Show HN: My wife is pregnant; naturally I made a baby-name app to prepare | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: My wife is pregnant; naturally I made a baby-name app to prepare

nomdebebe.app

1,077 pointshamaluik372 comments

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.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22332629

Why an app rather than a static site deployed to something free like GitHub pages?

Could even have the data in a repo to accept pull requests for new names.

This. Please don't create apps that shouldn't be apps.

Please do whatever the hell you want. There's a difference between asking a question, making a suggestion and shoving ideals down somebody's throat.

> Please do whatever the hell you want.

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?

Well, it was done in flutter so a web app might be something easy to do from that.

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.

> Taking about pleasing potential users/customers and how you'd have to be forced to install this app is more or less off-topic.

Then why make an app out of something that would work just as well with something I have already installed on my phone?

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.

No more apps! Only websites!

There should be a ShouldThisBeAnApp website, and a ShouldThisBeAWebsite app :D

Make it a ShouldThisBeAMobileAppOrWebAppOrNativeApp service that has a native implementation on all these platforms.

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.

We'll see how this comment ages, in the VR meta future

> But how do you know if it should be an app?

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.

Don't use apps you think shouldn't be apps? Making normative statements about something OP did for fun and shared with us is a bit odd.

> Don't use apps you think shouldn't be apps?

I said: don't _create_ apps that shouldn't be apps.

A static site would remove many of the features that OP built (favourites, matching with partner, sorting).

"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.

You could do everything but collaboration using a static site and localStorage though Apple's support of localStorage is iffy now.

You just gave two reasons why it wouldn’t work as a static site

That is indeed what I said

I assume that the app keeps track of names that you've already rejected.

People have different skill sets. I bet there are engineers out there feeling more comfortable building a mobile app than a webapp.

Ultimately because I wanted an app.

* 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.

ps: congrats on the new baby!

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).

Thanks!

9 months go by fast

For the father at least...

Congrats!

> I use the app when I have a few minutes to kill in line

You could track whether specific locations, or time of day/week, result in liking certain types of names. Version 2.

It's a baby name generator, there's no need to track everything!

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.

They could also stand with their decision, to stick it to all the user apps, that track you to oblivion ;)

It is possible to collect information, use it locally, and not upload it to a server.

of what relevance would such data be to the user who generated it?

curiosity!

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).

"Why isn't this a text file so that everybody can simply use their Unix shells to shuf -n 1 /usr/share/dict/baby-names".

this is hilarious

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.

Why not... `head -c8 /dev/random | base64`

That's exactly what we did, albeit the final list was filtered by grandma as well, non digitally

Because everybody knows how trivial it is to curl/wget the list from https://www.ssa.gov/oact/babynames/limits.html, unzip it, etc.

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)

You joke, but I see this as "why is this implemented as software that potentially violates the security of my device?"

I trust the browser sandbox a million times more than I trust the phone app sandbox.

Congratulations! We had our first in June.

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

Obvious question: who had the lower app id?

I’ll have to look! I think it might have come down to who was live in the store first.

To you as well :)

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.

[1] https://needgap.com/problems/259-suggest-unique-pronounceabl...

Problem validation is a brilliant idea.

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.

And nobody ever understands you when you introduce yourself, or when they're trying to pronounce it from reading it.

source: I have a very rare first name.

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.

> It's also a dead give-away class marker of the lower classes.

Plenty of upper- and middle-class babies with unique, or at least unusual, names.

Maybe he meant the name unique, not a unique 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.

Yeah, it's more that unique names are more likely to carry class markers (for any class) than common names, because common names are... common.

> 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.

> Such as? In my experience upper and upper-middle class kids get common names, ... Never crazy spelling, never unique names.

X Æ A-12 Musk?

Never say never.

Being rich doesn't make you upper class, evidently.

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.

Maybe not in Europe (and that is arguable depending on the country). In the US it absolutely does.

No.

Here's a good resource if you want to read up on how class works in the US: https://siderea.livejournal.com/1260265.html

A name like that screams new money / no roots to me.

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.

“Jacob Rees-Mogg announces birth of his sixth child, Sixtus”

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/jul/05/jacob-rees-...

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.)

> Such as?

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

None of these people are upper-class?

> None of these people are upper-class?

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.

I agree with the other guy about this not necessarily being desirable but you could repurpose pronounceable password generation like this: https://caseyjmorris.github.io/pronounceablePassword/

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!

Congratulations! Out of curiosity, what does your wife think of this?

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 ;)

Nice, and congrats.

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!

The dream!

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's should be a 'Tinder' style option where you and partner both pick names you like and it only shows you the overlap.

There already is:

* https://apps.apple.com/us/app/babyname-find-it-together/id95...

* https://apps.apple.com/us/app/kinder-find-baby-names/id10684...

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.

Like others have said: great job. Usually there is a tradeoff of functional, aesthetics, and open source/no tracking where we only get 2 of the 3.

EZ 5-star review for me.

feature requests -

- initials with full name, in various orders (country differences), and

- full name with given name, to see how it reads, sounds, feels.

> 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.

>didn't work for my wife and I (bugs, subscriptions…

Subscription seems like a curious choice of business model for a child naming app.

Congrats on the app.

Maybe there should be an app for the babies to change their name as they grow up as well.

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.

Great hack…:)

You can't leave us hanging after a story like that :)

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.

I think some names are actually born this way: "Tibidy"

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.

evidence for that last claim? because it is interesting

pink and blue were gender neutral.

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...

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.

Anyway, cheers!

[0] https://bebepool.com

I commend you for the effort.

Any chance this will be included in the Fdroid marketplace?

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

When app developers “nest”...

