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Comment by mattmanser | Hacker News Reader

Sorry to burst your bubble, but bin is a standard warehouse term.

Ah, that's disappointing - I did think that was unique to Amazon.

I don't suppose other companies call their product classifiers browse nodes and call their most granular classifiers leaf nodes...?

I doubt it!

I was actually thinking the etymology of the word bin in CS is probably from someone who worked in a warehouse. It can't be a coincidence.

I have always assumed both refer to the English word bin, which is a receptacle, box, etc. E.g. trash bin.

We just call them bins in the UK, not trash bins. Putting something in the bin idiomatically means throwing it away. Perhaps that's a modern usage. We do also have bread bins, which is about the only use meaning 'receptacle' I can think of outside of warehouse bins.

I think it is a UK phrase, or at least not US. A friend of mine from Taiwan, with excellent (US) English, had never heard of using the word 'bin' for trash before.

It's not common in the US, but you hear it now and again here. The most similar example I can think of is probably "lift." You'll hear someone call an elevator that every so often in the US, but it's mainly the UK term

In New Zealand they also have chilly bins.

...or it could simply be a short form of "binary".

It's a shame you are being downvoted considering that the first kind of computational storage was "binary files"/"binary data." Bin for short..

This is almost certainly where /usr/bin comes from, yes.

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