config anyway, but maybe it can be configured.
I don't care if people use "cat" or "<" and the whole "useless use of cat" is stupid >99% of the time, but I've gotten in to the habit of using <file as it's shorter to type ("<file cmd" vs. "cat file | cmd").
Totally with you there. "Useless use of cat" is usually good practice, not bad.
It's clearer - the structure indicates right at the front what it is going to do, namely read a file and pass it through a pipeline. There is no need to read ahead to find out what the source material is.
It's safer - "cat" is a read-only operation, once you've written that command up-front there is no longer a risk of overwriting the original file with a typo in the rest of the pipeline.
It's simpler to construct and nicely orthogonal to the rest of the pipeline - you can write the "cat" and then season the rest to taste (as you suggested).
I will occasionally remove cat from a very heavily-used loop, but as a default style it's fine.
"It's safer - "cat" is a read-only operation, once you've written that command up-front there is no longer a risk of overwriting the original file with a typo in the rest of the pipeline."
With zsh you can prevent such accidents by "setopt NO_CLOBBER"
The result is that if you "foo > bar" and "bar" exists, zsh will refuse to overwrite "bar" and give you an error: "zsh: file exists: bar"
This makes constructs such "foo < bar > baz" perfectly safe, because accidentally typing "foo > bar > baz" will error out when "bar" (or "baz") already exists.
(PS: if you want to force zsh to overwrite the file even when NO_CLOBBER is set you can "foo >| bar")
>> "That doesn't help with sed -i and similar things."
> Can you give an example? I don't know what you mean.
Sure. The first line below is dangerous no matter what zsh does to save you from yourself. The second line is safe no matter which shell you are using, and no matter what other commands are in the pipeline:
sed $SEDOPTIONS "s/$SEARCHTERM/$REPLACEMENT/g" $FILENAME
cat $FILENAME | sed $SEDOPTIONS "s/$SEARCHTERM/$REPLACEMENT/g"
>> "Zsh stops redirection errors"
> Which is what the post I was answering to was complaining about, wasn't it?
That's not how I interpreted "a typo in the rest of the pipeline." Sure, the typo could be a redirection. It could also accidentally set $SEDOPTIONS in the example above to include the '-i' flag.
>> "it won't help even if cat is in the front"
> Why not? "cat > foo" will error out if "foo" exists and NO_CLOBBER is set.
Yes, "cat > foo" will error out, but "cat $FILENAME | sed -i "s/a/b/g" $FILENAME" won't.
> It's clearer - the structure indicates right at the front what it is going to do, namely read a file and pass it through a pipeline. There is no need to read ahead to find out what the source material is.
I only found this out recently, but this works perfectly fine:
$ < /some/file awk ...
You're not wrong though, where cat improves readability there's no harm in using it.
The redirect doesn't have to appear "out of order" at the end of the command.
In zsh you can even do just `<somefile` to print it (equivalent to `cat somefile`, very useful for reading files into variables) although in bash that appears to do nothing.
Personally I almost never use any of the standard Unix tools like `awk` etc. since an equivalent Ruby script is almost always shorter and easier to write. (There are exceptions of course; and in really simple cases the standard tools will obviously still win.)
I think it's a shame that Ruby never really got popular as a general purpose scripting language, since it has that nice property that it's often as short as Perl while still being readable.
Hopefully with a way to patch it from the last download so you don't have to download the whole thing over and over. I wouldn't mind paying $5 / month for a service like this - for helping me avoid the red tape.
Alternatively, use instantdomainsearch.com (disclosure, I'm the CTO), which packages most of these things up in a fast web interface and also enables searching in a bunch of other TLDs.
Just wanted to say thank you for this service. Have been using this site for several years now. Perhaps the first place I visit whenever I need to research a domain name, have recommended it to tons of people already.
Please consider creating an API with possibly a free tier. Right now I have to use godaddy api and it's so darn slow (plus I don't like using godaddy for many of the reasons for which they are so infamous).
Something on that page is causing an immediate redirect to Godaddy.
I just tested on Google Chrome and had slightly different results. Instead of a redirect, the Godaddy page opened in a new tab (which was focused) yet the instantdomainsearch.com page remained in another tab.
I think that's what happens if you hit enter from within the search bar. We search as you type, so no need to hit enter in order to search. Not our finest bit of UI, will bring that back to the team to see if we can improve on it.
I like your site, but are you marking prices up massively?
A url in the domain search took me to a purchase page for $99/yr. I see the same domain on Hover for $14.... Are you bundling a bunch of additional services or something?
You can compare to get newly registered domain names so it's sometimes used for Spam to target new companies - I've not noticed that so much lately though.
