[HN Gopher] I moderate /r/kafka; people mistake it as a subreddi...
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       I moderate /r/kafka; people mistake it as a subreddit about kafka
       the product
        
       Author : mooreds
       Score  : 141 points
       Date   : 2021-11-21 15:41 UTC (7 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (twitter.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
        
       | martinflack wrote:
       | I thought we solved this in the 1980's by usenet groups having
       | prefixes like comp.*, rec.*, hum.* etc...
        
         | PawBer wrote:
         | Reddit subreddit creation form actually recommends that
         | subreddit names should end with a suffix that describes just
         | that e.g. kafkasoftware. The lack of enforcement of this rule
         | caused it to become forgotten.
        
           | skinnymuch wrote:
           | I mr would be unfair if this only got enforced on newer
           | subreddits. They already have to compete with other
           | subreddits that got easy names early on.
           | 
           | If all subreddits had to transition to this. Cool. Obviously
           | that isn't going to happen.
        
         | donio wrote:
         | That helped but not always. alt.games.gb which used to be a
         | group for Galactic Bloodshed got overrun by Gameboy posts at
         | some point. And there was a time period when gnu.emacs.help got
         | some posts related to Apple's eMac line.
        
           | dtech wrote:
           | Or see this post [1] about comp.windows.news, which is not
           | about Microsoft Windows
           | 
           | [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29298481
        
       | pushcx wrote:
       | I moderate https://lobste.rs; people mistake it as a site about a
       | self-help guru. (both fans and anti-fans)
       | 
       | We added a note about it: https://lobste.rs/about#michaelbolton
       | People still make the assumption but at least they now usually
       | get that link as a rebuttal.
        
         | wpietri wrote:
         | I deeply appreciate the anchor name here. Kudos! The only
         | problem is now I have to go look for my stapler.
        
       | 1970-01-01 wrote:
       | It's the old whitehouse.gov / whitehouse.com problem. I'm sure
       | there are earlier examples but that one is my favorite.
        
       | wodenokoto wrote:
       | Given that Kafka books are about impenetrable bureaucratic
       | worlds, why is Kafka called Kafka? Sounds like it's a tool to
       | make sure your infrastructure is hard to comprehend.
        
         | marcosdumay wrote:
         | That's only one of his famous books. There is another about
         | bugs appearing for no good reason on unexpected places.
        
         | zwkrt wrote:
         | Comment I made last summer:
         | 
         | It's rare a piece of tech has a more fitting name! "Is your
         | orgs politics so complicated that direct team-to-team
         | communication has broken down? Is your business process subject
         | to unannounced violent change? Bogged down by consistent DB
         | schemas and API versioning? Tired of retries on failed
         | messages? Introducing Kafka by Apache: an easy to use, highly
         | configurable, persistently stored ephemeral centralized
         | federated event based messaging data analytics Single Source of
         | Truth as a Service that can scale with any enterprise-sized
         | dysfunction!"
        
           | almeria wrote:
           | Anything more about Kafka you can tell us?
           | 
           | Seriously, the one time I was in a situation where much of
           | the team seemed hellbent on this "just put all in Kafka" idea
           | (without really understanding why, exactly) the arguments
           | they came up with were not too dissimilar from what you've
           | shared with us above. It all seemed to come down to "OMG
           | databases are hard, schemas are hard, our customers don't
           | understand the data they're shoving at us. But Kafka will
           | take care of all of that for us. Because, you know, shiny."
           | 
           | That said I'd still like to have a more ... balanced
           | understanding of why Kafka may not necessarily be The Answer,
           | and/or have more hidden complexity or other negative
           | tradeoffs than we may have bargained for.
        
             | yongjik wrote:
             | I only had a brief exposure to it, but my impression is
             | that it's sort of a message queue optimized for very large
             | data (TB or more). So, for example, there's no way to
             | easily answer questions like "How many requests did server
             | X generate between 1pm and 2pm and how many of them were
             | served by server Y?" because when your data doesn't fit in
             | a single machine, supporting such queries requires a lot of
             | bookkeeping. If you never need them, you don't want to pay
             | for them.
             | 
             | Of course, when have a few _megabytes_ of data and you
             | route it through Kafka, then all you get is an opaque
             | message queue where you can 't see which message went from
             | where to where. Good luck debugging any issues. But, hey,
             | you got to use Kafka.
        
