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Comment by ufo | Hacker News Reader

Where was the conference planned to take place? It doesn't say in the original announcement.

The Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco

Some of the US Coronavirus evacuees from China were not handled properly, according to a whistleblower. One plane landed in the Bay Area. Better to be cautious at this point.

“ U.S. Health Workers Responding to Coronavirus Lacked Training and Protective Gear, Whistle-Blower Says”

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/27/us/politics/coronavirus-u...

No need for hypotheticals, there's already a case of community spread in Mountain View https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-02-28/intense-...

Where did you get Mountain View? I watched the press conference. They wouldn't name which city in Santa Clara County when asked.

Updated news articles mention El Camino Hospital in Mt View

San Francisco

GDC normally takes place in SFO

SFO is an airport, not a city.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metonymy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synecdoche

Those things do exist of course, but in 9 years of living here I don’t think I’ve ever heard the city referred to as “SFO.”

Do many places do this? PDX / Portland is the only example I can think of offhand

DFW for Dallas-Fort Worth is common

Ed: "The ATL" for Atlanta is also a thing

My rather small and unknown city, Canberra, is not regularly referred to as CBR in verbal conversation, but it's been adopted as part of the city's tourism brand.

In Springfield and St. Louis, MO we often referred to the cities by their airport codes SGF and STL. But those are both more plausible abbreviations in their own right than SFO.

Many people who sysadmin machines/networks/routers in disparate places name them after their closest major/international three-letter airport code. I have a bunch of boxes named 'ewr{1,2,3}', 'sfo{1,2,3}', et c.

You will frequently see this in traceroutes, for router hostnames. Some people use the meta-airport-codes (e.g. NYC instead of JFK/LGA) too.

From what I see, it's less something done by people living somewhere but by people from elsewhere, e.g. when discussing travel plans.

Parent is right. I've been in and around the SF Bay Area for about a decade and SFO is _only_ ever, unambiguously, the airport.

Also, SFO, the airport, is not even in the city of San Francisco. It's about ten miles south, in San Bruno. Not close to GDC, which is in downtown SF.

Most people outside of San Francisco would know that you mean 'San Francisco' when you say SFO, though. Same as I think of Seattle when I see SEA, Dallas when I see DFW, St. Louis for STL, etc.

Inside the city that's not always the case, but even when you're abbreviating sports teams and the like, it's common to use the airport code to refer to the city name if they match up so well.

Are you sure about that? These acronyms don’t have the same meaning when I read them.

It’s pretty American to think like that.

I have no clue about any of the acronyms yet I recognize all the names.

Geographically, but it actually is under the jurisdiction of the city and the Mayor of San Francisco who appoints the Airport Commission [1].

[1] https://www.flysfo.com/about-sfo/airport-commission/city-cha...

It probably depends on your circle of friends and acquaintances but for at least a decade in text messages and social networks I have seen people use airport designations in place of the city they represent. For example,

“Spending next weekend in SEA then staying with friends in MPS before returning home to SFO.”

So no, SFO is not only ever unambiguously the airport.

I believe the combination of more frequent flying, booking tickets ourselves online (rather than by telephone) and increased communication on devices have combined to result in this quirk of language.

That and I think there's a certain (not so) subtle "I'm such an in the know traveler that I know even the obscure airport codes like EWR" vibe associated with using them. (And, yes, I'm guilty.)

I love the little tangent you’ve created here. It’s textbook HN. I wonder if there’s a word for it.

I've heard "rathole" to describe taking a meeting off topic.

That's it! They remind me of old school bubble chambers used in particle accelerators. Momentum carrying things mostly in one direction, but every now and again something just coils inward until it runs out of energy.

https://media.sciencephoto.com/image/a1380122/800wm/A1380122...

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