Damn, would have been useful. Too late, though, we are already at two.

My baby naming days are long in my past. I have two daughters of 14 and 12. Their names where a real challenge. My wife and I lost our first child. It would have been a boy. We had chosen for the name Roan. We where of course devastated. A part of me was also very sad for loosing the name. If the second would also be a boy we could no longer give it this beautiful name. We knew the second would become a girl and we wanted to include the name Roan in it. After really long puzzling we came to the name: Norah. It contains all letters or Roan and an added H. Something for her specifically. When we had our third we wanted to do this again. Norah was already at the daycare by then and played a lot with a child called Roos. Somehow we liked the combination but it did not contain all the letters or Roan. After some thinking we settled on Rosanne and we call her Roos (that's Rose in English). So her name does contain all the letters of Roan and extra.

I like the idea but I am unable to have any more kids

Congrats one your pregnancy and I wish you the best of luck.

Forgot to mention that we had an extra rule when deciding on a name: it had to have a unique starting letters. I had a friend in highschool his parents and his siblings all had the same first letter. They thought it was fun but later on it because a privacy nightmare when post arrived...

My wife and I also lost our first, who was a boy at 23 weeks. It was an awful experience to say the least

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).

Ours was Stardust, tying into part of their name that is a constellation name.

That used to be the case in some culture, like the Chinese one.

In a way - perhaps? If someone doesn't like their name they can change it when they reach adulthood (at least in the US)

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?

In either case, what would a solution look like?

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?

hahaha

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.

There's something about picking the names for your kids that is just so fun and special. For those of you for whom this app may be relevant, I hope you have even half as much fun as my wife and I did picking names.

Ever since my wife was little, she had a particular name chosen for her son. So when we got pregnant, we already knew what the boy name would be. But we had fun coming up with a girl name, and that fun was both serious fun imagining a world in which we'd have a Megan or a Lily or a Lydia or whatever, and it was also very playful and ridiculous. We would one-up each other with what we thought were ridiculous names that just don't make sense (given our language, culture, etc.).

So then our son was born, and she got her wish for the name she's always wanted. Then when we got pregnant again, we got to go through the fun a second time around. One day, when my dad was over and was playing with our toddler, my wife and I were joking about silly names. "What about X if it's a girl? What about Y if it's a boy?" I got a call that night from my mom, very concerned.

"Have... have you decided on baby names? ... What did you decide?" I told her the two names we had (seriously) decided on. "Oh. Your father thought he heard some very bizarre names that you were thinking about." We had to explain our little game to her so she understood the situation.

What would be the very bizarre names warranting a call from your mom lol?

Girl names are been relatively fun but boy names have been a challenge. The options feel limited if you want one that isn't overdone but isn't ... strange.

My son was born in 2013. For some reason I immediately blurted out "Archer" when we found out we were having a boy. My wife did not like it, I loved the name! I kept referring to him as Archer, and then soon she couldn't think of him as anything other than Archer, haha. It's a great name and it suits him so well, and it's unique enough (it was not a popular name back in 2012-2013) but I'm seeing it become more popular now.

He's still the only Archer at his school though. (no, I hadn't even watched the Archer TV series or heard about it, but one day I will...)

Archer is also the main hero protagonist of the incredibly popular (globally) and sprawling Fate series, which you should also check out, starting with Fate/Stay Night.

My wife and I were trying to think of a middle name that my grandmother would approve of. We were heading back from Gatwick and hadn't come up with anything.

Sighing, my wife said, "We need a sign."

Just at that moment, we pulled into the London station, where a giant, 5 meter high sign announced "VICTORIA"...

Good timing. She could have ended up being named Clapham Junction.

We recently had our first child and finding a name for him was extremely difficult. We tried using books and apps but they weren't that helpful.

Part of the problem was that we wanted a name that would work in both english and spanish, and wasn't too popular or trendy.

I found that I hated most boy names, especially the ones that are trendy today (Aiden, Jaiden, Zaiden).

Feel free to name your kids whatever you want, but here is my advice to anyone who is trying to name a child:

---------

1. Do not tell anyone what the name will be before the child is born. They will try to talk you out of it.

2. If your family is not a native speaker of your language then present them with a list of a bunch of names that also includes the ones you want. Then ask them to pronounce all the names. That will let you know if your family will be able to accurately pronounce the name.

3. If you are going to give them a middle name make sure that their initials don't spell out something embarrassing like Carl Otis Winslow.

4. Do a google search of your child's first and last name so you don't accidentally name them after a serial killer or some other controversial person. Also google their initials so you don't accidentally name them after a company or a chemical.

5. Consider how their first name can used against them by other kids. Does it rhyme with something? Is there some famous fictional character with the same name?

6. Try to delay giving your child a name for as long as you can before leaving the hospital. This will give you time to decide which name best fits this person who is now in the world. (I thought I would name my son one thing, but decided that he didn't 'look' like some one with that name)

7. Do not leave the hospital without naming the child (unless you have a good reason to do this). I know some one who waited a month to name their child and they wouldn't recommend doing this.

8. Consider how popular the name is. Most of the names in the top 10 are popular for a reason, they tend to be good names, but do you want your kid to have a unique name, or just another kid among the other 10 Liams and Olivias in their class?

9. People are going to give your kid a nickname the instant they are born, whether you like it or not. Are you okay with people calling your kid Bobby, Danny, Mikey, etc? If not then consider a different name.

The impact of the name on the child/teen/adult is often overlooked. Great to see you've considered the negatives, especially how the name/initials could be used against them.

> The impact of the name on the child/teen/adult is often overlooked.

And confusing!