         | Lio wrote:
         | I went to talk by RMS some time in the late 90s, early 00s.
         | 
         | The one thing I remember RMS saying after all this time is that
         | "the whole point of writing software is so that you can give it
         | a funny name".
         | 
         | All things considered, I still think that's good advice.
        
           | perl4ever wrote:
           | The whole point of naming things is so you can find them
           | later.
           | 
           | Why can't people follow the simple rule of not reusing any
           | word or name that's already in use?
           | 
           | They don't seem to have a problem with racehorses.
           | 
           | In fact, why not get the most comprehensive list of racehorse
           | names to date, and start using them for new software projects
           | - then nobody will have to be creative until they run out.
        
             | egypturnash wrote:
             | "I'm an expert in Potoooooooo".
             | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potoooooooo
        
         | 0des wrote:
         | You know it's just young people working at these bigcorps
         | making our tooling, right?
        
         | grzm wrote:
         | > Jay Kreps chose to name the software after the author Franz
         | Kafka because it is "a system optimized for writing", and he
         | liked Kafka's work.
         | 
         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Kafka#History
        
         | yongjik wrote:
         | It does tend to prompt a developer onto a sudden fit of self-
         | awareness ("Why am I reading this code? Why are we using this?
         | What am I doing with my life?"), so I think it's quite aptly
         | named.
        
       | maze-le wrote:
       | A big fat pinned exclamation on the top of the feed might help...
       | On the other hand, the village-folk probably think Barnabas is
       | behind it and simply ignore it.
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | cmacleod4 wrote:
       | I follow /r/Tcl which is dedicated to the Tcl scripting language,
       | but recently gets lots of inappropriate posts about the products
       | of the TCL electronics company :-(
       | 
       | This is not a new problem, I remember around 25 years ago when
       | the usenet news group comp.windows.news, which was dedicated to
       | Sun's "Network Extensible Window System", became overwhelmed by
       | posts from people who thought it was for news about Microsoft
       | Windows.
        
       | throwaway984393 wrote:
       | I died when CockroachDB popped up in the thread
        
       | irthomasthomas wrote:
       | Not a redditor but I heard https://old.reddit.com/r/trees is one
       | of the best examples of this. (/>=V<=)/-~
        
         | erk__ wrote:
         | And of course https://old.reddit.com/r/marijuanaenthusiasts/ on
         | the other side of that
        
         | tfehring wrote:
         | See also: https://old.reddit.com/r/MarijuanaEnthusiasts
        
         | 1_player wrote:
         | And the sub for quitting weed is called
         | https://old.reddit.com/r/leaves
        
       | brockrockman wrote:
       | /r/tcl has a similar problem -- rare topical posts and frequent
       | TV support questions.
        
         | gmfawcett wrote:
         | Same with /r/mercury. Come and post questions about this
         | interesting logic / functional programming language! Or be like
         | everyone else, and post about the metal, the planet, or your
         | star sign. :P
        
       | pfkurtz wrote:
       | I want every comment about this here and on Twitter tattooed over
       | every inch of my body and codebase. Love it.
        
       | markus_zhang wrote:
       | That's why I believe technical products should have better names.
       | From HN you can see new products with very common names launched
       | every month.
        
         | cwp wrote:
         | I think this is actually getting better. A while back there was
         | a trend of choosing the most generic name possible. For
         | example, who though "node" would be a good name for a
         | Javascript runtime? Or that "parse" would obviously be a mobile
         | app backend framework? Yeesh. At least we didn't have a project
         | named "Thing".
        
           | perl4ever wrote:
           | After years of only doing higher level scripting and SQL,
           | I've been trying to learn to program Android recently, and it
           | seems like there are dozens of classes that are all just
           | synonyms for "Thing" or "Action".
           | 
           | And some of the names are reused in Android even though they
           | are in standard Java libraries.
           | 
           | It's probably invisible to people who have been using it all
           | along, but for me, it's absurd and infuriating because almost
           | nothing has a name that places it in a larger context.
           | 
           | Google seems to have a particular issue with naming things.
           | 
           | If you _can 't_ name something in a meaningful way, the next
           | best thing is to name it something completely unique, and not
           | just a generic synonym.
        
