Misbrands | Hacker News Reader

Misbrands

github.com

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Being in a work environment where quite a lot of people have stickers on their laptop lids I am pretty confident you'd have to actively point at it and be like "See? That's the joke." for someone to even notice it because people just don't pay that much attention to it. It's too subtile, but I get that's the point.

Second day of my first ever internship, I dented the aluminium lid of my brand new, very expensive, work Macbook.

So I had an idea - I slapped a band-aid on the dent to hide it. Caught the attention of way too many people. Everytime they inquired, I'd tell them it's because I hurt the laptop by denting it. Resulted in amused and confused faces alike.

The Band-Aid Streisand effect

This would be a fun game. Take some heavier stickered entries from DevLids.com, Photoshop some of those misbrands-stickers, and let people guess the "fake" ones.

But there are already plenty of these there. It full of these, I'd say. I saw on the first page:

  -Github styled as Pornhub (multiple times)
  -HDL styled as DHL
 -Github styled as Obama
 -"Write the Docs" styled as a Metal Band
 -Linux styled as "Intel Inside"
 -javascript styled as supreme
 -"sys admin" styled as AC/DC
 -slayer syled as lorde
 -"sempai" styled as supreme
 -npm styled as IBM
 -Arur syled as AC/DC
 -untitled goose game styled as antifa
 -Javascript styled as playstation 1
 -css styled as sega
 -starwars as starbucks
 - "bookface" as facebook

And more. I didn't recognise a lot of stuff.

I had a sticker on my work laptop at my old company with the company logo edited to say "ecstasy" and no-one ever commented on it

Yeah I think the JavaScript one is the only one ham-fisted enough to get spotted without explaining the joke.

I visualize them in https://misbrands.vercel.app/

Code: https://github.com/yiksanchan/misbrands

Check it out!

Thank you for your public service. For some reason Github shows only half of the images on my mobile.

Click (…) at the top right of the image, choose “view raw”. Or use the URL above.

Thanks for the kind words! Anything I can do to resolve your issue? Is there a way to reproduce?

No, no. The website is fine. It was looking at the images on Github that was a problem :)

ah gotcha

I create a few more and list them on opensea for sale :)

https://opensea.io/collection/sillycon-valley

I found the vim/vscode one especially obnoxious. OTOH, it took me a while to work out what was 'wrong' with the Debian/Ubuntu one. Maybe there's some unconscious biases at play.

I kinda like that these misbrands are all done in the style of a competing technology, or a misconception that would kinda bother people (like vim / vscode, rust / go, or angular / react).

I'm especially fond of the go/rust mashup. We don't have enough whatever that thing is in computers these days.

Not on the homepage logo, but i really loved the rusty gopher, or whatever this thing from hell should be called: https://github.com/mkrl/misbrands/blob/master/ferris.svg

I'm sure somebody has a project to link Rust from Go, and are thrilled to have this as their project logo!

It's called "gorris".

Edit: there's also the inverse, called "fepher".

this thing just stares in my soul

it's like a go's gopher but smaller and more dangerous

It's a gopherris inepta, clearly.

There should be a Doom version with that thing.

The JavaScript one is funny. To be honest they should have picked a different name for JavaScript since it has nothing to do with Java.

When I saw that sticker, I immediately wanted to give it to this SEO consultant I worked with several years ago. We had a Python + Angular stack so among our first conversations went like:

Him: Okay your biggest problem right now is that your website is written in Java.

Me: Uhh...no...we use Python. Why is our choice of backend language a problem? (I honestly thought this involves a development in Google v. Oracle that I didn't know about.)

Him: No, no. It's all in Java. Look...(he uses a tool that shows us what Googlebot sees).

Me: Ah...Javascript.

Him: Yes, Java.

I instantly recognized the situation I was in so I didn't opt for pedantry. I adjusted accordingly but I kept using Javascript on my side of the conversation. I dunno if he ever caught on to that or if someone ever corrected him but this has been some kind of inside joke in my engineering team at the time.

I'm hoping if he has this on his laptop lid, it would serve as a "hobo sign" for future software engineers he might have to meet with. (Not to be mean on Christmas! He gave us competent advice, this issue aside.)

I’m really curious what good advice an SEO consultant that knows so little about his platform he cannot distinguish Java from Javascript can give.

I would be immediately suspect of anything else they said or did.

Sounds like he needs to consult some books and articles and get to that “I don’t know what I’m talking about” moment.

