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Comment by hamaluik | Hacker News Reader

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

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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!

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

In some countries if you have a weird name people it means that you are either a foreigner or you parents are complete morons. Some names strongly imply the later.

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

Such as?

In my experience, upper and upper-middle class kids get common names, usually a bit on the conservative side, nothing that sticks out too much. Never crazy spelling, never unique names.

“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? 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.

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.

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

> 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”).

Maybe he meant the name unique, not a unique name.

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.

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'.

I like a common first name and uncommon middle name.

The first name gives anonymity. The middle gives uniqueness that is rarely used except when you want the full formal name and want to be sure you have the right person.

Thank you, I've been running needgap for over 2 years.

You do have a point regarding security implications of the unique names, Considering people get swatted and have even died for their unique social media handle it might not be worth to pursue a unique name for that.

Interesting, I haven't had any trouble with concatenating my first & last name for my public handles like email and had never thought this was a problem. Perks of having a relatively unique last name I guess. My sympathy goes out to all the "John Smith"s of the world!

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/

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.

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!

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).

> 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!

"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".

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.

this is hilarious

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

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.

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?

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?

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

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.

> 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.

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

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.

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

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..

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.

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 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.

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...

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…:)

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

>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.

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...

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

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 ;)

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

I commend you for the effort.

Any chance this will be included in the Fdroid marketplace?

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.

When app developers “nest”...

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...

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