             | perl4ever wrote:
             | Also, if you have created the 20th asynchronous task
             | managing class, _please_ put it in context with all the
             | others - which are deprecated, which are good for what use
             | case, etc.
             | 
             | Alsoalso why do we need "factories" for abstract objects
             | that relate to other abstract objects that are some sort of
             | "thing"?
             | 
             | I have to wonder if some of this has to do with really
             | smart people coming to work at Google, adding something
             | without ever really grokking the whole mess, and then
             | leaving after a couple of years because they got their tour
             | of duty for their resume.
        
         | billfruit wrote:
         | Even something like "c" does not look like a good name anymore.
         | For example searching for something C related often turns up
         | hundreds of links for C++, C# many of them not relevant to the
         | search topic.
         | 
         | Also choosing names with non-obvious pronunciation is also a
         | peeve, sometimes it can become a marker between those who know
         | how to pronounce it and those who don't. For example Godot.
        
           | techdragon wrote:
           | Like the "Go" programming language. Only Google could have
           | gotten away with this name since to be honest I was pretty
           | sure it used to be a "do not brother indexing"/"stop word"
           | back in the day. So I honestly suspect Google had to alter
           | their search engine to search for the programming language
           | they invented just because they made it impossible to search
           | for because of how bad the name is.
        
             | PeterisP wrote:
             | For me it seems like that the common workarounds (searching
             | for "golang" "csharp" etc) make it not really a problem.
        
             | ectopod wrote:
             | When Go was new they recommended using "golang" for web
             | searches. I still do though it sounds like it's unnecessary
             | now.
        
               | chrsig wrote:
               | there's also a non trivial amount of zealots that then
               | complain when people refer to the language as
               | "golang"...it's not correct, but hardly surprising either
        
               | marcosdumay wrote:
               | At this point clang and rcran should as well change their
               | official names. Golang has better possibilities on the
               | horizon, but it wouldn't hurt either.
        
             | matsemann wrote:
             | They did alter it for google+, at least.
        
               | webmaven wrote:
               | _> They did alter it for google+, at least._
               | 
               | Yes, and nerfed the + search operator in the process.
        
             | bee_rider wrote:
             | C gets a pass because it is older than search engines, but
             | Go was a pretty bad name.
        
           | jeroenhd wrote:
           | > Even something like "c" does not look like a good name
           | anymore. For example searching for something C related often
           | turns up hundreds of links for C++, C# many of them not
           | relevant to the search topic.
           | 
           | That's not a naming problem as much as it's a search engine
           | problem. Search engines ignore anything that's not remotely
           | alphabetic so for the longest time Google saw "C++ C#" as "C
           | C". More and more characters are taken into account when
           | searching these days, but it's still very error prone today.
           | 
           | If anything, C# was a mistake because it was developed after
           | the first search engines entered the web. Then again, this
           | was made by the same company that developed frameworks called
           | "COM", "COM+" and ".NET". The names C and C++ were chosen way
           | before this could have ever been perceived as a problem,
           | because only lunatics and tinfoil hats could have predicted
           | the internet in its current form all the way back in 1983.
           | 
           | In my experience, adding a revision (C99, C11, C17) to a
           | search query often gets more relevant results specifically
           | for C actual. For C++ the search term cpp always works for
           | me. It's a bit of a pain to teach yourself to use, but after
           | a while you start to get used to it.
        
         | chrsig wrote:
         | I've learned to really loathe 'fun' names for projects
         | (especially internal-only projects). it really just obscures
         | whatever the project is intended to do.
         | 
         | AWS is probably the worst in this regard...so many services
         | with names that give no indication about what the service
         | actually does.
        
           | tayo42 wrote:
           | I can't pick a side on this. I agree with you in general but
           | also it's nice to be reminded that there's a human and
           | personal element to things sometimes. I normally name what
           | ever I'm working on to be clear and boring though.
        
