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Comment by l3s2d | Hacker News Reader

This is an interesting solution to a problem I hadn't given much thought to in the past.

On the one hand, it's demoralizing that we've reached this point where misinformation spreads at the same rate as good information. On the other, it does seem like a decent way to expose predatory journals.

Could this method be extended to other fields?

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There's that classic double joke about fad technology names being gibberish and hapless tech recruiters:

"I typically ask recruiters to point out which of these are pokemon" https://imgur.com/gallery/r0SEEoh

The trick is that a lot of Pokémon names make good tech names. Metapod would be a great name for a perl documentation suite, or a container orchestration tool. And that makes caterpie a questionable, but valid, name for a partial container orchestration tool; and maybe butterfree could be containers evolved.

Onix is clearly a unix-like or linux distribution that's shaped around some software with first letter O (Opera? OpenOffice? I dunno), in addition to a Pokémon.

MetaPOD is a thing:

https://metacpan.org/pod/MetaPOD

Onix is shaped around Operator Framework. It's all containers.

Vulpix could be something to do with pictures.

Farfetch could be a database library.

Hmmm that onyx one almost had me, was gonna say it's both a pokemon and a language...but the Pokemon's spelled Onix.

At the time that was doing the rounds (2015 or so) someone expanded it into a "Pokemon or Big Data" quiz game, which is startlingly difficult: https://pixelastic.github.io/pokemonorbigdata/

I thought that was extremely easy, but only because the Pokemon didn't go past Generation 3. Flink sounds a whole lot like Klink, a Pokemon from Generation 5.

> only because the Pokemon didn't go past Generation 3

That's about two generations too many for me to be able to know :P

Yeah...the first one's pretty much burned permanently in my mind forever, I can recognize most of the second ones, but after that I don't really know them.

i can easily understand and accept the idea of an infinite gender spectrum and associated naming conventions but there are ONLY 150(+1) pokémon and nothing anyone says will change my mind

This is fantastic. You should submit this as a post on HN - it deserves its own thread :)

I’ll steal that karma:

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fpixelastic.github.io...

It's easy if you know your Pokémon well. It's really hard if you kinda know names because many of them have lookalike names ;)

Damn, got the first one wrong :

> ADABAS was NoSQL from a time when there was no SQL. The technology now is owned by Software AG. "Software AG: We're not sure what we do either."

Damn, I seem to get only half of them right, not better than random chance ! EDIT : Ok, 59% correct. (Eventually you get a 'victory' screen.)

I've seen many people saying "Onyx was the Pokemon, not the language" and I have to resist the urge to reply in all caps going "IT'S SPELT ONIX NOT ONYX"

There's also this: https://pixelastic.github.io/pokemonorbigdata/

I failed this miserably last year. Now I got 93% correct. I blame the quarantine and all the publicity Pokémon has done.

Ekans belonged after Python.

> it's demoralizing that we've reached this point where misinformation spreads at the same rate as good information.

This has always been true. It's a fundamental part of the human story, an emergent property that arises from the cost to produce misinformation compared to the cost to discover the truth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law

I would expect that generally misinformation spreads faster. People that verify authenticity before spreading are slower because they're verifying authenticity.

Verifiers may be slower to repeat, but those with a good track record of authenticity presumably have larger networks willing to take them at their word. It may take longer for Nature to publish something than a random crank journal, but Nature's impact factor is orders of magnitude higher.

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