I suppose you could identify recent NS changes to create a list of servers/hosting that might not have been locked down or secured yet.
But on the whole I can't personally think of anything too bad.
I believe you have to sign an agreement to not use the domain names list for DDoS attacks, specifically against WHOIS services. Not saying that this stops anyone, but that's what they probably had in mind.
Unfortunately not every domain that has no DNS record is available for purchase: some people configure no records, others are reserved by the registry (many short words for nTLDs). If something isn't in the DNS zone you can do a live DNS and WHOIS check to be more certain.
A while back I tied together this DNS zone + live false positive check into a website (for all TLDs and with price info):
Congrats! The interface is just super neat, how it gets updated when you hover (I imagine it caches the information about that specific domain for the next user).
A tip I discovered - use hyphens, and suddenly very small nice domains become available. No one types domains anyway.
Also does anyone know how to get a shady domain parking service to give up on a domain they’ve been holding for decades? I’m actually happy to pay 500 but not thousands and it’s not even a domain that a company or commercial interest would want to purchase.
No, you just need something that has reasonable management and reputation and is familiar-enough for your potential users.
Some country codes are happy to have unrelated users, and some are not. .ninja was polluted by spammers so fast that many email servers just drop the entire TLD on sight. If most of your users speak something other than English, you might find any number of good words going unused.
The very fact you want to buy it and are willing to pay $500+ means there is a commercial interest in it. That's like saying no company wants to own a house because they won't live in it. True, but they rent them out.
It’s my first name, and unfortunately there’s an underwear company of the sAme name, but I know for a fact they’re misers (I know, I get their emails sometime).
By accidentally forgetting a "-" is how I once ended up on a porn site in front of the entire company, since that's what the version without a "-" was.
It wasn't a big deal, but I was very young, and I had a very red head.
Oh man, I did something similar in class. In 4th grade (+/- a year). whitehouse.com (I don't know what it is now, but it was a porn site) instead of whitehouse.gov.
By offering them a low amount. They'll counter with a ridiculously high amount. Make clear that there's no way you'll ever pay anything close to that amount and stop with negotiating if they don't come up with a reasonable price.
They might come back to you in a few months with a better offer. Or they might not, but it has worked for me two times.
But is it a good one? There are better methods for finding an actually good domain name, you just have to think outside the box and come up with new ideas constantly.
For example these domains should be available winkwink:
editormag.com
geekyglossary.com
infiniteiterator.com
infographics365.com
minutequestions.com
museumology.com
onlinehistorian.com
webdesigndaily.com
donateyourcomputerpower.com
lazysites.com
scorchingearth.com
thechronoscope.com
24hourdigitalclock.com
adfunkr.com
aircontroltower.com
aracina.com
artistreferences.com
athletelite.com
askaboutamerica.com
audiofeedr.com
australers.com
babysnooker.com
beercounting.com
bipabit.com
bonfirekids.com
bookinthebag.com
cactusportal.com
californiculture.com
cheerfulservices.com
complimentopia.com
crocotin.com
dreadpirateradio.com
egoarbitrage.com
firsttimebuyeralert.com
gardenomat.com
gigaspeakers.com
hipsterian.com
kateke.com
messingwithyourmind.com
myfitnessdoctor.com
mypassword123.com
orgasmatron5000.com
panonyx.com
propmakerz.com
ricefactor.com
thrillerdomains.com
ulugulu.com
Sometimes now, if you are careful about dose. It can free the doubts and writers block. Hence the phrase a few write-y friends of mine like to repeat: write drunk, edit sober. Or to put it a little more prosaically: you can edit a bad page, you can't edit a blank page.
Your domain ideas are pretty good. You could sell your creativity as a service. 50 bucks for 3-5 name options for someone's side project, if you're that good at coming up with them you'd save everyone some time.
Thought no one would notice the orgasmatron5000 eh? I’m onto you.
My family once manufactured a sex toy that was popular enough for someone to quit their job, so that brought back memories. Sadly the popularity dried up when their YouTube video stopped being recommended as much.
It was a real DaVinci-workshop type operation. I’m still amazed how much logistics went into it. Also art ability and sculpting. You have to be able to make molds, which are the inverse of the shape you want to cast. It’s really difficult.
I now have a clear image of the Family Sillysaurusx. Dad is hard at work designing dildos. Mum and the kids have got a production line going. The littlest sculpts the wavy lines on the Cliterminator Pro. Finally, Benjy the dog carries the finished product over to the delivery parcel (unmarked brown paper) and drops it in. Mmmm! What's that cooking in the oven? Do I smell cherry pie?
