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Comment by jessaustin | Hacker News Reader

>Captricity then uses sophisticated machine learning to package up these fields (we call them “shreds”) into quickly identifiable packets.

Reminds one of the "Librareome Project" from Rainbows End. That book is dense with the future...

ISTM a ML firm that can't get the ML to work and falls back to Mechanical Turk (how did that wonderful name get past corporate PR?) is kind of like Theranos using normal blood tests to stand in for their imaginary ones: at least as much of a scam on investors as on customers.

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I’m not sure Amazon really had much of a PR department back in 2005 when they launched the service and named it after a chess-playing “automaton” that had a human hidden in it to do all the thinking. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Turk

If an 11yo firm with billions in revenue could avoid having "much of a PR department", I'm impressed. Even one PR person would seem to be enough to avoid naming a product after a nationality...

Of course Amazon has a PR department. But it also has thousands of teams and products, most of which were started by a handful of people and grown (or killed off if unsuccessful). There's a big difference between handling the global scale news stories Amazon is involved in and the naming of new products.

Shouldn't your product naming go through a review process?

That doesn't guarantee that a name like "Mechanical Turk" will be rejected. Maybe they asked a Turk who believed it to be unlikely to be an issue.

Personally, I think the historical reference is clever, but then I'd say the same if someone named an autonomous ship-control system "Flying Dutchman". Maybe I just have bad taste.

As a Turk I do not find the name offensive at all and I am certain most Turks would find it amusing had they heard of the product/service.

Turk is an ethnicity.

It's both (there is a real nation called "Turkey"), but why would one be more "acceptable" than the other?

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