Man, this obnoxious HN arrogance again. And on Christmas Eve too. I specifically added that Not to be mean part because it's simply not fair that people judge your competence based on an unflattering anecdote. But of course, here we are. :(

Look here:

- He was a consultant; not part of the team. It wasn't his platform, strictly speaking.

- That said, Java and JS was created 1995. Google was founded 1998. I'd give two or three years more before the term "SEO" even became a thing. And then a few more years before it became an established sub-industry. My point is, people working in a Web/IT field have been confusing Java and JS far before SEO's time. These people aren't programmers though they may have worked closely with programmers. Does that make them incompetent at their job?

Marketing: Hey we want a tie-in with the release of the first Harry Potter film! (Good suggestion) Can Java make magic spell effects when people click on our website?

Programmer: Heck no, dunce. First of all, you're thinking of Javascript. Second of all, even if we were a Java Applet, that would be difficult. Third of all, our website is basically in Flash so yes we can accomplish that with some ActionScript.

- You know why these people can't distinguish Java from JS? Because the distinction doesn't matter for their job! The job of an SEO consultant, in particular, is to come up with a strategy; this takes a lot of approaches, and technical execution is a small part of the pie. A lot of the companies they would work with won't even have dedicated engineers developing the platform.

The point of the meeting I related, ICYMI, is that our website is basically "code not content" in the eyes of Googlebot so that needed to be addressed. It could've been spewing out Brainfuck and the point of the meeting stands.

----

SEO is really a different kind of beast (I've talked about it here other times before). In that team I'm ready to admit that I, the guy who can distinguish between Java and Javascript, had the least impact; there was a low bar on the programming skills needed and I just happened to be the guy with nothing else on his plate then. I was a "fungible asset" as the cool kids would say nowadays. Shows you how little technical programming details matter for general SEO.

And yet with that guy's strategy we achieved (and this goes on my resume):

- from page nowhere of hyper-targeted keywords we made it to page 1 within a few months. Crept up in ranking slowly with marketing, not technical, strategy. Then from that content we managed to score in less-targeted keywords.

- by the end of my tenure as the "Growth Hacker" we went from 200K users to past the 1M mark with zero marketing ad spend. (We were actually bleeding on ad spend with very little ROI that's why they kickstarted the SEO initiative.) It was slow but steady, not the hockey-stick growth that would've pulled Sequoia Capital on board but enough for our investors.

----

To be honest, this is one long comment too many than I planned today. But what can I do duty calls (https://xkcd.com/386/) even on holidays. Merry Christmas/Happy holidays and a fine new year HN community. I'm pulling myself off-duty for HN comments for the rest of the calendar year.

> My point is, people working in a Web/IT field have been confusing Java and JS far before SEO's time. These people aren't programmers though they may have worked closely with programmers. Does that make them incompetent at their job?

It’s been around for nearly thirty years. It entirely matters if they are saying “your site has poor SEO because it uses Java” rather than “because it uses JavaScript”. I’m glad you reinforced it without becoming arrogant or standoffish and seemed to meet your goal in working with him. I’m not sure I’d been able to do the same myself. Merry Christmas :)

I’m glad you reached your goal, which is exactly why I was asking.

I’d genuinely like to know if someone had a good experience since it might change my current view.

Unfortunately, the tone of your comment did the exact opposite. You blame me for being uncharitable in the same breath that you are being immensely uncharitable yourself.

In my experience, people that don’t know the difference are invariably windbags that read results off of whatever google dashboard. It’s not like this skepticism on HN comes out of nowhere. There’s a fuckton of charlatans in the SEO space.

I’ll admit part of it is that nobody listens to me when I tell them the same thing (5 months before) their $200/hour consultant is telling them.

There was another section here, but in the spirit of Christmas I’ll leave off.

Have a good one :)

It was done on purpose, and early on JVM was shipped with Netscape Navigator. The rebranding of LiveScript (iirc) to JavaScript was done to connect to the Java hype of the time.

That was the summer that MarcA publicly announced that Netscape would be a pure Java app by the end of the year.

So one of the mainline JavaScript interpreters was written in Java, and the JavaScript could call out to that engine, so you could load Java plugins at runtime, extend the JavaScript interpreter.

So you could say "Java" many times during the tech demo.

A bit later, it seems Netscape wanted to connect to the Visual Basic hype of the time: https://web.archive.org/web/19971022101212if_/http://www101....

I'm not sure if Visual JavaScript is archived at all: https://www.betaarchive.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=42968

:-) I can remember the excitement at the time over Java.