Having my name as a kid was horrible! I was constantly harassed and made fun of for it.

As an adult, it rocks! Close enough to other names to be familiar, but different enough to be memorable.

If you choose a common name and your kid has an allergy or something, I guarantee you will pick him up from day care and he'll be eating snacks brought by the parent of one of the other children with the same first name.

This is a good list! I do disagree with #8 and #9 though...

#8: "just another kid among the other 10..." always seemed weird to me. There are tons of notable Peter's, John's, Anne's, and Olivia's in the world. The converse is of course the mistaken idea that a remarkable or unique name makes a remarkable or unique person and at least anecdotally in my life I've seen more young people find difficulty in the attention given to their uncommon name than I have people finding difficulty being unnoticed for having a common one.

#9: As parents you actually have a ton of control over nicknames when the child is small. I know a number of Jonathans who don't go by Jon, Joshuas who don't go by Josh, Daniels who don't go by Danny, etc. You 100% can't manage the names people use to TEASE your child (as you addressed in earlier points) but you can teach your child and those around them that initially you and then ultimately your child does have ownership of how their name is used.

Agree with the rest of your list, just wanted to give my 2c on those two!

I wish that were remotely true. We continually have to ask people not to shorten our toddler's name from Jacqueline to Jac or JacJac, and I'm pretty confident that once we leave the room they go right back to Jac.

I have a somewhat unusual name that's related to a common name. Think Jeremiah. Even though I have that as my email address and sign off as Jeremiah, people frequently reply to me as Jeremy or Jerry or even Jer.

Yeah you sort of have ownership of your name, but people are still going to butcher it or abuse it if there's opportunity.

Agree on 9. We have a Fox and a Scout. If they get called Foxy or Scouty, they get politely asked not to early on before it becomes habit. That’s worked without being overbearing.

Kind of wish I had done a google search before choosing Kayodé for my online persona.

Kayode (no accent) is from Africa. I’m white. Oops. Also Lycaon is short for Lycaon pictus… African Wild Dog. Double oops on the first name.

> 3. If you are going to give them a middle name...

Just don't do it. Nobody is going to use it and it will mess up when you have to fill forms.

My dad didn't have a middle name. In Canada that caused more problems than anything; forms would constantly be denied / sent back / whatever because whoever processed them would think he forgot to fully fill it out.

This - please don't burden your child with a middle name or even worse, two middle names.

We have used middle names to place our kids within their family, they are in some sense family names.

Common uses of middle names in the UK include to give a child a name of a God-parent or other significant non-family person, or to record the mother's maiden name, or to give an alternative name a child can use (if they prefer that name) later in life without having to change their name, or to disambiguate (John Frederick Smith, son of John David Smith, son of John James Smith -- they might all go by John outside of the family and be Freddy, Dai, and Jim at home, for example).

Middle names (especially unusual ones) make name collisions much less likely.

> give an alternative name a child can use (if they prefer that name) later in life without having to change their name

This is an underrated reason for a middle name.

As someone with a middle name, it has never caused me any problem when filling out forms and the like.

I wish I could upvote you 10x. I have a middle name and it is extremely annoying that it pops up everywhere and I always have to remember to fill it out.

Even worse is that where I am from there is no legal way to get rid of it (and believe me - I tried). This means that until the end of my life I am stuck with a name that no-one uses, I personally very much dislike, I always have to enter in forms and can't get rid of.

On the contrary I would not mind if my child was named after a controversial figure due to the fact it would obscure people trying to find them

Little Adolf is so cute!

Your list reminds me of this SNL skit of nearly 30 years ago :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goPerp_BWvs

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.

https://mixedname.com/

Perfect!

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.

YMMV.

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.

But mileage does vary indeed.

I had the same problem and built this: https://zigam.github.io/ginkgo/

> 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*?"

Love the app, seems nicely functional - as feedback/bug report?, it doesn't look like the "Sex" filter works, at least not for the "Explore" mode.

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.

I would love to be able to filter by number of syllables. Probably not a trivial thing though

When the baby is finally old enough and ask "Dad/Mom, why did you name me as xxx?", and you answer "oh, it's from that app the dude on HN wrote.", imagine how would he/she feel XD

a) lie

b) maybe that will be common enough by then

c) does that really come up a lot? I don't think I ever asked why and don't think I would require a profound answer. I guess maybe if it wasn't a name that blended in I would have more questions and thoughts about it.

> does that really come up a lot?

I have. My middle name is both obscure in its sound and more obscure in its spelling.

Mine if that of a former socialist head or state..

I'm pretty sure kids bourn around 2021 will see using apps for everything as something very natural. People used to rely on physical books for that. No big deal.

Haha, I guess this is what every programmer does when they have a kid. I wrote an ELO ranking program when I had my first kid: https://github.com/cortesoft/BabyNamer

Give it a list of names, it presents pairs of names to voters who choose which they prefer of the two. Allows many people to work together to narrow down a name choice.

I took the site down after a while because I didn't want to keep paying for it after both my kids were born.

It worked ok, although the app basically just confirmed that we had clear favorites for our names.

Awesome. I sincerely wish I found this before I decided to write my own, we definitely would have used it!

I did something similar, although it was a Windows desktop app. Finding and picking names was easy. My wife and I found it hard to rank them so the app (like yours) showed two names (drawn from her list, my list and top 200 popular names) and you'd make a gut choice of favorite. After a few dozen rounds, clear winners would emerge. We could see the top 10 from each of our lists and easily spot overlaps. Since, I've used the same code to decide on vacation destinations and even what house to buy. It avoided a lot of marital disputes, for sure.

I hope that the app makes it clear which country/culture it applies to. (I assume it's for a European-origin family in the US?)