             | chrsig wrote:
             | I understand the distaste for the stiffness of descriptive
             | names...but I've found that over time trying to explain why
             | a project has a clever name, or what it really does, to be
             | quite arduous.
             | 
             | And usually not too long after I've coined a fun name for a
             | project, I wind up feeling like it's cringy, and start to
             | loathe when other people talk about it.
        
         | jl6 wrote:
         | Trademarks exist to solve this problem but they're typically
         | too expensive for casual projects. What we need is some good
         | sportsmanship amongst amateurs. It's bad manners to name your
         | thing using a word that is already taken.
        
         | teddyh wrote:
         | People have also been complaining about this for many years:
         | 
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12201353#12204630
        
           | Macha wrote:
           | They've even been making slightly sarcastic browser games
           | like "Pokemon or Big Data":
           | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10622752
        
         | ogogmad wrote:
         | We should go back to using classical-sounding names: Virtua,
         | imperia, rex, vita, Hercules. And sticking the letter X in
         | there: reXX
         | 
         | Actually, one of the best named products I remember (for devs)
         | was Big Worlds. It was an engine for making MMORPGs. I think
         | the name had a clever mystique.
        
           | emerged wrote:
           | The real solution is to use GUIDs. One of the best games of
           | 2029 will be Project 28AC8F07, the second in the B76A7CF0
           | series.
        
             | loxias wrote:
             | Naming is really hard. I concur with your satire tho in all
             | honesty, these days, when I start a new project I name it
             | "foo", "project", or "1" ("0" is too special), and then
             | rename it something more apt if it actually goes somewhere.
             | 
             | It's freeing to "break the rules" and code with single
             | letter variable names, first letter that comes to mind. ;)
        
               | signal11 wrote:
               | > "0" is too special
               | 
               | And yet Project Zero exists :-)
        
             | JCWasmx86 wrote:
             | These names are too short. Think of all the collisions. Use
             | a full UUID, e.g: {84347ab5-45e1-4801-98fc-685624039068}
             | 
             | Googling your product will always be quite nice
        
               | kuroguro wrote:
               | Also use a true randomness source to minimize the chance
               | for collision.
        
               | robocat wrote:
               | You need to keep your project names secret, otherwise
               | people will maliciously collide them on purpose.
               | 
               | It has always disturbed me that magician's names of power
               | in books are far too short: I presume there is more
               | encoding than just the letters - the intonation perhaps
               | contains a lot of entropy. Otherwise a name like Ged
               | could be brute forced (or would that make a good short
               | fantasy story?)
               | 
               | Edit: Related is the short story "The nine billion names
               | of god" - the story is archived a bit incorrectly, it
               | starts in middle of the page with no heading, with the
               | line "This is a slightly unusual request": https://archiv
               | e.org/stream/ninebillionnames00clar/ninebillio...
        
               | _dain_ wrote:
               | I think that's the plot of "Unsong" (I never finished it
               | though)
        
               | emerged wrote:
               | I was on mobile and was becoming fatigued trying to type
               | random hex characters. It's surprisingly time consuming,
               | almost as much as thinking up an actual project name.
        
               | BeFlatXIII wrote:
               | It's the worst on iOS where you have to toggle between
               | the alphabet and numeric layers. Some Android keyboards
               | have the good sense to display numbers above the letters.
        
               | Banana699 wrote:
               | That's why new companies will spring up around NGAS, Name
               | Generation As A Service. Full servers dedicated to
               | finding the best names in the namespace and renting them
               | for you, because who really wants to self-host a name
               | those days, so exhausting.
        
         | dan-robertson wrote:
         | Every distributed system should be called hydra because it has
         | multiple heads and recovers when one dies. Everything else
         | should be called epiousios which is safe as no one knows what
         | it means, or maybe some combination of words about dynamic
         | entropy.
        
         | jcynix wrote:
         | I agree. Apple Mail, Apple Safari, Microsoft Windows, etc pp.
         | Makes certain searches hard or almost impossible (until the
         | arrival of the semantic web).
         | 
         | You'd expect that the people who chose these "names" have dogs
         | named "dog" and their childs have names like boy" or "girl" ...
        
           | almaember wrote:
           | To be fair, Windows was named way before the WWW was a thing.
           | And Apple Mail is an email client, so it absolutely makes
           | sense.
        
