250,000 English words currently available as Twitter handles | Hacker News Reader

250,000 English words currently available as Twitter handles

peticol.as

26 pointsred_hare45 comments

I was about to sort them by letter count, but there's a txt of 4 letter handles: http://peticol.as/twitter-handles/4-letter-ok-sounding.txt

They're going fast now that you posted this link!

nill was the best one I saw, looks like someone got to it.

The script generates some false positives on reserved words. It's a bug I need to fix.

Probably a reserved word rather than an account.

Did a 'sort' to list names from least chars to most and didn't like any, except the few that were already gone. Though the many better ones seem to be reserved keywords like 'nill'.

Output at http://pastebin.com/18vCegaT

grep -P '(phobe|phile|ist)\s*$'

@categorist or @pantywaist, anyone?

Hard to believe @abdominohysterectomy is still available. Jackpot.

Edit: Equally fortunate: abdominohysterectomy.com is available.

http://www.whois.com/whois/abdominohysterectomy.com

Jokes asides, it would be useful to cross check this with domain availability and username availability on other _popular_ social sites.

Dictionary word domain names are mostly gone, esp. if you are referring to .COMs.

This is OT: I've always wanted to take a crack at a couple of problems/semi-thought-experiments I came up with:

1) Find the verified Twitter account followed by minimum number of users - This is easy, since Twitter maintains an official list of verified accounts at https://twitter.com/verified/following . We could iterate over this list, and find the minimum.

2) Find the maximum-followed non-verified Twitter account. Now this is a harder problem. Does anyone have any ideas apart from brute-forcing Twitter handles?

2) I think you'd be likely to find it by just crawling the graph, but it'd be very hard to prove that you had found it. For example, @sockington https://twitter.com/sockington has 1.4M followers.

https://twitter.com/UberSoc/

10 million followers. Not verified.

Pretty sure they win. They're in the to 50 on the followers list, and the rest are basically singers or really famous.

At least @arsefeet is available - don't all rush to get it at once

I hope people don't use this to park twitter usernames.

Don't worry, only 90% of the prior million good names are parked. I'm sure it'll never happen. ;)

...and yet every permutation of "Brian Willis" is taken. Many of which are spam accounts which twitter seems completely uninterested in killing off.

I share your frustration. No reasonable permutation of my name and initials or usual handles is available, and most are inactive accounts.

Besides their developer-relations problem, namespace pollution and stagnation is a big problem for Twitter going forward. Who wants to join and use a service when the closest thing they can get to their desired username is a second-class moniker like @ffffirst_last1 or @L4stF1rst88 ?? I've heard this complaint from several of my friends who were late to the Twitter scene. The name availability issue is the main reason I think app.net has any chance of succeeding.

Kind of like what wants a screen name like AzNpRyDe1983 or XXXlilCutiEXXX3 or FastIntegra345?

Some may be reserved keywords - e.g. accounts is available, twitter.com/accounts returns a 404, but you are unable to register the username.

You might want to filter out words which are too long to actually be Twitter handles.

More importantly, thats something I should have thought to do before running this script for 8 hours. Would have eliminated about an hour of requests :)

I made a python script for this purpose a while back. Supports brute force and dictionaries.

https://github.com/process/Twitter-Name-Finder

top 50, sorted by frequency

all me leave events resources myself post status pages accounts positions discuss administrative remove root join session statistics phone friendship blocks focused links responsibilities administered explore suspended sessions receptors discusses characterization practised translate ensuring frontiers stationed industrialization telecommunications distinguishes occurrences condensed resembled rapidity legislatures misunderstanding gastrointestinal administering discharges ensued characterizes

As someone who rather wanted @root, I can say that these are not all available.

Yep. I just sorted his list by something more reasonable than alpha.

Most of these works appear to be unavailable or banned... Unfortunately.

Anything containing the substring "admin" is banned. Which is a PITA when you want to set up a Twitter account for a sysadmin book/service...

One short-ish reasonable sounding one I was surprised wasn't taken was "kobold"...you'd think that some tabletop gaming fan somewhere would have gotten that one!

This is why I like Perl,

  perl -e 'print sort{length $a <=> length $b} <>' english-words.txt > sorted.txt

Thanks ! Just, you're missing a "print" and single quotes would work better :)

Cheers for that! Fixed.

Looks handy indeed, I wasn't aware perl had such potential.

Can you explain what's happening there?

I love that I'm always being shown quicker ways of doing this. Using Perl for this wouldn't have occurred to me, so I'm pleased I saw this today.

What it's doing:

One of the call types of the sort function takes a block as its fist parameter and a list as its second. When called this way, the block should operate on two special variables ($a and $b), returning a -1, 0 or 1 depending upon whether $a should be placed before, beside or after $b in the sorted list. The "<=>" operator does this comparison on numbers, the numbers in question being the lengths of the two variables.

The second parameter here is a read of a file handle (the syntax for this is "<filehandlename>"). When the file handle read is used with no named file handle, it reads the the contents of each parameter the script was passed in turn (or STDIN if none). Perl reads files as lists of strings, with each string being a line in the file.

The sorted list is then printed to STDOUT.

do you mind sharing the output?

Thanks. I'm getting tetramethoxypropenylbenzenes.

By the time you type "@tetramethoxypropenylbenzenes" you have only 111 characters left!

The real experiment is to run the script again and find out how many people are parking the good ones now that i've distributed this list

No need to create a list quite that long, seeing as though Twitter doesn't allow handles longer than 15 characters in length.

Yeah. I realized that after this script ran for 8 hours :)

Could have mentioned link includes them all... Dat mobile loading.

Awesome, got a good one

cool - just snagged one

no 3-letter handlers?

I tested that a while back in 2012.

There's some, but they're all nonsense. Nasty ones like 2q4 for the most part.

not even @2q4 anymore...

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