Unsurprisingly, bugbear.com is taken. Surprisingly, it features Paul Graham, Robert Morris, Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston and John McCarthy ( http://www.bugbear.com/roguesgallery.html ).
Bugbear.com is also not a commercial site, it is a guy's personal web presence. I would think that this would be a factor in the value of the bugbear.net name, especially for something homebrew or community oriented.
If he ever did sell to a corporate body then, of course, that would change the dynamics.
Edit: I just noticed a sibling thread talking about bugbear.com being PG's site. Just random luck on my part. Bugbear just came to mind as a defect tracking product name.
That would explain why bugbear's profile ( http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=bugbear ) says "Okay just had to see if I could register it :-) Feel free to delete/lock/change pw."
While it is possible to find <foo>bug.com or even snuffle<foo>bug.com you are unlikely to find <foo> which is better than snuffle and is also available. Indeed, I'm becoming quite partial to snuffle because the word is similar to both snafu ( http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/S/SNAFU-principle.html ) and muffle; going from a very bad situation to greatly reducing unwanted side-effects.
I suppose you could choose mufflebug.com but would either of us thought of it if we hadn't seen snufflebug.com?