         | NoboruWataya wrote:
         | I agree. I've recently become interested in the Gemini
         | protocol, but between the space programme, the crypto exchange
         | and various other uses of the word it's difficult to find
         | related content without some extra Google-fu. It's exacerbated
         | by the fact that most software written for the protocol tends
         | to stick with the space theme.
         | 
         | I'm not sure if there's a term for it but it's like linguistic
         | debris. The namespace is being polluted; eventually it won't be
         | obvious what any particular word refers to.
        
           | Kye wrote:
           | Linguistic Kessler syndrome
        
       | oconnor663 wrote:
       | r/rust has a similar problem. It's also the name of a popular
       | game.
        
         | conradfr wrote:
         | r/elixir as well, as apparently there's a crypto with that
         | name.
         | 
         | When I google "elixir strings" I also only get results for
         | Elixir guitar strings instead of the hex doc page I'm looking
         | for :)
        
         | bee_rider wrote:
         | The name for the game's subreddit is apparently "r/playrust."
         | IMO they missed the opportunity to use r/ust instead.
        
         | nestorD wrote:
         | I came here to say that and had that they have a bot to notify
         | people who might be on the wrong reddit. It seems to do a good
         | job as those post are rare nowadays.
         | 
         | A similar bot (using a naive bayesian classifier and a few
         | examples) should be easy to build for the /r/kafka reddit.
        
         | Buttons840 wrote:
         | At least the Rust language will outlive the Rust game.
         | Hopefully.
        
       | NikolaeVarius wrote:
       | Kafka is optimized for writing, reading is not part of the spec.
        
         | j-pb wrote:
         | Nononono, you see; Kafka is a single writer multiple reader
         | system and therefore highly scalable. Sadly leader-election was
         | never implemented and the system is in a read-only state since
         | the main died in 1924.
        
         | [deleted]
        
       | dmead wrote:
       | I used to organize Philly lambda, a meetup group about functional
       | programs languages.
       | 
       | Many people joined obviously thinking it was a gay right activist
       | group.
        
       | saurik wrote:
       | The premise of everyone using short unique strings to represent
       | themselves and their projects--particularly when the uniqueness
       | property is sharded across numerous disparate incompatible
       | namespaces (reddit, Twitter, Telegram, Hacker News, ClubHouse,
       | every individual TLD... the list goes on and on: like, Oculus and
       | Facebook seriously don't even share a namespace! :/)--is
       | _ridiculous_ , and doubly-so when those names cannot be changed
       | and are required to be _permanent_ , which is simply _not_ how
       | names of any form work in the real world anyway (which I will
       | note has the added issue of being actively cruel to people whose
       | names, given or chosen, have good reason to be changed due to
       | connections with core identity or past trauma). Amazingly, it isn
       | 't even how _trademarks_ work, despite all the hoopla about how
       | they allow you to  "own words": multiple parties _absolutely_ are
       | allowed to use the same name if they exist in separate  "markets"
       | (such as a bakery and a software company).
       | 
       | If there are two things people think of as "kafka" (even if kafka
       | is one of _multiple_ names, identifiers, or euphemisms something
       | is or _has been_ known by!!), the descriptors should be allowed
       | to all co-exist and users should discover the actual referents
       | (which at that point might be identified by a UUID) via
       | contextual search, direct links, or disambiguation pages.
       | Projects that understand this at a deep level and reject the
       | premise of simultaneously permanent unique human grokkable
       | identifiers--projects such as Discord, which at least suffixes
       | usernames with numbers to disambiguate conflicts--deserve our
       | _unending respect_ , as it is just so _easy_ to not give a shit
       | and build a system with usernames: no one was ever fired for
       | being part of this problem, and people will defend to their dying
       | breath how important these namespaces are without ever addressing
       | the practical world of what happens when there are thousands of
       | unrelated namespaces attempting to serve tens of billions of
       | users (and no: this isn 't a wild exaggeration, as products that
       | exist for decades can serve more unique humans than were alive at
       | any given moment).
        
