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353 points todsacerdoti | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.202s | source
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munificent ◴[] No.46236775[source]
> This would be career suicide in virtually any other technical field.

This article would certainly disagree with you:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._Department_of_Def...

> the Golden Gate Bridge tells you it spans the Golden Gate strait.

Is that even a meaningful distinction? Does anyone think, "Gee, I'd really like to cross the Golden Gate strait?" or do they think "I want to get to Napa?".

> The Hoover Dam is a dam, named after the president who commissioned it, not “Project Thunderfall” or “AquaHold.”

It was actually called the "Boulder Canyon Project" while being built, referred to as "Hoover Dam" even though finished during the Roosevelt administration, officially called "Boulder Dam", and only later officially renamed to "Hoover Dam".

The fact that Herbert Hoover initiated the project tells you nothing meaningful about it. Would "Reitzlib" be a better name than "Requests"?

> If you wrote 100 CLIs, you will never counter with a cobra.

But out in the real world, you could encounter a Shelby Cobra sports car, Bell AH-1 Cobra chopper, USS Cobra (SP-626) patrol boat, Colt Cobra handgun, etc.

> No chemist wakes up and decides to call it “Steve” because Steve is a funny name and they think it’ll make their paper more approachable.

When you open your medicine cabinet, do you look for a jar labeled "acetylsalicylic acid", "2-propylvaleric acid", or "N-acetyl-para-aminophenol"? Probably not.

It's a bad sign when all of the examples in an article don't even agree with the author's point.

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1. rsynnott ◴[] No.46243867[source]
Military codenames are a bit different; they're deliberately random words, assigned so that no-one can guess the nature of the programme based on the name.

(Companies sometimes do this, too, for internal stuff.)