There was a massive Java event at the QE2 hall in London, I went to I still have the little metal pin of the Java Mascot from that event.

It's like "Blockchain" today!

It's like when Panel de Pon for the Super Famicon was rebranded and rereleased as Tetris Attack for the Super Nintendo. It has nothing to do with Tetris, but Tetris was a popular game at the time.

I don't remember that java script logo - it looks like a knock off of the Sunsoft Java trademark of the era, however. Does that image have any provenance? It looks like a professional imitation but I am seeing straight trade dress if not actual Langham Act infringement.

It’s a parody logo and a straight copy of the Java logo, on purpose. The point is to ridicule the lack of legitimate connection between the two languages, as pointed out above thread.

GP was saying that "JavaScript" was named "JavaScript" on purpose to build of off Java's popularity at the time.

Logos were never related (was there a JS logo at all?)

How did Sun manage to get so much hype around Java?

> To be honest they should have picked a different name for JavaScript since it has nothing to do with Java.

It was marketing very much in cooperation with Sun.

That's why JS has a C-style syntax: Netscape simultaneously looked at embedding Java and hired Eich to embed Scheme, which then morphed into a bespoke language with Java-inspired syntax but semantics closer to Scheme's.

Small part of history of JavaScript:

>In 1995, after 10 days of work, Brendan Eich created a scripting language for browsers. He called it Mocha. The language was renamed several times over the course of just a couple of months, and was eventually given the name we know today, JavaScript. Brendan originally wanted to add support for the Schema programming language to the Netscape browser, but his superiors wanted the language available in their browser to be more like the then popular Java [1].

[1] Freely based on a description from book and wikipedia:

C. Saternos, ClientServer Web Apps with JavaScript and Java. O’Reilly Media, Inc., 2014.

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

Small typo, he originally wanted to support Scheme. I wonder where if the typo was introduced in your comment, or in the book, or in Wikipedia at the time (which was since corrected)!

Thanks for noticing. It's probably my own typo, as I wrote this years ago for my thesis and I haven't caught it.

JS is an accident of history, which nobody expected would catch on at this scale.

I felt bad that PHP and Django were unfairly left out in the RoR misbrand (well, Wordpress is written in PHP but that looked a bit remote), so I decided to fix that: https://imgur.com/a/quN1aEa. Now THAT should make someone's blood boil.

(sorry for the aliasing, the font was taken from a screenshot)

For the laity there's /r/sbubby https://old.reddit.com/r/sbubby/top/?sort=top&t=all

Never understood why people put stickers on their laptops, to me it seems like a cargo cult. Oh, you’re using this trendy library? Are you a brogrammer or a programmer? Why is libraries and technologies trendy anyway, so much time has been wasted building something using the wrong tool for the job. It also ruins the design of the laptop, just like a phone case does. Maybe I’m just old.

Because I have a free unblemished sticker and an unavoidable desire to reduce entropy in the universe. Gotta stick something.

For me it's positive memories. Every time I pull my laptop out I'm greeted with a mash of events I've been proud to have been involved in and technologies I've done good things with - it's good motivation to continue to do good things. Same goes for every place I've glued the case back together (and frankly a lot of the scars on my body). It all reminds me of a story so why not collect the good ones.

I don't like them either but having one is definitely better than displaying the manufacturer logo. Far less obnoxious than advertising a product you had to pay for. I also never buy clothes with printed brand names and remove every single logo I can off my car.

If everybody at work has the exact same laptop model, it allows distinguishing between laptops.

Also at airports. I liked having no sticker then I was at an airport and at screening they gathered up four identical MacBooks and (non ironically) asked ok whose is this? Nobody knew and they had to start turning them all on.

This. The issue is that once you start and put one on your laptop, it's hard to stop.

> just like a phone cover does.

If the designers of the phone want to provide a reasonably priced cover that will hold my credit cards and protect the screen then perhaps they can make one that complements the device; and perhaps I'll buy it. Until then I'll have to make do with what the third party suppliers can deliver, there is no way I'm going to carry my mobile without having it in a case.

I switched to carrying my phones naked about 6 years ago and prefer it. It seems odd to prioritize buying a thin, light phone and then put it in an Otter Box. I buy them used right after the next one is released (when the first glut of used phones is available) and keep them for a few cycles. Worst damage I’ve done is to damage a volume down button on the XS Max I’m using right now.