       | 37ef_ced3 wrote:
       | The psychedelic rock band Elder has subreddit r/elder and you can
       | imagine the geriatric misposting that occurs.
       | 
       | If you haven't heard Elder, listen to this masterpiece:
       | 
       | https://youtu.be/-nDsO30bUx0
       | 
       | Epic.
        
       | sebow wrote:
       | I always cringe at people using reddit or similar places as a way
       | to interact with their customers or users.It's just a bad idea.
       | This is not the same as talking about a product that is FOSS/free
       | like emacs, when the support is de facto entirely community-
       | based.
       | 
       | A forum/ a semi-anonymous board would provide the same utility as
       | reddit does, without all the negative drawbacks(which are and
       | people ignore them).The funny thing is that the solutions for
       | these kinds of interactions multiplied compared to 5-10+ years
       | ago where you had 2-3 forum options.I don't think it's a naming
       | issue, it's a "swipe-down i'm lazy" issue from the low attention
       | span tiktok generation.On one hand people grown accustomed to not
       | try to hack the software at all and ask for help at every step of
       | the way, and on the other hand, that help better be asked really
       | easily.
        
         | Sunspark wrote:
         | The interface and the approach by the site owner makes a
         | difference.
         | 
         | I hated looking at threads on Microsoft or Intel's forums. Many
         | replies to postings were clearly level 1 outsourced agents in
         | India or some other faraway place reading from a script. It was
         | plainly obvious because many times their response would not
         | have much to do at all with what the OP was asking after, and
         | all it did was just aggravate people because they felt they
         | were not being heard. Lots of noise, no signal.
         | 
         | On reddit, one doesn't have this infestation of script-reading
         | call-centre agents and can often find the information you need.
         | Of course, reddit is not perfect either. Rules are arbitrarily
         | interpreted by many mods, and there is no avenue for review or
         | appeal to a higher authority.
         | 
         | That said, I do like classic web forums. They're great,
         | everything is subject-specific. But one downside to them is
         | that you have to travel to them to view them as opposed to
         | being on an aggregator like reddit where people are already
         | there and might have subscribed to a sub.
         | 
         | A lot of companies use Facebook for their customer interactions
         | because they don't need to do much.. the business page template
         | is pre-defined.
        
           | kgran wrote:
           | I use RSS feeds for some forums. For example, phpBB-based
           | forums provide such feeds for new messages in a thread or new
           | threads in a forum. The downside is that you could not reply
           | using your feedreader. But then again, I'm more of a lurker
           | than a partaker, so that's not much of a problem for me.
        
         | klyrs wrote:
         | Indeed, I've asked for help on a reddit, because the install
         | instructions said "get stuck? ask on our reddit!" Got zero
         | help, just one person saying "there's no bugs in that build,
         | just follow the instructions" and that was the end of it.
         | _sigh_. It could have happened anywhere, but redditors seem to
         | relish in having a bad attitude.
        
         | 323 wrote:
         | If I have a question about VS Code, or Ubuntu, I can just pop
         | on the respective subreddit and quickly ask it.
         | 
         | No way I'm going to create a forum account, confirm the email,
         | save the password, just for a on off.
        
         | caslon wrote:
         | The reason to avoid running your own forum is because the cost
         | of effort to interact on a bespoke forum is lower than it is on
         | a dedicated one. Subreddits usually ban people from posting who
         | have under a specific amount of points; this stopped the
         | illiterate from posting for a very long time, up until the
         | parent company started pushing the mobile app and punishing
         | subreddits that do. If you compare the discussion quality on a
         | subreddit that still enforces quality posters with, say,
         | Apple's bespoke forum, you'll quickly see why the platform is
         | useful.
        
         | rp1 wrote:
         | I think you're being unfair to Reddit and others like it
         | (thinking specifically of Discord). I run a product that has
         | extensive community interaction, and Discord has been a life
         | saver. There is no way we could have convinced people to sign
         | up for a random forum, but they're happy to use Discord, which
         | makes joining via invite link trivial. It also works better for
         | synchronous communication. If someone reports an issue, I can
         | immediately DM them and have them DM me back some info. It just
         | works SO much better than a forum.
         | 
         | Have you tried any alternatives to a forum? I see similar
         | sentiment to your post a lot on HN, and the impression I always
         | get is that people haven't given alternatives an honest chance.
         | There is a reason the forum is dying. The alternatives are
         | simply better.
        