It was actually for guys, not a dildo. Basically a silicone bag you could fill with water. Getting the shape right was the hardest part, since if you think about how to mold something like that you’ll run into a bunch of problems.
Your description wasn’t far off, by the way! Thanks for the laugh.
> Getting the shape right was the hardest part, since if you think about
> how to mold something like that you’ll run into a bunch of problems.
Shape of the part that interfaces with the guy's anatomy? I wonder what types of problems?
How pliable is the silicone bag? Human women and men come in a variety of interface shapes yet it usually works out. Could different size bags be manufactured?
I wasn't involved directly, so unfortunately this is a game of telephone. This was also back in 2012 through 2015, so it's been some time. But here's my understanding of it.
Suppose the problem is to make a silicone bag that you can fill with warm water. That wouldn't be easy, but it'd be much easier.
To make something like that out of silicone, you have to pour some material into a mold, and let it sit. (I think the material was called Dragon Skin, but I'm not sure.) Think of it like cooking pancakes: You could imagine pouring this silicone into a frying pan and letting it sit, and you'd end up with a flat disc of silicone. So to make a bag, you'd want it to be a bowl. But of course if you pour it into a bowl, you'll end up with a spherical-ish disc of silicone that's flat on top, because it all pools to the bottom.
So your next attempt might be to put one bowl into another bowl, and then pour the silicone between the two bowls. That way the top bowl fixes the problem of it coming out like a flat disc. The silicone is sandwiched between the two bowls, and so you end up getting a shape that looks like the bowl on the bottom. Progress! That's closer to something that can hold water.
(Someone just told me that the shape wasn't actually the hardest part. The hardest part was materials. Dragon Skin was just one component. She said it was for the spine, whatever that means. But it wasn't the primary material, which needed to feel right and be easy to work with. I'll just note that here and continue on where I left off above. Basically, it needs to feel like skin, not rubber.)
But to get something that can actually hold water, you need it to be something closer to a flask shape. You could imagine a bowling ball inside another, smaller bowling ball, and then pouring the silicone inbetween the two and letting it sit.
Question: How do you get the silicone out? The silicone is now wrapped around the inner bowling ball. Hmm.
Once you solve all of those problems, then you start to focus on the dynamics of man-woman interaction and anatomy. That requires a mold which you can shape very precisely. I believe they ended up sculpting the molds out of clay, then turning it into something stronger through a process I don't understand.
To get the silicone out of the damn molds, they needed to invent a whole contraption that was like a giant lever. It would hook onto the inner mold and pull real hard on it, and pop! The whole thing comes out. It'd be totally impossible to pull it out with your bare hands.
Then you run into problems like, there are bubbles in the material, so this needs to be done inside a vacuum chamber to get all the bubbles out.
Finally there's the whole problem of putting a bow on it and making it look nice. You need packaging, a manual, and a reliable velcro strap that won't leak water. It needs to look professional. And all of this needs to be scalable so that when you suddenly get 200 orders because your vagina hot water bag went viral, you can fulfill those orders in a reasonable timeframe and get paid.
There's a bunch of funny stories from that era. The postal delivery people got super curious about what we were up to. (At this point they'd moved into an actual building, not the family house.) One day he found an excuse to come in, strutting around with a big smirk on his face. Then next time they went to drop off the packages for delivery at the post office, the lady there was like oh, you're the people that make the sex toys! They were like yeahhh, that's us.
It was a very interesting experience. It's a shame the business ended up folding due to lack of financing for all the production issues.
Very interesting, thank you! I do prefer bags of mostly water that require more maintenance than the silicone bags, but it is good to know that the option exists (or did exist).
I don’t suppose you watch Star Trek? “Ugly bags of mostly water” was a line from the show. Just wanted to be like that spiderman meme where we both point at each other.
It’s actually fascinating that there still aren’t any products like that on the market. The water is what makes it feel real. Or at least a lot nicer than a fleshlight.
Are you saying that the product sold enough so that someone involved could quit their job to produce it, or that someone enjoyed the product enough that they decided to go all in on using it?
The former. They were a single-income household at the time, so it was a big decision. But they sensed that it was their only chance to get wealthy, so they went for it. I really respect that.
It's unfortunate it didn't work out, but that's life. They regretted leaving their job and ended up losing the family house, but they recovered after a time. They're now in a job they like renting a house they like.
The molds were the heart and soul of the project, since they were the only irreplaceable component. They ended up throwing those into a dumpster. As a final twist, a family friend happened to be working at the trash center and spotted the molds as they were coming through. So even when they were trying to get rid of it like it was a monkey's paw, it still didn't go out without being noticed one last time.
