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Comment by gerdesj | Hacker News Reader

Great response.

Panzer on its own translates to (an) "armoured" (thing).

I love the Chelsea tractor -> "Hausfrauenpanzer" allusion. The German might be translated as "The wife's tank" or "The missus' tank" or "Me bird's tank".

The English word tank is the outlier. It's a code word for the initial concept that has stuck and unfortunately ended up as the canonical name for the thing. The word tank in English really used to mean a vessel eg a water tank.

I lived in West Germany in the 1970s/80s ...

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At the risk of getting shredded here for working in defense contracts on unmanned vehicles, I’m one of software engineers working on an unmanned tank. [0] If someone asks what I do my initial response was “recently I’ve been writing software for unmanned tanks” which was met with a lot of blank stares. Now I say something like “I work on tracked vehicles like what you would call a WWII tank” and that seems to go over better.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ripsaw_(vehicle)

I imagine calling them "killer robots" is frowned upon in your industry.

Sure isn’t. Turns out most of them aren’t meant to fire artillery.

Edit: it’s also 100x more interesting than making a website or an app and arguing about which fotm framework to use.

> Edit: it’s also 100x more interesting than making a website or an app and arguing about which fotm framework to use.

I am not a pacifist. There are some people doing bad things, that need to be stopped. But there being many npm packages is one of the stupidest possible explanations for working on it.

Finding my work more interesting than nmp install is stupid?

Edit: I’m really kind of blown right now. You’ve decided my job interest is stupid. I’ve loved remote controlled cars since I was 4, I’m now in my late 30s. I get to program big remote controlled vehicles. I love it. But I guess that isn’t ok. ={{

I have faith in your ability to understand that I have not decided that your job interest is per se stupid, but that choosing to build weapons, because of a short-lived frontend landscape sounds exceptionally stupid.

Unmanned tank warfare sounds kinda humane actually. Instead of killing each other, tank crew members being cooked alive, etc, we just let the unmanned tanks duke it out kinda like a really expensive robotics competition. Of course reality doesn't really work like this but...

For the most part conventional armies don’t really fight one another that often anymore - it’s more common to have asymmetric warfare like western/russian involvement in the Middle East. These “tanks” will probably not target other “tanks”.

The early Ripsaw really does look like the first WWI tanks...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Flickr_-_The_U.S._Army_-_...

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