Hacker News Reader

Comment by thepasswordis | Hacker News Reader

I really wish people would be more careful about choosing names for these things.

LoRa has been a popular wireless protocol for like 10 years.

The scale of human knowledge, and the pace we're increasing it at, means we probably can't have unique names for everything any more if we aim for short, pronounceable things. "Lora" must have dozens of meanings across different domains. The fact you recognize it from another one is just something you have to deal with.

Yes, but this is LoRA, clearly not LoRa.

PP has a point though. I entered "LoRA" on Google, DuckDuckGo, Startpage and Bing, and all returned results in all first pages were about the communication protocol (1). They could have inferred my interests from previous searches, but I never used Bing in the last year or so, so it seems to me someone didn't care about name clashes.

(1) well, except Google which -surprise- returned about mid page an ad of a local quite expensive chandeliers brand called "LORA".

I usually just add a term like 'ml' or 'nn' after my search to give the machine context and it is sufficient in most cases.

Wait until you find out its a name too

Most of the time you have to add a keyword as to what it is related. We cannot expect everything to have unique names, unless we are perfectly fine with random pronounceable strings as names.

I think you mean LoRa®, a registered trademark of Semtech® Corporation, for use only with permission and within specific guidelines. https://www.semtech.com/uploads/company/FAQ-for-Use-of-LoRa-...

Not to be confused with Semtex who sell a completely different kind of problem solver.

Isn't Semtex an explosive aka RDX?

Yes, you got the joke.

The other side of this is that if you become paralyzed by decisions because 0.001% of people are bothered by it, you're not gonna make it.

Seriously, that was a terrible name for the wireless system since it's been used by the Loyola Online Records Access system for half a decade or more before the radio company shamelessly copied the name.

I addressed the same in a previous 'lora' post on HN. For me the name is already reserved for the radio telecommunication meaning. Nothing going to change that.

Think of Apple naming its spreadsheet "Numbers" and its word processor "Pages" (or, for that matter, the name "Apple" itself. Or "Windows", "Word", "Access"...).

And yet (as others have noted) adding another word or two to give a bit of context is usually enough that web searches work.

Search engines are pretty clever nowadays, except when they've been deliberately dumbed-down (cough... Google...).

Not sure about "popular"

99% of ML engineers wouldn't know what it is.

I'm not an ML engineer and the only reason I know that the wireless protocol exists is because in every HN article, there's a comment repeating the same complaint

99% of the engineers who are still working in ML (Machine Language) would.

A much smaller percent among those who write in ML (the functional programming language) probably, though.

Even if the ML engineers know about the wireless protocol (and I doubt that many do), the scientists/researchers who develop these models probably don't. They are completely different domain. The lead author on this paper is basically a neuroscientist; some of the other are technically computer scientists, but probably have little hands-on experience with networking beyond whatever they did in undergrad.

...but they should know how to use search engines...

at some point we are going to run out of easily pronounceable abbreviations that are unique. Perhaps that point is actually in the past and we should just acknowledge it and move on. Although I guess it could have been Lorall - oops, that's a character in World of Warcraft.

Old concepts become obsolete anyway. People can start reusing VCR, etc.

As should have the IoT people to not conflict with the decades old LORA name used for Level of Repair Analysis.

Anyone with some starch to their collar now knows that lora is both a wireless technology and an ANN fine tuning method.

It's virtually impossible to be sent for a loop if you're engaging critically. The two domains solve very different problems and have no overlapping concepts. The way we talk about each topic is very distinct.

Not much of a surprise there. The ML culture is to reinvent names for everything.

And LORA stood for Level of Repair Analysis since the 70s.

The overlap in the Venn Diagram of people who care about LoRA and people who care about LoRa is extremely small. Your problem is not typical of people in the Machine Learning field. That's why they didn't care, or more likely this issue didn't occur to the first 50 people who saw the name LoRA.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com