One of ya'll should try your hand at it. As with programming, the problems are tough but solvable (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31667798) and as far as I know there's still nothing like it on the market, with plenty of demand.
At one point they were selling multiple color varieties, and people would buy all three colors. I asked if there was any other difference, and he said nope, just color added via dye. So there's a real opportunity for an enterprising sculptor that happens to be reading this.
(I don't know much else and I do ML nowadays, so good luck! But feel free to DM for advice I guess. https://www.smooth-on.com/product-line/dragon-skin/ was part of the materials they used, but apparently it was too rigid for the skin. It was for internal support.)
Requesting a domain name just in case: would love a domain name for a side project:
It will allow users to list what they own (maybe a photo or video, idk yet), and they'll be able to consult it, but other people can also check what they have.
breakingandentering.com or ilovereplacingmybrokenwindows.com or anentirecatalogueoffreestufftosteal.com?
What would be the purpose of your side project? I'm very confused by it. Not trying to be disrespectful, but it just sounds like an easy way to case a home for a burglary.
I have over a hundred board and card games... Total value on resell market is not that great (especially factoring the value per trip into the house, and relative low value per cubic foot of storage it claims in your car/van)... but having such a list outside google sheets would be helpful.. tells people what we already have if they want to gift items, could have running discussions on games, etc.
Dang dude, love your creativity! Let me know if I can contact you for some personalized domain suggestions for ideas I have but cannot come up with domain names for?
10 months later - the following SEO spam came into the HN inbox this morning (actual inbox, not the spam bin):
How is your day today? Hope it's good. Sorry to inform you that your website orgasmatron5000.com is highly inactive on top search engines like Google, yahoo, Bing, etc.
Imo, .net domains are also just fine, and often just look/feel/sound better than the .com counterpart. They also kind of feel more personal. For my personal domain name I chose .net even though the .com was available because the .net just felt and sounded right, and more personal.
One of my hobbies is the diametric opposite of this approach, I enjoy trawling domain auctions for short .coms that don't include any dictionary words but still sound fun. I love names like Quora that are meaningless but still somehow feel like they should be a real word! I believe the academic category for these is "lexical gap". During the pandemic I got a little too much into it and so now I'm actually busy working on a site to list them for sale - https://wuzmo.com - the plan is to make it essentially a cheap brandbucket.
Squatting has an intention behind it. You don't call ancient coin collectors deplorable squatters because they are taking limited stock off the market.
I think DALL-E would be a good way to come up with these. The nonsense text it adds to images is usually pronouncable and somehow always seems to match the theme you give it. GilaWhamm.com, anyone?
Interesting question! Well no one has complained so far, but I should definitely run them all through Google Translate to see. I could see this happening quite easily.
The one issue I did have was buying a domain on Namecheap auctions only to find it had been used very aggressively by spammers before going to auction. It made me think of the recent top HN post about how you could push a suspect domain to someone within a registrar and then implicate them without their knowledge. The Namecheap auction system happily let me buy the domain, but then as soon as it was in my account it got suspended and I got various emails from their security team about how many blocklists it was on and how I'd have to submit extensive documentation to get it unsuspended etc. Thankfully the support was helpful and now I check domains more thoroughly before I buy them...
Yeah. At my last job we made a pivot table tool feature into our project and we named it Pito after Pito Salas, thinking we were so clever and finally came up with a slick little branding for a feature. But that's slang for penis in Spanish... name lasted for a couple of years before it was replaced.
I have found amazing domain names by just checking auctions daily. I got both file.io and impervious.com on Flippa for around a few thousand each. I've started companies on both of these domains.
If you just check once a year, you likely won't find a good one. But if you check almost daily for years, you will eventually strike gold.
Programmatic land grabs like this is why people today must suffer from lack of remaining .com domain names.
Nothing wrong with the writer of this post. I think this is a rational behavior that should be considered "expected". Whoever designed domain name registration/ownership model is to blame for failing to create a system which can efficiently give right domain names to people who actually need them and can use them for good (aka actually hosting businesses or contents instead of scalping).
Some newer TLDs like .dev or .app have a tiered pricing structure. So it becomes less economically feasible to squat the best names. They also released them in stages when the TLD first went live.
Realistically this problem will never be solved while we only support fixed domain extensions and act like some are more legit than others. Like what gives DNS providers the right to say what's a valid extension or not? Just support any string ffs.
Not to mention the country restricted ones that you can only get if you're a resident, like bruh.
That said, part of the issue you flag is just perception. It's like going with a financial services firm that has a Wall Street or "Fifth Avenue" address in New York City versus a firm that has an address in Hoboken, New Jersey.
