But seriously, now I want to know, what are the most unfortunate technology or startup names my fellow HN'ers have encountered? I'd bet a moderate sum there are some wild examples to be found in SV history.
A few years back there was a Github OSS project by an Asian developer who couldn't speak English at all - I think it was a Ruby or Node utility library of some kind.
I don't remember the exact details anymore, but he intended to call it something like 'childlike' or 'so simple a child can use it' - unfortunately the machine translator he used interpreted the input phrase in his language as 'one that likes children'.
So he was very, very confused at the loud community reaction when he made a post announcing the 0.1 release of his new 'pedophile' library.
Honestly, how does this name even remotely relate to what it does? Sometimes I really despise the trend towards "quirky" names in open source projects.
(That's because "Mongolian idiocy" is the obsolete medical term for DS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolian_idiocy)
It was named after "Mongo, an immensely strong, dim-witted, yet philosophical henchman" in the movie "Blazing Saddles" (which is hilarious but would probably get Mel Brooks burned at the stake if he tried to make it today.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blazing_Saddles
Anyway, "mongo" is short for "mongoloid" which was a derogatory word for folks with what we now call Down Syndrome, and also racist in re: Mongols. So yeah, not a great choice of name.