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Comment by throwaway3699 | Hacker News Reader

> Gazette: Feature Stores and Model Prediction Engine

When did developers stop naming things properly and go straight to weird codenames? What is wrong with 'recommendation service'?

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One advantage: googling by weird names is much easier.

IT has always been full of non-descriptive names. Unix was a pun, Linux is named after its creator, Macintosh after an apple and programming languages are probably the worst offender with their single-letter names.

I do not think I would necessarily have more of a practical idea what to expect out of a "recommendation service" than "Gazette". Sure, it's related to recommendations in some way, but that might as well be next to useless technically. A 10 minute introduction on the various services and one could get their head around them even with silly names. Are you bothered your webserver is called nginx or by curl or grep or git or cat etc. etc.?

curl, grep and cat all have specific names that make sense.

curl: cURL (library)

grep: g/re/p "globally search for a regular expression and print matching lines"

cat: as in, concatenate

Gazette is just meaningless.

Actually, a “gazette” is a periodical newspaper.[0] It’s a more obscure word, but it isn’t meaningless. And I can kindof see the usage as coming from “recommendation email spam is a periodical”, but it’s a stretch IMHO.

[0]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/gazette

You're going to hate the cryptocurrency space :)

> What is wrong with 'recommendation service'?

Telling dozens of competing recommendation services apart somehow.

RedditRecommendationService. Although, "Recommendation Service" is likely plenty clear if used in a discussion between two reddit engineers.

Now you've merely shifted the onus. What does "reddit" mean? It's also a meaningless name (ok it's trying to be a pun on "read it"). These are pretty much entirely equivalent in this context:

Gazette Feature Stores and Model Prediction Engine

Reddit Recommendation Service

It is only one part of the recommendation service.

Anyway, the reason you don’t “name things properly” is because it’s one of those truly hard problems (in a class beyond EXPTIME in input program functionality).

By bypassing it you no longer have to worry about the connotations and you can do things like split the tool without having to worry if the name will stay the same or if which piece will retain the name.

I would strongly recommend it.

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