Both might be fine but we often attach significance to an address (even if its just a mailbox).
To your last point, I think its ultimately good that (many) Country restricted TLDs have geographic restrictions.
Nothing inherently, it doesn't have the “full of spammers” stigma of .xyz and so forth, though some seem to think it inherently means non-profit/non-commercial (sort of true, it was defined as for organisations not fitting in other tlds where .com was one of those and intended for commercial use) and think .com therefor looks more serious.
Also: if you take the .org and the .com is already in use, be ready to have the name taken off you if they get successful, or for some of your users to mistakenly go to the wrong place. To avoid one of those things happening later if the .com is available now you could buy both, but then the availability of the .com becomes the deciding factor again not the .org and you are paying for two domains.
The inability to find any available domain names was one of the primary reasons for us to create Mashword. (https://mashword.com) You can enter the name you are looking for and it will quickly suggest similarly spelled or sounding names to the one you entered.
Do .com domains still matter? Especially expensive "good" ones? Does a mortgage company really need to be known as "better.com"? Does a screen recorder really need to be known as "loom.com"? Yes these are short and expensive English words, but they are also unintuitive and honestly as a result unmemorable. There are times I see a company with englishword.com and it has nothing to do with their company and therefore I can't remember it. Lemonade.com? Oh yeah, insurance.
Domain name requirements depend on your customer base and the business that you're in (eg, enterprise software, crypto, or developer tools? completely different expectations). There are no general rules
300 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 260 ms ] threadCould one make a webservice based on the data?
Edit to clarify: I'm envisioning a open source service that uses an in-browser sqlite database [1] so you don't have to worry about a predatory middle party reserving the domains you searched for.
[1] https://sql.js.org/#/
I edited my comment to clarify what I envisioned.
It also lets you quickly search for available domain names related to
- baby names - animal names - planet names etc etc via templates.
https://domainy.io
In this case it seems to work with “participating tlds”, whichever those are.
But you're right for ccTLDs -- everyone uses their own format and most don't even allow you to get the zone file. There are some companies though that provide similar lists from crawling data (e.g. https://zonefiles.io/).
https://every.horse/
Why do they come with a dictionary of words?
I'm thinking of branding - think Google, Pepsi, Adidas, Nike, Starbucks
You'd really prefer to attempt build a brand around SearchEngine.tld or RunningShoe.tld ?
hotels.com trip.com
Indeed, although the Beatles got there first with Apple Corps[0] way back in 1968, the resulting dispute with what became Apple Inc[1] took decades[2] and must have eaten up $deity only knows how much in legal fees.
Some might say that one actually backs up my suggestion that a made-up name is easier to build a brand around!
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Corps [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc. [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Corps_v_Apple_Computer
The first command changes all the time so by using 'cat' those blocks remain reusable, everything will use the piped input that cat sends if there is no preceding program, rather than to have to insert < somefile in the middle of the first command.
Even with "ctrl-a alt-d < alt-f alt-f ctrl-d ctrl-d ctrl-e" that replaces cat with < and removes the pipe, which any emacs user can pull off in it's sleep
Using cat for first look is usually looking for trouble if the file is huge or some binary file.
I don't care if people use "cat" or "<" and the whole "useless use of cat" is stupid >99% of the time, but I've gotten in to the habit of using <file as it's shorter to type ("<file cmd" vs. "cat file | cmd").
It's clearer - the structure indicates right at the front what it is going to do, namely read a file and pass it through a pipeline. There is no need to read ahead to find out what the source material is.
It's safer - "cat" is a read-only operation, once you've written that command up-front there is no longer a risk of overwriting the original file with a typo in the rest of the pipeline.
It's simpler to construct and nicely orthogonal to the rest of the pipeline - you can write the "cat" and then season the rest to taste (as you suggested).
I will occasionally remove cat from a very heavily-used loop, but as a default style it's fine.
With zsh you can prevent such accidents by "setopt NO_CLOBBER"
The result is that if you "foo > bar" and "bar" exists, zsh will refuse to overwrite "bar" and give you an error: "zsh: file exists: bar"
This makes constructs such "foo < bar > baz" perfectly safe, because accidentally typing "foo > bar > baz" will error out when "bar" (or "baz") already exists.
(PS: if you want to force zsh to overwrite the file even when NO_CLOBBER is set you can "foo >| bar")
Zsh stops redirection errors, it won't help even if cat is in the front.
Can you give an example? I don't know what you mean.
"Zsh stops redirection errors"
Which is what the post I was answering to was complaining about, wasn't it?