We recently had a kid, and in case of our native culture (Japan), people want to pick a name that not only sounds good, but also carries "good fortune" in its characters... based on ancient literature or something (it's kind of feng shui, I guess). The shape of the letters also kind of matters. Note that Chinese characters not only carry sounds but also represent a meaning (ideogram) that adds to the complexity. Also in Japanese many characters tend to have multiple readings. So there are tons of websites where you can search kids name with various conditions (sound, meaning, shape, strokes, popularity, etc), and they look pretty popular.

My point is that, the requirements and restrictions of names differ vastly between cultures, and the app can be clear about it.

When we were deciding our kids names, we established some 'first principles'. I thought that simplified the process for us a lot. Of course, these principles are very subjective to the couple based on what they believe etc. Sharing hoping some might help others: 1. Names should be simple and should be pronounceable by anyone (we are from india and people can't just pronounce our names) 2. No association with anything religious or gods (we both are atheists) 3. No attributions to characteristics or features (it's common in indian names where the names mean something like one with beautiful eyes, one with great smile etc) 4. Names should end with vowel sounds (our mother tongue has sounds ending with vowel sounds. i heard it's the same with italian) 5. Avoid name bias and make sure people cannot guess ethnicity based on their first name 6. Have a middle name related to indian roots

Quite interestingly, our super set became quite limited with just those 6 principles.

My biggest take away is, there is no such thing as a beautiful name. When we think about names (at least in US), kid is not born yet. So we think about them as an independent thing. When as kid is born, they look so beautiful to you that, name naturally sounds beautiful to you. :)

What, has everyone forgotten the legendary babynamewizard.com? It was one of the few java applets that succeeded. Seems to be still kicking, probably rewritten in javascript.

https://www.babynamewizard.com/voyager#prefix=&sw=both&exact...

Nobody cares about stuff that’s good on hacker news, they want some new bullshit that will allow themselves to compete to attach themselves to a revenue stream to enable them to get into Elizabeth Holmes country club. Babynamewizard is a pretty good example.

My dad said to me "don't give your boy one of those trendy new names, stick to something traditionally English" so I called him Æthelbert.

How is that is trending, compared to X Æ A-12 ?

They literally say, it is not trending, but traditional.

I hope you spell it Æþelbriht like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Entry_for_827_in_the_Angl...

Needs more filters. I'd like ones that are based on popularity, so people (for instance) can aim for a name that is neither very popular or extremely rare. So many other things that could be filtered on.

I personally would like one that allows you to pick them based on popularity in parts of the world (for instance I might want to view names that is more popular in Europe than in the US), or even one that lets you choose names with or without diacritics. (I wanted a name for my daughter that had a "heavy metal umlaut" like Zöe but the mom ruled it out, which was a good idea now that I'm not on a Mac and I realize how freaking hard it is to type that)

I can think of many other suggestions (screenshots on your main page, and pick a chill color scheme as the default), but this is a pretty cool idea, and good luck.

I was halfway expecting to see a “This Baby Name Does Not Exist” generator.

Tomorrow on hacker news I expect to see a "This-name-does-not-exist" app. Make it happen.

Shameless plug for my caregiver support app Baby Buddy[0]. Previously a Show HN[1] as well. The app turned four years old not long ago (as did our first child!) and I'm still enjoying hacking away on it.

Give it a try if you are in to self-hosting and over-engineering (your child?).

[0] https://github.com/babybuddy/babybuddy

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15558057

This looks lush. One request - a filter for genderless names would be amazing. I have no idea what my kids will want to identify as so having something gender neutral seems like a gift.

That's a good idea and should be fairly easy to add. You can currently disable the colour-based gendering of the app if desired but your suggestion would be a lot more useful.

Back when my wife was pregnant I took the CSV export of baby name frequencies for last 10 years from the scottish National Records office (where we live) and loaded the lot into elasticsearch/kibana.

It was quite good, for any candidate name you could see popularity as a whole, trends from year to year - and it would give you ideas. Coming up with names is easy but but coming up with names that both of you like is the difficult part.

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!

Good idea, and would be easy enough to fork and do. Just need to find a list of pet names somewhere.

Your app is fucking amazing.

Would it be possible to filter names by regions or language as well as decades ?

Thanks!

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

A way to "upload" your own name list would be an incredible feature. Whether it is a .csv or a plain .txt with one name per line.

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 :)

EDIT: Btw, here is the same file for France, with a different format, of course : https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/2540004?sommaire=476726...

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).

I second the request for being able to upload a custom list. Looking for dual culture/language names at the moment and it isn't easy :)

When we were hunting for baby names I found that fiction character naming books (ex: The Writer's Digest Character Naming Sourcebook) were really great for inspiration. They tend to focus on the perceived qualities of the names more than the social qualities and are often more bold in their offerings.

That's a really clever idea, and would probably give us the types of names we're looking for (not common but everyone knows it and knows how to spell & pronounce it).

FYI, see the usage note here:

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hone%20in

The app itself seems to be oriented around viewing most popular names. It would be nice to have a way to view least popular as well.

We just had our second a few weeks ago, and to figure out some names, we each got a big list of "kind of like this name," totally casual and noncommittal, and combined them. We then used a little Elo[1] rater script I whipped up to compare items, it was fun! Once you get a short list there's no good algorithm to figure it out, but using Elo we both found names we loved that we never would have thought about, and had a fun time doing so.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_rating_system

Congrats! Elo rating is a good idea for sorting.. I just implemented an insertion sort to help rank names which works but also feels a bit awkward.

Your sort has a way higher complexity than required, in terms of comparisons. It will present the user with way more pairs than the optimal system would, which will make it very hard to sort through a longer list.

