As of about 11pm yesterday, I’m the proud owner of 0hats.com.

On Friday, I received a link to a document hosted on 17hats.com, which as far as I can tell is some kind of CRM. 17 is a fun number¹, and the concept of wearing 17 is a silly one and got a chuckle out of me. On a whim, I checked if 19hats.com (the next largest prime quantity of hats) was taken. It was. 23hats? Taken. 29hats? Also taken. Well then, what’s the smallest numbered hat quantity that I could register as my own domain?

A first attempt went something like this:

% for i in {1..50}; do dig ${i}hats.com | grep -i nxdomain >/dev/null && echo ${i}hats.com is available; done
5hats.com is available
16hats.com is available
26hats.com is available
28hats.com is available
30hats.com is available
35hats.com is available
36hats.com is available
37hats.com is available
41hats.com is available
43hats.com is available
44hats.com is available
46hats.com is available
48hats.com is available
49hats.com is available
%

(That’s not exactly right, as 5hats.com is registered, but doesn’t have a DNS entry associated with it.)

Anyway, I ended up getting well and truly nerd sniped by the problem—how many of these are registered? What are they used for? What’s the smallest number of hats whose domain name I could own?

So a few hours of Go code later, 0hats.com graced belabored the world with its presence.

In short, for each domain from 0hats.com to some limit (I’ve chosen 50, rather arbitrarily):

• Checks if the domain is registered with a whois lookup, and if it is, notes the owner
• Does a DNS lookup to see if there may be anything hosted at the site
• Opens a geckodriver instances, browses to the page, grabs the title, and takes a screenshot.
• and then renders the whole thing to one big list.

I’ve already snagged the smallest possible non-negative quantity of hats, but if anyone is interested, 16hats.com is available at the time of writing!

I also did a very basic scan of {51..1000} hats; it seems that registrations drop off pretty quickly after 50.

package main

import (
	"fmt"

	"github.com/likexian/whois"
	whoisparser "github.com/likexian/whois-parser"
)

func main() {
	for i := 0; i < 1000; i++ {
		domainName := fmt.Sprintf("%vhats.com", i)
		// Check if domain is registered
		query_result, err := whois.Whois(domainName)
		if err != nil {
			panic(err)
		}
		_, err = whoisparser.Parse(query_result)
		if err == whoisparser.ErrNotFoundDomain {
			fmt.Println(domainName, " is available")
		} else if err != nil {
			panic(err)
		} else {
			fmt.Println(domainName, " is taken")
		}

	}

}

% time go run main.go >/dev/null
go run main.go  2.58s user 1.96s system 1% cpu 5:03.92 total
% go run main.go | grep "taken" | wc -l  # How many in total?
77
% go run main.go | tail +52 | grep "taken" | wc -l  # How many above 50?
39
% go run main.go | tail +52 | grep "taken"
51hats.com  is taken
52hats.com  is taken
58hats.com  is taken
66hats.com  is taken
68hats.com  is taken
69hats.com  is taken
73hats.com  is taken
80hats.com  is taken
83hats.com  is taken
86hats.com  is taken
88hats.com  is taken
89hats.com  is taken
97hats.com  is taken
99hats.com  is taken
100hats.com  is taken
101hats.com  is taken
112hats.com  is taken
123hats.com  is taken
208hats.com  is taken
210hats.com  is taken
234hats.com  is taken
241hats.com  is taken
247hats.com  is taken
252hats.com  is taken
300hats.com  is taken
310hats.com  is taken
360hats.com  is taken
365hats.com  is taken
386hats.com  is taken
420hats.com  is taken
444hats.com  is taken
500hats.com  is taken
501hats.com  is taken
586hats.com  is taken
710hats.com  is taken
777hats.com  is taken
802hats.com  is taken
906hats.com  is taken
911hats.com  is taken