"it won't help even if cat is in the front"
Why not? "cat > foo" will error out if "foo" exists and NO_CLOBBER is set.
> Can you give an example? I don't know what you mean.
Sure. The first line below is dangerous no matter what zsh does to save you from yourself. The second line is safe no matter which shell you are using, and no matter what other commands are in the pipeline:
>> "Zsh stops redirection errors"> Which is what the post I was answering to was complaining about, wasn't it?
That's not how I interpreted "a typo in the rest of the pipeline." Sure, the typo could be a redirection. It could also accidentally set $SEDOPTIONS in the example above to include the '-i' flag.
>> "it won't help even if cat is in the front"
> Why not? "cat > foo" will error out if "foo" exists and NO_CLOBBER is set.
Yes, "cat > foo" will error out, but "cat $FILENAME | sed -i "s/a/b/g" $FILENAME" won't.
But, in your own example you have a useless use of cat:
could be replaced with:With the useless use of cat, that is no longer possible even if there is a typo in the SEDOPTIONS.
Don't even need zsh for this; "set -C" will do the same in any POSIX shell. >| is also in POSIX. csh supports it as well.
I only found this out recently, but this works perfectly fine:
$ < /some/file awk ...
You're not wrong though, where cat improves readability there's no harm in using it.
In zsh you can even do just `<somefile` to print it (equivalent to `cat somefile`, very useful for reading files into variables) although in bash that appears to do nothing.
ruby -e "puts File.read('/tmp/com.txt').scan(/^[^.]+/).uniq"
Personally I almost never use any of the standard Unix tools like `awk` etc. since an equivalent Ruby script is almost always shorter and easier to write. (There are exceptions of course; and in really simple cases the standard tools will obviously still win.)
I think it's a shame that Ruby never really got popular as a general purpose scripting language, since it has that nice property that it's often as short as Perl while still being readable.
Do you have any write up on its tech stack?
Please consider creating an API with possibly a free tier. Right now I have to use godaddy api and it's so darn slow (plus I don't like using godaddy for many of the reasons for which they are so infamous).
https://il.godaddy.com/en/domainsearch/find?checkAvail=1&tms...
However, I did notice the flash of something else loading and a redirect, so I hit the browser's back button and this is where it took me:
https://instantdomainsearch.com/?q=led+lighting
Something on that page is causing an immediate redirect to Godaddy.
I just tested on Google Chrome and had slightly different results. Instead of a redirect, the Godaddy page opened in a new tab (which was focused) yet the instantdomainsearch.com page remained in another tab.
A url in the domain search took me to a purchase page for $99/yr. I see the same domain on Hover for $14.... Are you bundling a bunch of additional services or something?
I suppose you could identify recent NS changes to create a list of servers/hosting that might not have been locked down or secured yet.
But on the whole I can't personally think of anything too bad.
i remember getting lot a spam from different persons/agencies to develop a website for my newly bought domain.
A while back I tied together this DNS zone + live false positive check into a website (for all TLDs and with price info):
https://domain.garden
AWS credits are still paying for this, so feel free to use it!
Also does anyone know how to get a shady domain parking service to give up on a domain they’ve been holding for decades? I’m actually happy to pay 500 but not thousands and it’s not even a domain that a company or commercial interest would want to purchase.
Some country codes are happy to have unrelated users, and some are not. .ninja was polluted by spammers so fast that many email servers just drop the entire TLD on sight. If most of your users speak something other than English, you might find any number of good words going unused.
I do, at least the first letters until the browser completes the rest.
And if no one types domains, why do you need a short domain name anyway?
I prefer *.io domains for non critical things.
That will cost you a few thousand dollars if you are not lucky, which you are not if you need to use a hyphen
But a renewal price for 50$/year for a business doesn't matter.
Bad idea. The owner of the corresponding domain without hyphens might steal your visitors.
It wasn't a big deal, but I was very young, and I had a very red head.
I own currency-calc.com, which I find even better than the non hypen version of the name name.
I think for generic name domains are fantastic, but maybe not for a brand.
Only as long as you don't plan to offer e-mail under that domain.
They might come back to you in a few months with a better offer. Or they might not, but it has worked for me two times.