You might want to use a merge insertion sort instead. See https://stackoverflow.com/a/53979250/711380

Of course this only works if you assume the order is total, which is actually a good assumption unless multiple people are contributing to the same ranking (in that case use ELO).

Hmm, that is a good idea; thanks. I don't have a CS degree so this is one of those areas where I don't know what I don't know.

On an intuitive level, if I just said I prefer "Alice" to "Anna", and "Anna" to "Mary", it should not ask whether I prefer "Alice" to "Mary".

In practice that seems a little bit difficult and I was hoping someone would jump with the optimal solution.

My wife and me didn't use a computer application. We used p&p and made a list of names we liked, then gave each other the list at a deathline date. Then we reviewed each other's list, if we had a name on both our lists it got a pre (this kind of happened with our first). Otherwise, marked any of the names the other person liked, and then it all started. What I mean with that, its multiple names. The name has to flow. It shouldn't be an offensive acronym. We want certain references (to our last name, and several family members). But all in all, its a matter of give and take. You win some, you lose some.

I'm sure the main principle of the matching can be made in a Tinder-esque app (though I never used Tinder, so I am kind of guessing how it works). But I kind of liked the ease of handing out the lists and the discussions. I don't think an app can (easily) replace that, at least not fully automated. The manual stuff can be made in threads with replies etc.

Just some words of advice: ensure you start when you know gender (can do gender reveal but don't wait too long), and take into account a child can come too early, so don't wait too long. Start proactively with the names. Even if the birth ends up in a disaster (it is possible) you still want to give him/her a name. After all, you knew him/her, especially the woman as she had the child inside her. Naming your child, even if its a miscarriage, helps with acceptance of the tragedy. In other words: it is not a lost effort.

did you know that ...

>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.

I too wrote code to help with picking baby names with each of my children. Popular but not too popular was a hard requirement when bisecting the SSN data base.

One hard thing was not realizing how many variants there were of the name we picked for my daughter. We ended up picking a more popular name than we sort of intended.

Naming twins was also extra hard because of the added requirement that the 2 names were of similar “stature” (or “coolness” or something hard to define).

Congrats.

This is an interesting thing I had never considered. There would be fascinating consequences for having twins, naming one Kip and the other Themistocles Aurelius.

Add numerology analysis as a premium feature.

A number can be assigned to every specific letter. You add them up, then again until it's just 1 digit. The digit has a meaning supposedly influencing the person destiny and personal traits a specific way.

I don't mean this is true, but I know many people believe it is (or may be so why not) - I personally met many such people. This way you can attract some extra audience.

Counter-point: some people may think this is BS to the extent that they'd give the app a pass after seeing that in the feature list.

Perhaps. A/B testing probably is necessary. I would try and some way emphasize the numerology part is just a game, entirely optional and doesn't interfere with the actual job the app does - suggesting names.

Another, a more rational extra feature I can think of is providing a clue on how easy it is going to be for speakers of different languages to pronounce the name or to spell it in their alphabet.

Some clue on the etymological meaning/history of the name and history of some notable people named this way, etymological counterparts in other languages, some fun facts like "how do you spell it in tengwar", statistical data on where and when was the name popular, cultural data like if it sounds close to some specific word in some specific language etc should probably also be there.

Speaking of names is it really true than in Sweden you have to get a baby name approved by some government office? How strict is that in practice?

Not sure about Sweden, but in Iceland there's a naming committee that has to approve names not already on the approved list.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_Naming_Committee

It does look like there's a similar thing in Sweden though

To add: I think this is to make sure the name can be declined into the noun cases necessary to make sentences in Icelandic.

In Iceland, I believe one can’t give the baby a last name not following the -son or -dottir format even if the parents are not Icelandic I believe.

Atleast it was the case until few years back. Not sure it changed recently or they need to go through an approval process.

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.

how can you move to a different country with a newborn child without having any papers for that child?

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".

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")

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.

Has anyone named their child with an accent character like è in the US? Have you run into any issues? What your experience has been?

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?

Relevant XKCD:

https://xkcd.com/327

Even big carriers with automated workflows get this wrong, e.g. put "Rémi" in your Amazon address, get a confused UPS driver looking at a "RÃ©mi" label.

Most states won't even allow you to give you child a name with a diacritical mark.

It's not allowed in most US states. If you already have a name with an accent most companies and agencies will just remove it.

Congratulations! I did the exact same thing; made an app to help name my first child.

I've slowly developed a method which incorporates 1) culture, 2) popularity in different countries, and 3) pronunciation of names and attempts to recommend you names based on names you like. It kind of works, it's taken a lot of tuning to make it output something sensible. It's specifically designed to attempt to combine cultures together, which is a top request from customers I identified.

I've been working on releasing the app for a while. If you're interested in helping me test it before its release this month please feel free to sign up here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/namenerds/comments/qge6t9/im_lookin...

I will also look at this thread's comments closely before launching.

When my wife and I were picking names for our son earlier this year, I pulled down a list of the top 1,000 names from the social security office. I removed the top 20, and then we kept making passes removing more names until we were down to the winner.

I called it name whittling. It was surprisingly easy to whittle the list down to 50 names or so.

One thing that would be cool is to see the name with initials (given family name/middle name) and also to check social media/email accounts and even domain names to see if you can get a unique handle for them based on a few variations ;) Those would make a great gift when they join the internet one day.

I'll bet you're using this dataset: https://catalog.data.gov/dataset/baby-names-from-social-secu...

I downloaded it recently to dig for names that start with vowels. I wound up loading it in a SQLite database.

