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Ask HN: How do you go about choosing a cool code name for your hack?

4 points by bhoomit 12 years ago · 4 comments


ElongatedTowel 12 years ago

How do you choose a name for anything anyway? From company names to personal blogs, naming them is a fruitless exercise. In the end you're trying to be clever but instead you end up with something that means wang in vietnamese or is inspired by a straight quote from a line in a book you think fits your character but is really something that speaks to a hundred million people, which is the exact same number of people who read the book in the first place. Then it sounds either obscure or cheesy.

  • DanBC 12 years ago

    > How do you choose a name for anything anyway?

    You find something that people can search for, and that isn't already being used by other companies in the same space. You also check it's not wang in Vietnamese.

    The traditional tricks are much harder to do nowadays. (Kodak using K - "it seems a strong, incisive sort of letter."; Pyrex being a mashup of the Latin words Pyro (fire) and Rex (king)).

adrianwaj 12 years ago

Always thought drug names were interesting. Maybe take two words to describe the hack, transform them into their connotative meaning, then twist them. What's the hack?

thex86 12 years ago

Single character or double character names are the trend these days. (Not saying I support that though!)

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