       | egypturnash wrote:
       | Every now and then someone goes to /r/discordian looking for help
       | with their chat account bans fnord and it's always amusing, if a
       | bit repetitive, to see the torrent of incomprehensible Erisian
       | shibboleths deployed to make it clear that there will be no help
       | here.
        
         | Krasnol wrote:
         | Kallisti!
        
       | annoyingnoob wrote:
       | Believe it or not, naming things is one of the hardest things we
       | do in computer science and information technology.
        
         | anon9001 wrote:
         | The two problems in CS are naming things, cache invalidation,
         | and off by one errors.
        
           | rvense wrote:
           | No, the two problems in CS are that we only one joke and it's
           | not funny.
        
             | oxfeed65261 wrote:
             | We actually have 10 jokes, but neither is funny.
        
         | rvense wrote:
         | It is! But I heard the hardest thing is coming up with new
         | jokes.
        
           | bee_rider wrote:
           | Of course, one of the most important skills for academic CS
           | lies at the intersection of these two problems -- coming up
           | with names that lend themselves to funny conference paper
           | titles.
        
         | bserge wrote:
         | I don't believe it since I can come up with half a dozen names
         | for anything and they'd be a good fit.
         | 
         | I may be in the wrong line of work, actually.
        
       | 1_player wrote:
       | Not sure I sympathise with an account titled "Programming has
       | been a disaster for the Human Race" with "I think all tech people
       | should be thrown in prison." as tagline.
       | 
       | You might say it's tongue-in-cheek, but you never know on
       | Twitter.
        
         | one_off_comment wrote:
         | Meh. I am a tech people, and I'd gladly go to prison if all the
         | other tech people had to go, too.
        
       | ddek wrote:
       | This is a well known problem in reddit. The self-aware joke is
       | /r/suberbowl, which is commonly mistaken for a football game,
       | when it's really a place for suberb owl pics.
       | 
       | I remember /r/crypto having predictable problems, given its a
       | fairly small community going back long before cryptocurrency
       | gained mainstream attention.
        
         | oasisbob wrote:
         | Also r/trees: it's a euphemistic drug sub.
         | 
         | The sub for the woody perennials ("real trees") is resigned to
         | r/sfwtrees.
        
           | speedgoose wrote:
           | It's not r/marijuanaenthusiasts ?
        
           | anon9001 wrote:
           | Weird someone made sfwtrees, it's supposed to be
           | /r/marijuanaenthusiasts for non-cannabis trees.
        
           | bitxbitxbitcoin wrote:
           | The sub for the woody perennials is r/marijuanaenthusiasts in
           | classic switcharoo style.
        
         | peterkelly wrote:
         | /r/worldpolitics and /r/anime_titties
        
           | BeFlatXIII wrote:
           | The ol' Reddit switcharoo.
        
         | lormayna wrote:
         | > This is a well known problem in reddit. The self-aware joke
         | is /r/suberbowl, which is commonly mistaken for a football
         | game, when it's really a place for suberb owl pics.
         | 
         | > I remember /r/crypto having predictable problems, given its a
         | fairly small community going back long before cryptocurrency
         | gained mainstream attention.
         | 
         | /r/peloton is about professional cycling, but many people think
         | it's about Peloton trainers
        
         | mlok wrote:
         | Unsollicited Diks is cute, too :
         | https://twitter.com/UnsolicitedDiks
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | gs17 wrote:
         | /r/flash (for the obsolete plugin, not the superhero) and
         | /r/valve (for the game company, not the plumbing fixture) have
         | this issue too. I get spammers not caring but you'd think
         | actual users would look around a bit before posting. Maybe they
         | have a totally different post flow than what I'm used to (e.g.
         | using subreddits like hashtags instead of communities).
        
         | emodendroket wrote:
         | My favorite was a guy coming to /r/bbw to ask about barbecuing.
        
         | jrootabega wrote:
         | The coffee roasting sub /r/roasting occasionally has people
         | come in to discuss how to insult their friends better. People
         | seem pretty nice about it, though, which must be annoying.
        