> It seems odd to prioritize buying a thin, light phone and then put it in an Otter Box

Not everyone prioritizes buying thin phones, but it appears aesthetics is a big deal for you. I'm your opposite: all I want to see when I'm using my phone is its screen. Having a case made out of soft material that can absorb energy when it is dropped (not "if") has saved it on multiple occasions at the cost of adding ~1mm to the thickness.

The Xiaomi Mi 9 SE had exactly that

The same argument can be made for tattoos. Why ruin the design of perfectly good skin? And not so long ago, it was the common opinion.

Stickers are a way of expression. Sometimes, I don't like the idea being expressed, sometimes I do. Clean is fine too.

Phone covers are usually for protection. And a reason I hate phones with a glass back (thankfully a dying trend). It is fragile, slippery, heavy and not structural, it only looks good in a store because people put on a case afterwards. Pre Galaxy S6, Samsung had the perfect back cover, made of light plastic, openable and replaceable, and in the case of the S5, waterproof. You may find it ugly, but under a protective case, you don't see it. In fact, they even sold cases that replaced the back cover.

I've certainly used it as a conversation starter, just like wearing a band tee. I think there's something interesting to say as well about putting cheap stickers on a a super expensive laptop as a “see if I care” vibe like slapping a bumper sticker on a Lamborghini.

I wonder how many log4j stickers are out there?

It's a way to express your opinion. Quite a lot of stuff on devlids.com is political. Like a bumper sticker or a t shirt. Althoug it probably is a "everybody posts, nobody reads" situation.

The company I work for handed out stickers when I joined and I put my company logo sticker on the work laptop so that I don't confuse it with my personal one.

It’s a personal taste thing, like any other fashion. I prefer things clean on my laptop, but can see why people find it appealing.

What's worse is the stickers will fade after a while and then just look bad. I used to put stickers on my laptops, but I stopped doing it a few years ago. I especially don't want to put a random company logo/brand on my laptop (as opposed to a library or programming language, which I'd be a little happier with, at least)

I never use stickers from commercial projects or just because something is trendy.

I have stickers from community projects that I actively contribute to or projects that are really meaningful to me and I support morally and financially.

In limited amount and size not to be tacky...

Many people apply the same logic to tattoos.

The stickers don't have to be software related. My current ones are not.

I put one on my work laptop to distinguish it from other colleague's laptops. Zero stickers on my personal laptop though.

Just saw these on Twitter the other day and they are heinous. I don't think I've ever been so annoyed by a sticker before.

Great job! :D

I just had to laugh at loud when I opened the page and saw the Vim logo with Vscode written in it. I was not expecting it. Thanks for this :D

I used to want to personalize my laptops. Due to same vague notion it'd reduce confusion in the office. (Which proved to not be a problem.)

Not big on product stickers. Because "No Logo".

I haven't liked any of the cases I've tried. Among other problems, accumulation of grit and scuz.

I once tried that spray rubber stuff (on an old sacrificial laptop). PlastiDip? Didn't work well. I'm dumb about this stuff. Someone with more experience could probably make it "nice". I plugged stuff into the ports I cared about. Then tried to tidy all the edges with an exacto knife. Looked terrible.

You know those fancy vinyl car wraps? I keep expecting someone to do that for laptops.

No need for plastidip, and no need to apply directly to the laptop.

I got these transparent covers for my Mac: https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0009/5354/8852/products/cm...

Then I made a custom vinyl skin from DecalGirl that was applied to the top transparent cover : https://www.decalgirl.com/skins/laptops/apple

Problem solved. Now I have a laptop "wrap" that isn't permanently or semi-permanently attached to the machine.

DecalGirl has a bunch of other laptop skins as well for Dell, HP, Acer etc: https://www.decalgirl.com/skins/laptops

> You know those fancy vinyl car wraps? I keep expecting someone to do that for laptops.

I had one of those in like 2006. There was a website where I gave my laptop model, uploaded the image I wanted, and they mailed me a perfectly sized sticker that covered my entire laptop back.

I made one real one, and a "Three Wolf Moon" one for fun.

> Not big on product stickers. Because "No Logo".

I personally use generic stickers from random sticker packs, since I also don't like the product or political stuff (well, work laptop can have employers product if there's nice stickers for that). E.g. the laptop I'm typing this on has a small bird sticker in one corner.

> You know those fancy vinyl car wraps? I keep expecting someone to do that for laptops.

"Laptop skins" is the keyword for that.

>You know those fancy vinyl car wraps? I keep expecting someone to do that for laptops.

Sounds like something dbrand[1] does.

[1]https://dbrand.com/shop/dell-xps-13-skins-9380

dbrand sells vinyl "skins" for laptops and phones

Ever though about printing your initials in a sticker?