For example these domains should be available wink wink: editormag.com geekyglossary.com infiniteiterator.com infographics365.com minutequestions.com museumology.com onlinehistorian.com webdesigndaily.com donateyourcomputerpower.com lazysites.com scorchingearth.com thechronoscope.com 24hourdigitalclock.com adfunkr.com aircontroltower.com aracina.com artistreferences.com athletelite.com askaboutamerica.com audiofeedr.com australers.com babysnooker.com beercounting.com bipabit.com bonfirekids.com bookinthebag.com cactusportal.com californiculture.com cheerfulservices.com complimentopia.com crocotin.com dreadpirateradio.com egoarbitrage.com firsttimebuyeralert.com gardenomat.com gigaspeakers.com hipsterian.com kateke.com messingwithyourmind.com myfitnessdoctor.com mypassword123.com orgasmatron5000.com panonyx.com propmakerz.com ricefactor.com thrillerdomains.com ulugulu.com
This is something that, to my great shame, I've always struggled with. Any recommendations for improving in this area?
Step 0: Get yourself in front of a paper or whiteboard. Eliminate distractions.
Step 1: Get all of the BS out of your head. Whatever comes out. Do not try to discuss, assess, etc., just get it out of your head.
Step 2: Take a step back and start assessing. Is there anything valuable? What if you pair things together?
I heard people applying this to ideate on a new start-up, brand, domain name, etc.
This is the problem, not the solution.
Yoink, thank you. Seems perfect for my new email.
Maybe someone finds a name for their blog/project/something.
My family once manufactured a sex toy that was popular enough for someone to quit their job, so that brought back memories. Sadly the popularity dried up when their YouTube video stopped being recommended as much.
It was a real DaVinci-workshop type operation. I’m still amazed how much logistics went into it. Also art ability and sculpting. You have to be able to make molds, which are the inverse of the shape you want to cast. It’s really difficult.
Your description wasn’t far off, by the way! Thanks for the laugh.
How pliable is the silicone bag? Human women and men come in a variety of interface shapes yet it usually works out. Could different size bags be manufactured?
I wasn't involved directly, so unfortunately this is a game of telephone. This was also back in 2012 through 2015, so it's been some time. But here's my understanding of it.
Suppose the problem is to make a silicone bag that you can fill with warm water. That wouldn't be easy, but it'd be much easier.
To make something like that out of silicone, you have to pour some material into a mold, and let it sit. (I think the material was called Dragon Skin, but I'm not sure.) Think of it like cooking pancakes: You could imagine pouring this silicone into a frying pan and letting it sit, and you'd end up with a flat disc of silicone. So to make a bag, you'd want it to be a bowl. But of course if you pour it into a bowl, you'll end up with a spherical-ish disc of silicone that's flat on top, because it all pools to the bottom.
So your next attempt might be to put one bowl into another bowl, and then pour the silicone between the two bowls. That way the top bowl fixes the problem of it coming out like a flat disc. The silicone is sandwiched between the two bowls, and so you end up getting a shape that looks like the bowl on the bottom. Progress! That's closer to something that can hold water.
(Someone just told me that the shape wasn't actually the hardest part. The hardest part was materials. Dragon Skin was just one component. She said it was for the spine, whatever that means. But it wasn't the primary material, which needed to feel right and be easy to work with. I'll just note that here and continue on where I left off above. Basically, it needs to feel like skin, not rubber.)
But to get something that can actually hold water, you need it to be something closer to a flask shape. You could imagine a bowling ball inside another, smaller bowling ball, and then pouring the silicone inbetween the two and letting it sit.
Question: How do you get the silicone out? The silicone is now wrapped around the inner bowling ball. Hmm.
Once you solve all of those problems, then you start to focus on the dynamics of man-woman interaction and anatomy. That requires a mold which you can shape very precisely. I believe they ended up sculpting the molds out of clay, then turning it into something stronger through a process I don't understand.
To get the silicone out of the damn molds, they needed to invent a whole contraption that was like a giant lever. It would hook onto the inner mold and pull real hard on it, and pop! The whole thing comes out. It'd be totally impossible to pull it out with your bare hands.
Then you run into problems like, there are bubbles in the material, so this needs to be done inside a vacuum chamber to get all the bubbles out.
Finally there's the whole problem of putting a bow on it and making it look nice. You need packaging, a manual, and a reliable velcro strap that won't leak water. It needs to look professional. And all of this needs to be scalable so that when you suddenly get 200 orders because your vagina hot water bag went viral, you can fulfill those orders in a reasonable timeframe and get paid.
There's a bunch of funny stories from that era. The postal delivery people got super curious about what we were up to. (At this point they'd moved into an actual building, not the family house.) One day he found an excuse to come in, strutting around with a big smirk on his face. Then next time they went to drop off the packages for delivery at the post office, the lady there was like oh, you're the people that make the sex toys! They were like yeahhh, that's us.
It was a very interesting experience. It's a shame the business ended up folding due to lack of financing for all the production issues.
