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Comment by indy | Hacker News Reader

It's the sort of behaviour you'd expect from Homer Simpson

As an aside: Back in the day, I worked for a nuclear sciences consultancy whose hostnames for machines were Simpsons' characters. They strived to make control-systems fail-safe with extensive planning, processes safe as possible and simulations as accurate as computing power allowed (30 million lines of Fortan worth)... it just takes one nitwit thinking "it's okay" or "they 'know' better" to screw up the industry's reputation even more than prevailing NIMBYism.

It brings a certain logic to NIMBYism.

If anything can of course it'll be the bumbling incompetence of a nitwit that appears to do so.

Well the logic certainly isn't supported by data. Most homeowners have no problems allowing cars to drive around their neighborhoods, despite the fact that cars have dangerous emissions that kill thousands yearly, not to mention inattentive drivers who cause thousands of wrecks annually.

That's because it's their own cars. The same people will complain about a burn ban during a dry summer, because it's their own yard waste they want to burn. But you want to put a developmental group home in the neighborhood and they freak out. There's no sense to it, just egoism.

>I worked for a nuclear sciences consultancy whose hostnames for machines were Simpsons' characters.

I once tried giving hosts Arabic names. It actually worked pretty well since the naming system lets you express inheritance and works better when spoken than "proxy X on testnet Y" or "proxyX dot testnetY" (especially when not everyone speaks English as their first language and some people may be joining the call from a cell phone in a car).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_name#Example_name

I don't think it would scale to an IT larger than ~10 or so.

Neat, I had no idea that at a certain point, you're referred to by your relationship to your first-born son.

Does it only work better spoken, or does it also work better in written form? Do you include the article/prefix in the hostnames?

Naming is the most vexing aspect of programming, so you really must share more, even if just to deflate expectations.

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