Nice work with the decade filter. I feel your pain with that one. I wound up dumping all the years from when "Nevaeh" spiked onward as a quick and dirty clean. This also cleared out the flood of -aidens and some awkward recent trends.

After all that, my wife hated every name I suggested from my efforts :) Still a lot of fun to play with the data and watch how the trends change. Like you can find when "Ashley" declines as a male name and rises as a female name.

Congratulations! The app looks neat too.

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.

Thanks!

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.

It's funny that we call them "baby names" when it's more that this name will be with this human for much longer than their baby years. Maybe calling it a baby name pre conditions us to think of the name as applying to a baby rather than to an adult human.

Nice - I got our daughter's name at the 27th try.

Our method was to wait until she started kicking in the womb and pick the name based on the consistent intensity of kicks when it was said out loud.

As a control we used common words. Out of them "Cockroach" got the most enthusiastic response.

Very nice app. A few suggestions after using it a bit:

Remove names: Unknown, Unnamed, Unk and Unborn (Some of these have dupes with typos)

Add an option to not show twice names that are unisex, they should show only once but maybe with a multi colored card. This is useful for two things: 1. actually looking for unisex names (or avoiding them - a filter?), so you don't need to keep in mind or search on both sexes 2. Reduce the amount of total names to review

Also something to help reduce yet more variations, an option to group similar or very close related names together. Ex. I saw Ulisses then Ulysses then Uulisses and so on.

And lastly, a way to sort by popularity, so that I can review the less (or most) popular first.

Anyway, great app and congratulations for the baby.

I think it's just the curve fitting on the chart widget, but I saw one name where the popularity went negative in the 2000's. I didn't recognize the name at all, so I had to laugh seeing that.

Nice!

I have to admit making a naming app has been on my mind since we had our child. I learned I really love naming and name issues in general, and really got into the name and naming community more than I thought.

I think the reason I never got around to it was I didn't really know where to start, and wrestled with issues around open source versus private data, how to collect the data I needed to do what I wanted, and how to balance data retention against privacy issues. I think I was just thinking of bootstrapping from users but was never sure if that would work or if I could do it another way.

This is great for me right now. My wife is pregnant too, and she has gone through many names and for some reason, I'm not convinced on any name (I don't know why this is, something personal I believe).

Back when I had to choose names for our kids, I needed to find names that were pronounceable in both Danish and Gujarati. Solving this involved taking names lists from both languages, and getting the phonemes for each name (based upon the language pronunciation). Following that it was a simple matter of finding the names with the shortest edit distances, so we could shortlist names that were familiar enough in each language.

My wife ended up picking names off the top of her head that entirely coincidentally were part of the shortlist.

Nice. Very relatable, though my equivalent summary was slightly different: "My wife is pregnant; naturally I wrote a name database analysis tool to generate a name shortlist". Congratulations!

Despite the French name for the app, this seems to only use English names.

US-census names actually.

As for the name of the app.. well names are hard ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Maybe someone should do an app-name app.

There was a product I ran across in the noughties: Razorname.

Its tag line was "So good it named itself".

Doesn't seem to be around any more.

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]

[1]: https://dash-naissances.herokuapp.com/ [2]: https://github.com/Elie-B/dash-naissances

Fork it, add a bunch of French given names and call it "nombre del bebé". Keep the cycle going.

I also wrote code when we had a baby (babies actually...), but with a different set of constraints. Me and my partner are from different countries, and we live in a third one, each with its own language, so we wanted to find names that "sounded" ok on all three languages (english, french, and spanish).

My algorithm finds roots that are common on all three languages, and suggested a few options. For fun I added where in the decimals of pi it could be found, closest prime number, that kind of thing...

Congratulations! App looks great, and as someone who's looking forward to meeting our first little one in a few weeks, wish you and the wife all the best on your own journey.

Thanks, and congrats to you too!

We named each of our kids beginning with the letter M. My hope was that it would become ridiculous and my wife would want to stop having babies. Didn’t work. She wants the 4th.

Good luck! We have a friend with 7 kids with all "C" names because they wanted the 7 C's

My wife is pregnant and we just had a really good time going through names, thanks for this!

Just like searching for recipes, searching baby names can be a miserable SEO-hijacked/ad-stuffed slog, so this really makes a difference.

I did encounter a small bug: I use Android (Pixel 5), the sharing tab wasn't working for me, I get a "Something went wrong sharing your names list" error. But we just texted the list to each other to share names, so it worked out.

Same error message for me, also on a Pixel 5. Otherwise a great app though!

I saw that there was an update to the Android version of the app today which addresses this exact issue. Fantastic! Sharing now working for me and my wife. Thank you.

This is fantastic - I hesitate to show it to my wife because it will induce baby fever.

I have a feature request for a naming contract option between you and your partner.

When you begin the name search you outline an agreement on key issues i.e.: -Veto rules -No Later Than Date for settling the name -Method(s) and timing by which you will release the name -Family name considerations

In my experience with 5 kids it's these things that end up taking the joy out of naming.

Congrats on the coming baby!

We had a problem (many years ago!) choosing a name all the various relatives could pronounce (between the two sides of the family there were half a dozen languages and no one person spoke them all). We had to throw away phonemes that not everyone could say and ended up with a single syllable name that everybody could at least pronounce one way or another.

Another is “is this name a rude or funny word in one of these other languages?”

Flutter! Love it. I feel like Flutter today is like what Go was like in 2011. Its basically right on the cusp of being recognized as being the best programming tool for a specific use case. In Go's case it was making back-end services. In Flutter's case its building 2D client experiences (I say 2D, because I think Unity will probably have an edge in creating 3D experiences for a while).

