That's clearly what the New York Times did as well (though probably with far less compute time than Facebook). nytimes3xbfgragh.onion is the easy to remember name they were able to generate.

Just say it out loud: En Why Times Three Ecks Bee Eff Gra{gargle}

Easy to remember.

Its something like facebookcorewwwi.onion - that must have taken a lot of cycles to generate..

IIRC they got the "corewwwi" part instead of complete nonsense purely out of luck, when searching for just "facebook*"

It was over 100,000,000 CPU-hours https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11550922 And they still got extremely lucky to find such a good address. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8538390 It's not usually that easy.

I found blockchainbdgpzk in just under 3 days. It was the sixth blockchain* address I found.

I ran 3x 4 GPU cloud instances on AWS on the old Teslas - which aren't very fast at SHA. IIRC it was doing 15GH/s total

Today you can get ~7GH/s on an Nvidia 1080 so you should be able to find an all-alpha 10 char onion in about a week.

The new cards and some of the password cracking rigs (i'm building a new one now) are able to do SHA1 so quickly that they're a real threat to generating phishing addresses for onions - which is why the DigiCert certificates are required