         | Macha wrote:
         | Yeah, r/rust is about the language, not the game, which is at
         | r/playrust, which is almost the reverse of this problem.
         | There's usually a handful of such submissions each week, which
         | is not much, but actual rust posts are probably in the 100-200
         | range.
         | 
         | It's most interesting when people post asking about hacks
         | (cheats) for Rust (the game) and get sent articles about
         | hacking (programming) using Rust (the language)
        
           | almaember wrote:
           | I once saw someone there posting asking what to do with
           | actual, physical rust (i.e. asking for removal tips)
        
           | BeFlatXIII wrote:
           | That's why r/wrongrust exists.
        
         | VortexDream wrote:
         | My favorite variation is the ones like
         | https://reddit.com/r/tightpussy (sfw). There are a lot of them.
        
         | Wowfunhappy wrote:
         | > The self-aware joke is /r/suberbowl, which is commonly
         | mistaken for a football game, when it's really a place for
         | suberb owl pics.
         | 
         | https://www.reddit.com//r/suberbowl
         | 
         | > This subreddit was banned due to being unmoderated.
         | 
         | Aww, it sounded funny. It's a shame reddit couldn't at least
         | leave a read-only archive up. I tried archive.org but there's
         | not much there.
        
         | wpietri wrote:
         | Hopefully folks will forgive the tangent, but my favorite-ever
         | Onion video is about Prague's Kafka International Airport:
         | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEyFH-a-XoQ
        
         | ffwszgf wrote:
         | A more high profile version is /r/Tesla and /r/teslamotors
        
         | eliaspro wrote:
         | That's like the /r/firstaidkit (Band from Sweden) seeing posts
         | of companies trying to advertise their newest first-aid kit or
         | people on /r/puppet believing they could find the next Jim
         | Henson there.
        
         | fernandotakai wrote:
         | yup! for the longest time, the top post on /r/gunners (a
         | subreddit for arsenal fc -- a soccer club from london --
         | supporters) was "How are long distance sniper shots taken"[0]
         | because the user thought it was a gun subreddit.
         | 
         | [0]
         | https://www.reddit.com/r/Gunners/comments/2blrik/how_are_lon...
        
           | paganel wrote:
           | Thanks for that link, it was somehow nostalgic, from back in
           | the day when Arsenal fans were still confident enough to make
           | fun of Tottenham dropping out of CL spots (I guess that's
           | what the chicken on the basketball and dropping out on 5th
           | place means)
        
             | fernandotakai wrote:
             | haha, exactly!
             | 
             | to be honest, i'm totally looking forward to arsenal's
             | future -- young manager, absurdly young and talented team
             | mixed with good veterans.
             | 
             | a front of Saka, ESR, Odegaard and Martinelli looks so
             | good!
        
         | tomc1985 wrote:
         | /r/weed and /r/trees
        
           | xdennis wrote:
           | /r/weed is about weed. I think you mean
           | https://old.reddit.com/r/marijuanaenthusiasts/ .
        
         | rubatuga wrote:
         | Minaj has a song called super bass, similar effect.
        
         | 1_player wrote:
         | /r/potatosalad is about John Cena.
         | 
         | /r/johncena is about potato salads.
        
         | jp57 wrote:
         | Except that unlike /r/kafka, they could have chosen
         | /r/superb_owl. Someone obviously wanted to make a joke by
         | grabbing "superbowl" before the football fans could.
        
           | jlarocco wrote:
           | > Except that unlike /r/kafka, they could have chosen
           | /r/superb_owl.
           | 
           | That's hardly a justification for either side, though. The
           | Kafkas could have went with "/r/franz_kafka" and
           | "/r/apache_kafka" and there wouldn't be any problem.
        
             | kitd wrote:
             | Reddit needs a disambiguation option, like Wikipedia.
        
           | halestock wrote:
           | I think it was deliberately tongue-in-cheek since the nfl is
           | notoriously litigious when it comes to the use of "super
           | bowl".
        
           | ddek wrote:
           | But, that wouldn't be a joke though.
        
         | davidkunz wrote:
         | "superbowl" was also featured in an episode of "What we do in
         | the shadows":
         | https://whatwedointheshadows.fandom.com/wiki/Brain_Scramblie...
        
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