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Comment by TacticalCoder | Hacker News Reader

> Through making several Extremely Reasonable Assumptions (namely, that parents are myopic, perfectly knowledgeable agents who pick a name based solely on its “uniqueness”)

What a weird assumption. We named our daughter picking four names, starting respectively with the letters 'G', 'A', 'T' and 'C'.

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It's dry humor. The article is soaked in it.

Did you name her Adenine?

Yeah, I was thinking the same thing - as a 1st time new parent you're famously not well plugged into the names currently being chosen by other parents, which is why our son Max was one of 3 in his class

I believe the authors, Katy Blumer, Kate Donahue, Katie Fritz, Kate Ivanovich, Katherine Lee, Katie Luo, Cathy Meng, Katie Van Koevering,

may have had a similar experience to your son.

I have only now realised the reason my name is fairly unique.

My father was a teacher, so he did know names people were using, and for any given name could probably think of a child he wouldn't want me to share a name with!

I definitely looked up what names people were naming their kids when choosing my kid's name. It allowed me to pick one that was not so unusual as to be seen as weird, but wasn't going to clash with everybody else out there either. It worked. He occasionally meets others with his name, but not very often. The only issue is that his name has about five different common spellings.

My name is Michael and I definitely used this data because I didn't want my kids to have very common names. As it turns out, the first person to compile this data in the US was an actuary for the Social Security Administration, also named Michael, who was trying to name his kid and wanted to know what the most common names were so that his kids wouldn't have names that were too common: https://nameberry.com/blog/most-popular-names-how-the-list-w...

As a currently (but ideally not permanently so) childless adult...what does it matter what the other parents are naming their babies?

btw and fwiw, Max is a good name.

You do realize they are just having fun in that paper, right?

I think this person is also having fun - suggesting they would name their kids by following a genetic sequence

But sticking to the familiar crowd-pleasing members of that sequence to make the joke stick, knowing that even on this site working in poor neglected uracil would be trying too hard

All my homies hate uracil

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