

Show HN:  My minimum viable side project - phuff
http://babynamegraphs.com

======
chancho
What exactly does "viable" mean in this context? Because the husband and wife
team behind NameVoyager have had the baby name trend visualization market
cornered for years now.

<http://www.babynamewizard.com/voyager#>

They aren't just using it to drive ad traffic and promote the book, but are
now (since I last looked) actually charging for the visualizations themselves.
And presumably people are paying, but who knows...

On the plus side, this means there's a market, but you've got a long way to go
to catch them, both in regards to the visualizations and the breadth of the
name database. It's a good start, though.

~~~
phuff
Yeah, viable in this context means that you can graph names and there are ads
on the page. All the times we've tried to look at names for popularity when
naming our kids we haven't had just simple visualization tools like this, so I
thought I'd build one.

Then after I started I saw those guys but saw that you have to pay to
visualize it, so I thought "hey, I'll disrupt them " :)

~~~
xyzzyb
Of course there's always Wolfram|Alpha.

<http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=David%2C+John>

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tycho77
Sorry to be a downer, but Wolfram Alpha has beaten you to the punch:

<http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Andrew>

~~~
jaynate
@phuff this is cool because it has a specific purpose and it's simple.
Frankly, if you let the fact that something already exists on the Internet
stop you from starting a projet, you'd never start anything.

There will always be room to iterate on good ideas. There were MP3 players on
the market before the iPod, right? And focusing on design or simplicity, or
both, can play into what your MVP is. Minimum viable is relative to your
product principles.

The one thing i would suggest is that ads are not minimally viable for your
users. It may be necessary for you to keep your project up and running, but
not MVP unless they provide some benefit to your users in line with your
product principles.

Nice work!

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pamelafox
I can't remember the name of the book, but I remember reading that people name
babies both after celebrities and after names of the higher class people
around them (with the goal of their children appearing higher class than they
actually are). The latter case is interesting, because it goes in a cycle -
the higher class folks pick unique names for their children, the lower class
folks copy them in the next generation so those names become common, and the
higher class folks pick new names in the next cycle.

So if the data was there, it'd be interesting to show these graphs both
alongside celebrity popularity over time and also to divide the graphs based
on socio-economic lines, to see if that is still happening.

~~~
lemma
I think the book is Freakonomics (don't have it here to check).

~~~
jarofgreen
Pretty sure that's it. The first one.

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JonathanBouman
Fix the XSS:
[http://babynamegraphs.com/male/multipleNamesGraph?names%5B%5...](http://babynamegraphs.com/male/multipleNamesGraph?names%5B%5D=%3Cmarquee%3Exss)

~~~
phuff
Thanks

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spacejunkie
Try this:

[http://babynamegraphs.com/female/multipleNamesGraph?names%5B...](http://babynamegraphs.com/female/multipleNamesGraph?names%5B%5D=mark)

and double click to show the "all time" graph.

Note this shows _females_.

And, of course, you have to see what this returns:

[http://babynamegraphs.com/male/multipleNamesGraph?names%5B%5...](http://babynamegraphs.com/male/multipleNamesGraph?names%5B%5D=sue)

~~~
phuff
Yeah, I actually have them separated this way because I couldn't think of a
great way to label/display male + female names for the same graph at the same
time. I've thought of only showing the predominant gender for each name, but
then doozies like the female John
[http://babynamegraphs.com/female/multipleNamesGraph?names[]=...](http://babynamegraphs.com/female/multipleNamesGraph?names\[\]=John)
would be unavailable :)

------
tikhonj
My name (Tikhon) didn't even get a graph :( Probably because it's an
exceptionally uncommon name (but not uncommon enough for me to get it as a
username).

In the list of names on the graph, could you make the "X" look a little bit
more like a UI element? The first time I saw it, I thought it was just a
letter. I think even just aligning the X's along the right side of the
rectangles would help.

~~~
phuff
That's a good idea. Thanks! Also, I have only crawled the SSA site for the
names, so if it's not in the top 1000 for some year in the USA since 1880 it
won't be in there.

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phzbOx
Small hack: Instead of using "X" for the delete icon, use "&times;". It looks
more like a delete/close button and still avoid the trouble to create an
image.

~~~
phuff
Hey, thanks for the tip! I'll check it out.

------
estel
Out of interest, what's the data source? US only?

~~~
phuff
Yeah, I scraped it from the social security website, so US only for right now.

~~~
jarofgreen
Would be good to have that clear on the website, that was my first Q. Cos I
suspect from knowledge of my name and the lookup I just did on your site, the
UK data looks very different :-) If you could compare countries that would be
cool.

------
philwelch
A lot of interesting data. Apparently the name Hillary massively plummeted in
popularity during the Clinton administration, but then spiked during the 2008
elections!

There was also a brief Geraldine fad in 1988, coinciding with Geraldine
Ferraro's candidacy for Vice President.

------
ajhai
It reminded me of the assignment from Google's Python Class
[http://code.google.com/edu/languages/google-python-
class/exe...](http://code.google.com/edu/languages/google-python-
class/exercises/baby-names.html) :)

~~~
rplnt
Exactly why I looked this name up
[http://babynamegraphs.com/female/multipleNamesGraph?names%5B...](http://babynamegraphs.com/female/multipleNamesGraph?names%5B%5D=Trinity&gender=female)

------
eurleif
I'd suggest putting focus in the 'Add another name' text box after every
reload. If I want to add multiple names, it's irritating to have to reach for
the mouse to put the focus back in the textbox for each one.

~~~
phuff
Good call, I'll add that in. Thanks.

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mmacneil
You could mash this with a name visualization hack I did in the spring:
<http://namestofaces.com/>

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jshen
Styling is messed up on an iPad

~~~
justincormack
Styling ok for me but the drag and double click actions dont work...

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dylangs1030
Well the design is good, simple to use, and most important: effective.
Unfortunately, unless you and I have a different definition of viable, this
idea isn't very lucrative. I've seen a lot of different websites with this
same idea, how is yours different?

~~~
phuff
It's a good question. Right now I'm not sure. I hadn't seen the
babynameclusters guy down below :)

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mtgentry
this is dope, nice work :)

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thigbee
Neat. My name (Tristan) went from #451 in 1994 to #121 in 1995. Maybe because
Brad Pitt played a character named Tristan in Legends of the Fall in 1994?

~~~
brfox
Here's a website I made a few years ago:
<http://www.babynameclusters.com/name/Tristan/Male>

That's a good guess regarding the Brad Pitt character. I should add movie
character names - those might be more influential than famous people in
wikipedia.

~~~
brador
What's the data source on that one? Is it a wiki scrape?

