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Comment by kerkeslager | Hacker News Reader

Gah, please type the names of your projects into the search engine of your choice before polluting everyone's search results with a new project. There are already a few programming projects which go by "rx". I'll boost the one I care about by linking it: http://reactivex.io/

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I disagree with the direction of this criticism. Building and shipping is the real victory for anyone with a passion project. To cut them down because of the project name is a cheap critique in my view.

Besides, given the extreme signal:noise ratio of codebases that gain notoriety most projects that share a name or acronym will only have a handful of users even aware of both's existence.

Further with this specific example, "ReactiveX" doesn't even call itself Rx, at least judging by the website. Closest to "Rx" from "ReactiveX" is the different implementations, but they are called RxY where Y seems to be the language. So "RxJS", "RxNet", "RxClojure" and so on. So the name collision doesn't even apply with the mentioned project!

Well, it's a mistake. Due diligence, for any new project, requires searching for existing uses of the intended names and deciding whether they are confusing.

It's difficult because it's easy to miss obscure social niches and name variants, and that's why most people make the task easier with an effort to find unique names.

For example, a sloppy google search for "Rx" yields, in search result order:

- two medical abbreviation, for "recipe" (i.e. "take") in medical prescriptions and for radiography: benign but common and used in proper names of pharmacies, labs etc.;

- Radeon RX-something video cards, unlikely to be confused but likely to yield search result noise for something related to videogames;

- some Lexus cars, popular but more harmless;

- iZotope RX 7, a major software entry: professional "audio repair" DAW plugins from a popular company;

- several unimportant random product and company names, including e.g. some Sony headphones, that collectively prove how "Rx" is an inappropriately short name.

A longer and more unique name would clearly be a better choice. But a further web search for "rx pixel" yields an awful lot of medical video card and car results and a frontal collision on Twitter, where dr. Jennifer Hazel goes by "@Rx_Pixel".

Searching for "rx editor" is also interesting:

- a deluge of iZotope RX results (no hope to become more popular, low-resolution image editors are a smaller niche than audio production)

- the highly popular RxJS JavaScript library. It doesn't take a JavaScript expert to figure out that it's highly popular: the home page mentions a conference about it.

This last conflict should be enough to veto the name "Rx", even without more targeted searches (e.g. social media) and less online-visible usages (e.g. in telecommunications as an abbreviation of receiver or reception, paired with "Tx" for transmitter or transmission).

Yes, except I like this name, and find it fitting, and no one can stop me. We have different priorities :)

Did you try search “rx pixel”? Rx is a cool name, and easy to remember. I always have troubles remembering the exact spelling of aseprite and pyxel edit, for example.

There's a very little overlap between the purpose and use case of the two projects. There's not that many good, short names. I personally wouldn't worry about naming conflicts with another project, unless it was a similar project in more than a name.

https://github.com/rxRust/rxRust

Many Rust projects are blah-rs where the rs is dropped in the crate name. So it would be normal to be confused and think Rx == RxRust. e.g. https://github.com/rust-lang/futures-rs has crate name "futures".

>There's not that many good, short names.

There'd be loads if the Rust community (or.. the 'rust parliamentary community' (people who actually get involved in the RFC processes and see things through to the end (heroes, imo)) (cf PLP[0])) elected to use namespaces for crates.

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

Namespaces are a good idea on paper, but you still need to secure the non namespaced name when you reach a bit of popularity or someone else will who will push malware there knowing people will often add a crate by the name they think it has and not necessarily the one it has.

Non namespaced crates can be io.cargo.blah and the short name can be deprecated or even changed programatically.

Short names are bad, unless somewhat sheltered from confusion (e.g. brief names of command line tools, which need to be unique only within your PATH environment variable and your installed man pages, not on the web).

Absolutely. And even ls, sed, etc are in the coreutils package. Not 'ls' package.

Getting a "perfect name" is a lost cause. I named a software project 'minion'. It was perfect, we were top on Google, the only other thing with the name was a font.

Then the movie dispicable me came out, then the Minions movie, and now we are off on page 11.

"Rx" already has a history of use as medical shorthand for "prescription". See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_prescription

I would also recommend choosing a less overloaded name. Searching for "rx" in Google brings up prescription-related results.

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