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Comment by fnoef | Hacker News Reader

This is so cringe. I feel like software engineers are just overgrown toddlers stuck in kindergarten: "We named our servers with boy and girls names and hired an artist to draw their personalities as ninjas!!@!111". I mean, whats wrong with a plain old 4 character hash or whatever?

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As someone slightly older than average here, one of the perks of maturity for me is not caring much about what others think anymore. Childish or cringe are fine.

But I don’t judge you: being a teenager or a young adult and rejecting such things is a rite of passage that we all go through.

> When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

― C.S. Lewis

> When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.

― 1 Corinthians 13:11

> I also went to the stock market today. I did a business.

Vincent Adultman

I'm quite sure C.S. Lewis was referencing that explicitly.

What's wrong with this? They have resources and desire to make their work fun. What happened to wanting to enjoy what you're doing?

Maybe they should spend more time keeping their servers from crashing lol, and less on nameserver-namings

This is an article from 2013

Exactly, they weren't proactive. Wasting their time on useless fanfiction.

Yeah, I'm sure they've spent a significant time of their whole engineering department in the 13 years since the blog post on this!

The only useful thing they provide is DDOS protection and free analytics. For some reason the whole world is brainwashed into thinking we need all of these horrendous cloud providers. Hetzner is thankfully taking up the market. You need a server and that's it + some ddos protection.

If people cared much more about how they spend their own time (and money) and less about how others spend their's world would've been a much better place. But it ain't

Maybe you should spend more time doing your job better and less on HN comments.

The wrong in this, is the extent they went to with this. I mean, name your servers whatever you want, but hiring an artist to draw the servers personalities and then writing a blog post about this? Like common, that's something a child would do about their favorite toy. At some point, people need to grow up.

And I guess the other "wrong with it" is the fact that it just wastes human potential. Build robust software and take pride in this, not it naming your servers bob and lola.

I reject your joyless reality and substitute my own.

I disagree with your definition of what 'growing up' is about. There is something lost in the world where making silly but fun things is frowned upon. And yes, fun is subjective.

I don't share my kids excitement about most things, but I'm genuinely happy they enjoy themselves so much. Being able to use the same notion to all people, not just (your) kids is part of growing up in my books.

Sure, not using a naming scheme and not hiring the artist would have unlocked the potential to make their software soooo much more robust…

It's not the single act, but the compound effect of millions of such acts across the entire industry.

Yeah? Well, you know, that's just like uh, your opinion, man.

of course it is, never claimed it to be universal truth or something

The only way to properly realize human potential is to have no fun when doing your work? Are you really sure you want to live in a world like that?

There are different grades of "fun". You can do silly things at work, name your servers bob and lola, while still serve the functionality and needs of your customers. But hiring an artist to draw the server as ninjas because "they protect our customers"? What kind of value does that bring? And then you write a blog post about it? Seriously?

Knowing when the fun needs to stop is a way to create valuable things in society. I prefer that, compared to living in world where the state of software is so dire because developers are overgrown kids that spend time writing blog posts about how they named their server pikachu because "pikachu is soooooo cute!!!1111"

Have fun on your hill. Or not, if that's what you prefer.

Agreed, sounds like Cloudflare is adult daycare. I see it as a sign that these companies have more money to waste than they should have in a functioning competitive market.

Common names are much easier for people to copy over and check. As opposed to a random jumble of numbers and letters.

Common names also seem retypeable, which is usually a bad idea because it is error prone, especially in certain fonts. Random jumbles make retyping untenable, so copy-paste is used, which can't make the same mistakes, but is still vulnerable to operator error with incomplete copies.

this is why you never get invited on houses party

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