The Long Tail of Dog Names | Hacker News Reader

The Long Tail of Dog Names

observablehq.com

49 pointsyurivish19 comments

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The "Googly Eyes" button is a work of art.

I didn't know how much I needed that laugh just now.

My family had a German shepherd named "Duke" and a labrador named "Hershey". We're so predictable.

Very cool. I’ve always wanted to do this analysis with our company’s data set but never got around to it.

Interesting how the Shibe Inu’s have Japanese names

This is all New York data so why do you think that is?

Seems more likely that people interested in Japan related things are buying and naming these dogs, less likely that it is Japanese owners, and nobody else is choosing these?

I think the simpler observation is that it's a Japanese breed name, so they pick a name that fits that. If you look at many of the other breeds, the most common name is clearly a riff on the breed:

Boxer -> Tyson

(Chocolate) labrador -> Hershey

Blue heeler -> Blue

Jack Russell terrier -> Jack

Chihuahua -> lots of Mexican names

King Charles spaniel -> Charlie

Pug -> Pugsly

Dachshund (weiner dog) -> Nathan (brand of hot dogs)

Boston terrier -> Buster (guessing this is because it's similar-sounding)

You missed English Bulldog -> Winston

Ah, good one!

"brooklyn"?!!! i'm guessing that one was the result of a very sparse data set rather than there actually being more than one dog named "brooklyn".

Looking at the 2016 data, there are 203 registered dogs named Brooklyn. Curiously, only 90 of them live in Brooklyn.

Brooklyns: https://gist.github.com/yurivish/326f64c439176f6d55f8d5528f1...

You can find the full dataset here: https://data.cityofnewyork.us/Health/NYC-Dog-Licensing-Datas...

wow, okay, i'm surprised :) seems like a weird dog name, even for a new yorker.

This is broken for me in both Firefox for Android and Chrome for Windows. Any ideas what might be up?

Mike Bostock suggested a code fix that I've just merged! Does it help?

The entire article is embedded external content with only a script tag -- all embedded in an iframe -- for some ungodly reason. The embedded page doesn't render when opened in another tab, even though I'm not blocking any of its Javascript.

Who made this design decision? This is awful.

Tangent: pet licensing data (which basically means dog licenses), particularly names and breeds, is always something I've wanted to analyze for fun, especially across jurisdictions, but always ends up being a huge data wrangling exercise. But MuckRock has a nice collection of completed public records requests for cities across America:

https://www.muckrock.com/foi/list/?q=pet+license&status=done...

For example, Houston's data is a 90MB Excel spreadsheet with more than a million rows, and includes columns like pet color and vaccination dates:

https://www.muckrock.com/foi/houston-113/houston-tx-pet-lice...

The breed names don't render in Firefox for some reason.

I sent Yuri a suggestion to fix this. (The problem is that Firefox doesn’t resolve relative links from the textPath to the path element because of the page’s base element, so you need absolute links instead.)

Just merged — thanks!

TLDR: kids name dogs

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