Hacker News Reader

Comment by bgun | Hacker News Reader

I know this is just an open source project but it’s a good example of why you might want to consult a woman before naming things.

View on HN

The authors are not native English speakers (and what you’re seeing in the name is not something most non native English speakers would spot).

I understand it’s funny to point and laugh “ha ha dumb dudes didn’t think about something female related because they’re dudes”, but it’s worth remembering that not everyone is from the anglosphere.

Also you might find this normal but I cannot imagine my female colleagues being amused at me calling one of them up asking to “consult” about a name solely because she’s a woman.

I didn't point it out because it was funny-ha-ha, but because it's a teachable example of a linguistic mis-step that could be easily resolved by diversifying your reviewers - in this case, since you mention it, perhaps a native English speaker?

I'm not even suggesting that this project needs a new name - although I think if they were naming a consumer-facing product or company, someone in marketing would push back on the name almost immediately.

As a native English speaker I would not dock points from this name for the gender related points as that doesn't even cross my mind, it's not relevant.

Keep gender out of engineering.

> Also you might find this normal but I cannot imagine my female colleagues being amused at me calling one of them up asking to “consult” about a name solely because she’s a woman.

I'd certainly hope it wouldn't be "solely" because she's a woman. There's no people you'd be interested in input from that happen to be women?

A project name is something you'd want to throw around to a few people (ideally with different perspectives) and make sure it conveys what you intend and has the right tone and such.

The assumption that author didn't talk to a woman sounds pretty knee-jerk to me. Can you explain what you mean?

"On the rag" is a semi-common slang for menstruation, but "rag" has way more meanings than just menstrual pads. IMO, as a marketing term, "RAGflow" sounds about as odd as "Nintendo Wii".

Not sure if sarcasm but 'about as odd as "Nintendo Wii"' kind of makes my point:

https://web.archive.org/web/20130623080716/http://www.forbes...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4953650.stm

https://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/why-wii-ask-nintendo-1...

People said the same thing about the iPad.

Hi, buddy, I'm sorry to make you feel like we don't take women's voices into account. We came up with this name because RAG is already a consensus, as an acronym for retrieval augmented generation, RAG is used in many places, and we think it would actually be a standard for LLM oriented B-side scenarios, so that's why we adopted this name.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com