It’s actually fascinating that there still aren’t any products like that on the market. The water is what makes it feel real. Or at least a lot nicer than a fleshlight.
The staff all strike a pose and shout "The Aristocrats!!!"
It's unfortunate it didn't work out, but that's life. They regretted leaving their job and ended up losing the family house, but they recovered after a time. They're now in a job they like renting a house they like.
The molds were the heart and soul of the project, since they were the only irreplaceable component. They ended up throwing those into a dumpster. As a final twist, a family friend happened to be working at the trash center and spotted the molds as they were coming through. So even when they were trying to get rid of it like it was a monkey's paw, it still didn't go out without being noticed one last time.
One of ya'll should try your hand at it. As with programming, the problems are tough but solvable (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31667798) and as far as I know there's still nothing like it on the market, with plenty of demand.
At one point they were selling multiple color varieties, and people would buy all three colors. I asked if there was any other difference, and he said nope, just color added via dye. So there's a real opportunity for an enterprising sculptor that happens to be reading this.
(I don't know much else and I do ML nowadays, so good luck! But feel free to DM for advice I guess. https://www.smooth-on.com/product-line/dragon-skin/ was part of the materials they used, but apparently it was too rigid for the skin. It was for internal support.)
Requesting a domain name just in case: would love a domain name for a side project:
It will allow users to list what they own (maybe a photo or video, idk yet), and they'll be able to consult it, but other people can also check what they have.
breakingandentering.com or ilovereplacingmybrokenwindows.com or anentirecatalogueoffreestufftosteal.com?
What would be the purpose of your side project? I'm very confused by it. Not trying to be disrespectful, but it just sounds like an easy way to case a home for a burglary.
I have over a hundred board and card games... Total value on resell market is not that great (especially factoring the value per trip into the house, and relative low value per cubic foot of storage it claims in your car/van)... but having such a list outside google sheets would be helpful.. tells people what we already have if they want to gift items, could have running discussions on games, etc.
I would like to know how you came up with these, they're pretty good.
How is your day today? Hope it's good. Sorry to inform you that your website orgasmatron5000.com is highly inactive on top search engines like Google, yahoo, Bing, etc.
That was one obscure in-joke...
also isn't the value of a domain related to how closely it matches search queries.
https://www.quora.com/Does-Quora-come-from-the-plural-versio...
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=%22Quora+...
Now dead.
The one issue I did have was buying a domain on Namecheap auctions only to find it had been used very aggressively by spammers before going to auction. It made me think of the recent top HN post about how you could push a suspect domain to someone within a registrar and then implicate them without their knowledge. The Namecheap auction system happily let me buy the domain, but then as soon as it was in my account it got suspended and I got various emails from their security team about how many blocklists it was on and how I'd have to submit extensive documentation to get it unsuspended etc. Thankfully the support was helpful and now I check domains more thoroughly before I buy them...
Lexical gap refers to potential words that, with regards to the language morphology or semantic rules, could have been part of the language.
I think it's systematic gap that might apply to some of the domains you're squatting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accidental_gap
If you just check once a year, you likely won't find a good one. But if you check almost daily for years, you will eventually strike gold.
Nothing wrong with the writer of this post. I think this is a rational behavior that should be considered "expected". Whoever designed domain name registration/ownership model is to blame for failing to create a system which can efficiently give right domain names to people who actually need them and can use them for good (aka actually hosting businesses or contents instead of scalping).
This guy (https://medium.com/@amd_2793/my-million-dollar-domain-hobby-...) actually used Google's rankings of domain value from .app to then squat domains on two other flat priced TLDs - io and ai!
Not to mention the country restricted ones that you can only get if you're a resident, like bruh.
That said, part of the issue you flag is just perception. It's like going with a financial services firm that has a Wall Street or "Fifth Avenue" address in New York City versus a firm that has an address in Hoboken, New Jersey.
Both might be fine but we often attach significance to an address (even if its just a mailbox).
To your last point, I think its ultimately good that (many) Country restricted TLDs have geographic restrictions.
What's wrong with .org?
Also: if you take the .org and the .com is already in use, be ready to have the name taken off you if they get successful, or for some of your users to mistakenly go to the wrong place. To avoid one of those things happening later if the .com is available now you could buy both, but then the availability of the .com becomes the deciding factor again not the .org and you are paying for two domains.
"Human-readable domains should not be the sole province of the rich! Sign the petition at, *sigh*, c12a:d1e0:ae77:dff5:2260:c017:26a9:b447"
thirty.ai topsy.ai hierarch.ai bisect.ai branching.ai saline.ai spume.ai cadr.ai
I'm sure using the dictionary method you could find a ton more.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24538758