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Comment by empath75 | Hacker News Reader

I was giving my sister a hard time about naming her kids Liam and Aiden, and she was like: ‘when I picked those names, nobody called their kids that.’ ‘And you got those names from where?’ ‘A baby name book on amazon.’

I got around the baby fad thing by just naming our kids after family members. It’s boring, but you don’t need an interesting name to have an interesting life, and I’m not sure I like the idea of expressing your personal quirkiness by burdening your kids with a lifetime of tediously spelling their name to customer service reps.

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I have an impossible to prove theory that the rise of boys named Aiden coincides with thst being the name of Carrie Bradshaw's nice guy boyfriend on sex in the city. Girls that watched in their teens and early 20s liked him and when they had sons of their own the name was on the short list.

That's very possible to prove in non-english-speaking countries, where surges of foreign names (along with some very creative misspellings) usually coincided with the first run of a foreign TV drama that had a character named like that, shifted by a few years.

I don’t understand why parents name their kids unique names. My name is unique, and other than getting my first name as my gmail address, it has no upside. I was constantly spelling it out until I decided to go by a short form which is a normal name, but because nobody names their kids normal names anymore I still have to spell it. (“What’s the name for the order? Gray?”).

I went by my middle name for years because it is the least weird of all my names. My first, maiden and married names are all weird. I felt like you. Then I read this article and it made my problems with my names pale in comparison to the troubles one can have from a common name:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/apr/03/identity-the...

Having a very common name is also awkward when you know many other people at your work with the same name. Getting emails accidently meant for them. Hi John this is John, etc.

Taking the name of family members -- either given or surname, was super common before the 20th century. I've done some ancestral research and come across towns in the late 1700s that were full of people with the same five first names, which is maddening if you're trying to determine which of them is your ancestor.

The great thing about being a hacker, I think, is that you're allowed to choose your own identity. At my last conference, I got to hang out with Ingy döt Net, and he's a fine person and his name's fine too. Sure it's not "normal", but honestly why would that matter? The proof is always in the code.

My uncle is really into genealogy and apparently “Severin” is an old family name. The problem is if I named a boy that people would probably just think we were SUPER into Harry Potter, because of the close similarities to a certain potions Professor.

In the region I was born in it was customary to name your firstborn after your father or your mother, and then your second child of the same sex after one of your parents' siblings, if none applied you'd turn to uncles/aunts, and so on.

That, the grandparents name. Godfather/godmother (if in use) also got dibs.

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