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Comment by s1mon | Hacker News Reader

Why name something that involves code "Grasshopper" when there's been a popular product for 15 years called Grasshopper? [0]

It seems like some people just don't bother to do a basic search to see if their new product name is going to add confusion.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grasshopper_3D

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"Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

This seems like a bad rule. A lot of time gets wasted fixing trademark & branding collisions, fixing format incompatibilities, and fixing UX dark patterns that confuse users. People should be thinking about these issues, especially people building brands around their projects.

HN isn't the comment section or feedback mechanism for 99% of the stories posted here; in fact, a large percentage of stories posted on HN are here without the knowledge of the author. So in addition to the fact that threads about presentation issues are attractive nuisances --- low-specificity issues that generate opinions from large numbers of HN commenters, often unlike (and competing with) the high-specificity topics of the stories themselves that we're actually here to discuss --- there's almost never any point to them. The original story authors aren't taking our feedback. We're just yelling at the clouds and making things worse for ourselves.

People are thinking about the issue, but HN has decided that it’s not the place to discuss it.

It’s like the anti politics rule. Politics is absolutely important but there are other forums to discuss it in.

I missed that in the guidelines. Good to know.

It's a relatively recent addition... sometime in the last 3 years I think :)

Edit: June 2020. Pretty close guess!

Edit 2: ah, but the bit about name collisions wasn't added until Dec 2021.

Well, it is based on Locust so there's at least some rhyme or reason to the name.

Now you're aware there's a tab manager using the forbidden name https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/grasshopper-u...

For what it's worth, the repo and package name is `locust-grasshopper`

https://github.com/alteryx/locust-grasshopper

The field it is used is very different. So why not?

Because it makes searching for info online much more complicated than it needs to be. Take Ubuntu Unity for instance, Unity is one of the most popular game engines out there and it also happens to run on Linux. When you do a search for Unity + Linux you get results for both things and it takes extra time sorting out the search results.

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