I did something like this with jupyter and the census records.

I added filters for min and max popularity, gender ratio, scrabble score, number of syllables, length, etc.

I love that you implemented scrabble score. Not even legal to play, but fun none the less!

That sounds awesome!

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.

Ha, awesome. I went through the exact same thing of getting a bit stuck on names and trying to solve it algorithmically. My approach was using very simple Bayesian classifier to try and find sounds and spellings you liked.

https://twitter.com/lemonwatcher/status/1286082683412582403

Charming and well-executed. Cheers! It makes me this this would be a quite good premise for a dating app. My intuition, after spending ample time with behavior data sets and related conversion data, is simple: people who would name their baby Ashley belong together, as do people who would name them Olivia or Jamari. It would be a wonderful experiment to see how this bears out.

Wish this existed years ago! It would be interesting if there were phonetic ways to filter names, for example: starts with consonant/vowel, has X syllables, ends with X letter(s).

A more advanced version of this could be a system that detects phonetic/orthographic similarities between names that you do or don't like, and shows you an optimized list of names based on your apparent preferences.

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

Nice work!

Had the same issue for the second kid and came to the same conclusion I needed an app for that.

I never shared it but I’m happy with my “trouve prénom” French only site, based on INSEE names statistics.

If you’re curious: http://trouveprenoms.azurewebsites.net/

This is fantastic, wish I had it before we had our fourth and final child. One piece of feedback: when I use the app with my thumb, the natural position for it to rest is right over the name. Consider moving the name more towards the center or top of the screen and making it possible to swipe anywhere in the top yellow area.

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

That sounds fun. Mostly we try to avoid names that would cause an unfortunate acronym, which definitely takes a few of the names we like off the list.

This is cool. But, I am also swinging by to be the jerk who points out a funny thing about French (because the app's name is in French):

In French, nom is your surname. Prénom is your name (given name). Your surnom is your nickname.

Bonne journée ! (The French put spaces before some punctuation too)

The spaces before punctuation drives me crazy. My mom still does it.

"Nom" is used interchangeably. In fact in spoken French people regularly use "nom" as given name and "nom de famille" as surname.

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"

Congrats to you and your family :)

If you're taking requests, a filter by country would serve great. While I loved the concept and the way it's executed, I wish it becomes contextual for me.

Also, back button interaction closes the app. If you can fix that too.

All in all, loved the app. :D

To add another point, will it be feasible to have the meaning of the name in the details. Or a redirection to external link where meaning of the name can be searched?

Congratulations and nice work! I build a baby-name webapp when we were expecting our second child a few years ago. Random rolls were fun and filter by rarity, etc http://peanutapp.herokuapp.com/

I found the listings and subcategories on Wikipedia for 'Given Names' to be a sufficient low-tech resource when surveying names.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29125195

What's the best way to explore a large set, one by one? Maybe cluster names (maybe there's a meaningful-enough language model that works), then when someone likes a name, sample within cluster n times, before hopping out to the big set again.

Built something very similar some time ago when my sister was pregnant. https://generate-name.net/popular-names

I'd like to see the first baby born to the courage parents who used this to name their newborn https://www.thisworddoesnotexist.com/

Nice! I needed this a few years ago. I was browsing the baby name sides, comparing notes with my wife, etc. Thinking all along, I wish there was a tinder-for-baby-names that would show us our mutual matches. Kudos on getting it done!!

I did the same for my girlfriend and I and preloaded it with all approved Danish names (42,000 in total) that we could then swipe through. I made it as a private web app, so that I didn't need to consider authentication.

Very nice! We spent quite some time on this and aren't even having a kid.

How did you implement the tournament? It feels very long when you have many names - almost like it's doing all N^2 pairs, or is there something smarter?

EDIT: spelling

Fully private — there is no tracking / spying / advertising / etc

That's great! But it's a sad world where that's a feature you have to lead with and not just an inherent assumption :-S.

My wife is also pregnant and this is the first baby-name app I don't hate.

Congrats! And thanks!

Very nice! The baby name app we used worked on a Tinder-like swipe-right basis. At the end, you ended up with your “matches”.

But the best part about the app was the name - Kinder. (German for “children” and rhymes with Tinder)

Give your baby a normal (by today standards) name in your language. Thomas, Alessandro, Alfredo, Rene, Elizabeth, Clara, Helen, ... then in 20 years time it will be unusual and exotic ;)

Please no Apple-Moonbeam-Chicago's-Compass names.

Unless you can afford a nanny or private tutoring , kids get lots of grief if they have shitty weird names and daycare is bloody hard enough as it is.

Nice App! However as someone named "Robyn" I got very confused by the screenshot and the claims against tracking. Totally threw me for a loop. Is that a special name in any way for you?

Sorry for the mini heart-attack! No, to be honest to get that screenshot I just launched the app in an emulator, randomly swiped left and right a bunch of times, then took the shot. I think it is a nice name though :)

It would be great to be able to make a judgment on all related names, like thumbs down or heart “William”, “Willy”, “Will” all at once.

Or to filter names by ethnic group?

Overall it is fantastic but I find 100k names to be daunting!

This is great! FYI, one of the options that just popped up for me is "Unnamed". Might want to remove that one :). Or not.

Edit: Looks like its popularity peaked in the late 1980s :D

Very cool. My only gripe with the UI is that when opening the popularity graph of a name, using the Android system-wide back button does not close the popularity graph. That would be handy.

This is really fantastic work. When we were naming our baby last year we did a playoff bracket system with pen and paper, but this is so much more thorough. Great visual style as well.

Don’t listen to the critics, well executed, and thanks for keeping it clean and focused.

