Hacker News Reader

Number domain names seem to be popular in countries that don’t use the latin alphabet - ie China or Japan.

01.ai is pretty cool name and domain … for sure beats grok or calling something open when it is actually closed.

China and Japan also have numerical stock tickers, e.g. Sony's ticker 6758 instead of e.g. SONY.

I guess numeric IDs like that were a consequence of early tech making it hard to deal with more complex character sets ... maybe the association lives on in those cultures?

There's also deeper associations with numbers like 8 representing luck, 4 meaning death etc.

Another reason number domains are popular in Asia is that they are much easier to type, especially historically on mobile

Reply on news.ycombinator.com