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Comment by ogogmad | Hacker News Reader

We should go back to using classical-sounding names: Virtua, imperia, rex, vita, Hercules. And sticking the letter X in there: reXX

Actually, one of the best named products I remember (for devs) was Big Worlds. It was an engine for making MMORPGs. I think the name had a clever mystique.

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The real solution is to use GUIDs. One of the best games of 2029 will be Project 28AC8F07, the second in the B76A7CF0 series.

Naming is really hard. I concur with your satire tho in all honesty, these days, when I start a new project I name it "foo", "project", or "1" ("0" is too special), and then rename it something more apt if it actually goes somewhere.

It's freeing to "break the rules" and code with single letter variable names, first letter that comes to mind. ;)

Someday I'll have a code graduate past 'temp.py'

> "0" is too special

And yet Project Zero exists :-)

These names are too short. Think of all the collisions. Use a full UUID, e.g: {84347ab5-45e1-4801-98fc-685624039068}

Googling your product will always be quite nice

I was on mobile and was becoming fatigued trying to type random hex characters. It’s surprisingly time consuming, almost as much as thinking up an actual project name.

That's why new companies will spring up around NGAS, Name Generation As A Service. Full servers dedicated to finding the best names in the namespace and renting them for you, because who really wants to self-host a name those days, so exhausting.

It's the worst on iOS where you have to toggle between the alphabet and numeric layers. Some Android keyboards have the good sense to display numbers above the letters.

Also use a true randomness source to minimize the chance for collision.

You need to keep your project names secret, otherwise people will maliciously collide them on purpose.

It has always disturbed me that magician’s names of power in books are far too short: I presume there is more encoding than just the letters - the intonation perhaps contains a lot of entropy. Otherwise a name like Ged could be brute forced (or would that make a good short fantasy story?)

Edit: Related is the short story “The nine billion names of god” - the story is archived a bit incorrectly, it starts in middle of the page with no heading, with the line “This is a slightly unusual request”: https://archive.org/stream/ninebillionnames00clar/ninebillio...

I think that's the plot of "Unsong" (I never finished it though)

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