Would have loved this app when we were looking, but after two kids I hope we won’t need to use it ;)

You might want to remove similar characters from your codes to share. For instance, is the first character in your app screenshot a zero or an oh?

Also standardizing on capitals IMO would help.

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!

Thanks for making this!

I am getting the "Something went wrong sharing your liked names list" when I click on the sharing tab.

I wanna see the overlap between my partners app and mine.

Dang, I'm sorry about that.. any chance you can send me a screenshot / phone details? I unfortunately don't have a good way of debugging this (essentially I think that error implies that you can't reach the server for whatever reason). And looking at the server logs is telling me that I have some more work to do there :(

So cool, gonna use it right now! Thanks! Also, congrats for the baby and the app!

Since everyone is asking for features: do you think you could add a filter for country, please?

Easier solution, adopt one of the millions of already named children in desperate need of a home and living family.

Procreation is the last thing the world needs.

Sorry no way I’d want to tell my child that their name was determined by a program I wrote. It makes it too impersonal and devoid of affection.

To the OP: I’m curious why this couldn’t be a website too (it’s good that this is available as an app for those who prefer the convenience).

Congratulations!

Hah, we agonized over this just 4 months ago with our first kid, finally settling on "Samson", this app would have been a huge help!

Nice app. How do you like flutter? I am learning dart flutter now and it seems quite powerful and huge community growing around it is nice.

A tip my parents and their parent(s) have done is to pick historical figures or characters from books.

Thanks for this. I was going to do something similar because my wife and I can’t think of a name and we only have 4 weeks to go!

Nice looking app. There’s a whole series of apps that just boil down to nice UIs on a spreadsheet.

Back in my day we had to use Google spreadsheets.

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.

Are the list of names shuffled? Even adding a pseudo shuffle UI action would provide some good mental feedback to the user.

Only time I’ve watched TV/movie credits attentively is when we were trying to come up with a name for our kids.

Would great to have an option where you and your partner can choose a name on their own (probably a tinder-like mode)

Something went wrong sharing your liked names list.

S21 Ultra - Android 11

Not sure what other info I can provide (I'm in the UK on talktalk broadband)

For my next child i will do it like my neighbours. Wait till it is born and wait till a name comes up.

Missed opportunity. You could’ve reached out to Heroku to give you several different haiku options. ;)

Wish there was an option for "I'm not sure, show me this name again some other time"

My feelings on this is that if you're not sure, that's actually an immediate dislike.

As a soon-to-be father in 3 months, this is great! My wife and I are using this as we speak :)

That's awesome. Let me know if you ever decide to add Portuguese/Brazilian names.

I see that is is Open Source, which is awesome. Would you consider distributing it on fdroid?

Yes! I still haven’t found time to do so for my other app (Time Cop), but I should probably just get my butt in gear and figure it out.

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!

is it like Tinder for baby names?

lol, I guess. I've never used Tinder but I suppose it is a decent comparison.

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.

Do baby names swipe right on the parents?

I made one of these for Yahoo! Health in 2000. Naturally it was not an app. Good idea!

I would probably sanitize the db by ignoring the names from the last 20 years or so.

lol, you can filter those out in the app if so desired (my filters currently only show names popular before the 1930s).

Very weird design choices. The like/dislike buttons are super small, the Names rated/names remaining counter takes up half the screen and seems like it should be at most 10-20% of the screen. Names are too small. BB complains about app design all the time and then creates these monstrosities

congrats, maybe you can use qr-code scanning for linking instead of sharing code ?

That's a really great idea, I'll add that for the next release for sure! Thanks!

I always liked short names and I wish my parents named me so.

I personally cringe when I hear any vocalization of the nametag I happen to have been assigned. Not a fan of this noise where some old bag gets to slap a label on a new shiny baby that is unwittingly subscribed to happily responding to that specific cacophony for a lifetime.

Would you prefer young children picking their own name?

I think that would actually be really rad. Yes.

ooh, I'm not even having a kid but this is fun to play around with!

One feature that would be nice to see: adding names. I always thought it would be fun to name a kid Pickle but it's not in your list :)

thanks for making this!

I made the same kind of countdown app when my wife was pregnant in 2006.

Could you please explain the process of collecting these names?

I'm unable to share on Android version 12 of a pixel 4a

2 months too late. We went with our default / backup

Congratulations! :)

Thanks!

Fantastic work.

Can you add a feature to do cache invalidation too?

Brilliant! Congratulations to you and your wife

Thanks!

Congratulations! Take care of your wife! :)

Great idea, is there a web version of the app?

No.. but its built using Dart / Flutter so it may be possible to publish as a web version (though I think you'd run into issues with the database backend).

Maybe seed it with the user's genealogy?

I hope Seven or Soda are both in the list!

Hacker? News?

Does it include "X Æ A-12"?

Reminder: baby names are adult names.

Did you integrate BehindTheName?

man, why not spend time with your wife during this exciting time instead of this?

We both work from home and literally spend nearly 24 hours a day together. I may have coded it but not in a vacuum; she helped design and test it. Despite having many things in common, we also believe it is healthy to each have hobbies & interests that are separate.

So glad I don’t have kids

Especially in the Bay Area. If you do, I recommend a move to some Pennsylvania farm country where you can have a good life and a good school district. No better life available.

That is a LOT of yellow.

What a good name!

Indian names too?

Congrats!

Pathological but productive.

lol, that describes me a little too well..

There's a certain kind of personality that says "I have a problem someone else must have that too - I'll make an app"

The productive part comes when you actually finish the app

Dude, the notch on the phone on your website looks 20% larger, not smaller! /joke

Reply on news.ycombinator.com