I get a couple of these and the logos involved in most of the others are familiar but I can't remember enough to figure them out.

Is there an explanation anywhere, or is someone willing to provide one?

ferris.svg - The rust mascot crab (called "ferris") with the face and color of Gopher (the golang mascot)

github.svg - GitHub in a Gitlab styled logo

javascript.svg - JavaScript written in a Java-styled font + the Java logo (Sun/Oracle)

pip.svg - Pip (the python package manager) styled in the npm logo style (node.js package manager)

rails.svg - Ruby on Rails with pretty much the rails logo, but in the color of WordPress. Also the "RubyOn Rails" text theming is in the style of the WordPress logo typography

react.svg - ReactJS in a the Angular logo, including the font style

rust.svg - (this one was truly painful, personally :P) "Rust" (the language) displayed in the node.js logo font styling, including colors

ubuntu.svg - "Ubunutu" styled in the debian (linux distribution) font styling, along with the debian logo. This one specifically, is where the hybrid feels the most accurate since Ubuntu is a debian-based linux distro, but I do believe the communities don't get along very well (or at least that's the running joke)

vscode.svg - VS Code (Visual Studio Code, the IDE/Text Editor) displayed in the "Vim" logo font styling and the logo with the stylized "V"

Thanks: I couldn't figure out the Rust one thought the font was indeed very familiar, or the Ruby on rails thing (looked familiar too).

FWIW, I wouldn't say Ubuntu/Debian communities don't get along well, Ubuntu is officially built on top of Debian (it imports packages from Debian unstable archive verbatim for majority of its archive), and many Ubuntu devs are Debian devs too. There are certainly some Debian devs who have held a grudge for Ubuntu becoming more popular by focusing on better integrating a subset of packages in the Debian archive, but I think we are waaaay past that.

Thank you! Could not figure out Rails, was thinking about Django, Laravel but didn't think of Wordpress. I think (Django) with a PHP-like oval background would have been funnier.

I thought the Rust one might have been trying to look similar to the C++ logo, but the node font looks like a better match.

Thanks!

I love how much I hate this.

VScode one is the best by far

Reminds me of this joke: https://twitter.com/tpope/status/1172743697315835904

This could get somebody hurt.

It has always irked me that the oh my zsh logo uses a bash style `$` prompt.

I don't know if it's just me by I would love to have these as t-shirts. I would buy them all in a heartbeat. Great for conversation starter or as a prank to my fellow CS friends lol

Redbubble! I believe they do one-off t-shirts

The logos are funny, but where do people put those stickers?

Laptop lids are common for developers, especially in trendier companies.

Our work laptops are are sold back to the sell after two to three years. They announced that this option would no longer be available to owners of MacBooks, if stickers are placed on the lids.

Apparently the stickers leave a discolouring that cannot be removed.

Sold back to the what? I think our (and many other companies) consider laptops depreciated for tax purposes after around 3 years. Maybe they just give them to the next developer to join?

The company we buy our laptops from will buy them back for 50% of the original price after two years. That allow us to renew hardware a little cheaper.

We never assign used hardware to new employees, well monitors are reused.

That's true of those "Intel inside" stickers as well (I've been removing them since early 2000s at least).

Can confirm, I did this and my old laptop is permanently discolored. Would recommend doing it with a case if you feel the need.

Can confirm, I did this and my old laptop is permanently discolored.

Since we're all just on video calls nowadays, maybe these apps should come with game streamer-style "add an image overlay" capability.

Bags as well, though you need pretty good (and / or small) stickers if you put them on a part which flexes a lot.

Corporate power point presentations is the target audience.

On servers, directly on the Hard-disk-cage-release....so you can be sure they are even more hated.

on your snowboard

Laptop lid

The troll in me says other people's laptop lids.

Thanks, I hate it.

The gopher ferris one is genius.

Shouldn't the RoR sticker use the Django font?

I was guessing something PHP-related, but I couldn't guess Wordpress fwiw.

Python/Ruby worlds generally have the "it's pretty much the same shit" attitude towards each others' ecosystem, so it wouldn't be exactly the same message :)

Someone should make one for the classic, "my other computer is your computer". God I hate that sticker.

It took me longer than I care to admit to "get it".

These should be NFTs.

no love for apache projects?

once can go to town with all the frameworks in big data ecosystem

Why do people hate Ubuntu and VSCode?

The idea is that the image is from their counterparts: Debian and Vim.

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