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Comment by knome | Hacker News Reader

This sort of reply seems so ludicrous to me. It's a bug. How can you guys use the net, knowing what spider-related metaphors lie hidden in its tangled web?

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Easy. It has deeper roots in the internet for me than in insects. You know, multiple definitions.

Cockroach on the other hand is very strongly associated with insects and disgust.

I do think it interferes with adoption. I don't think it'll kill it though.

I think the name's actually pretty good at selling it's key value, particularly to business people / management.

"It's called cockroach db - because it'll survive anything"

I stepped on a cockroach last night. Seemed pretty fragile to me.

The colony in your wall endured zero downtime.

That connotation seems obvious but I didn't pick up on it until months after I heard about CockroachDB. For one, a minority of people who know about cockroaches know about their resilience. For two, people who _do_ know that still know that cockroaches are disgusting. The reptile brain is going to react with revulsion even if the higher brain finds the metaphor.

For me, I've overlooked it because by the name I assumed it was meant to be a "worse mongoDB". I've found out recently it's more like Postgre.

The reptile brain is going to react with revulsion

As someone who knows someone who is very scared of reptiles but had a pet cockroach the irony of this statement amuses me greatly.

It's not called the World Wide Puss Filled Spider Bite, it's called the World Wide Web, I honestly never thought of the spider connotation till you mentioned it.

To be fair, in Ye Olden Days, web crawlers[0] were called spiders.

[0] Of course, web crawlers are no longer called web crawlers, either

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