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Comment by behnamoh | Hacker News Reader

How is the name pronounced? Like nate-n, which is a play on Nathan?

Aside from that, I've been thinking about no/low-code solutions for educational purposes. I'm an incoming professor of a university and most my students have little background in CS or related fields. The university insists on using tools like Alteryx but I want to see if free open-source solutions exist (because that way, students can use the tools after graduation).

So far I've seen Dify, Flowise, Langflow, n8n, Make. The last two seem to be more general while the other ones are tailored to LLMs (which is the focus of my courses—applications of LLMs in management).

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From their GitHub:

“ What does n8n mean?

Short answer: It means "nodemation" and is pronounced as n-eight-n.

Long answer: "I get that question quite often (more often than I expected) so I decided it is probably best to answer it here. While looking for a good name for the project with a free domain I realized very quickly that all the good ones I could think of were already taken. So, in the end, I chose nodemation. 'node-' in the sense that it uses a Node-View and that it uses Node.js and '-mation' for 'automation' which is what the project is supposed to help with. However, I did not like how long the name was and I could not imagine writing something that long every time in the CLI. That is when I then ended up on 'n8n'." - Jan Oberhauser, Founder and CEO, n8n.io”

This sounds like excellent evidence that they picked a terrible name and should change it.

It is definitely a bad name, even once you know the real name it feels unnatural to say. It might be too late to change though. Maybe better to ret-con it to just be “Nathan” :/

agreed. between this, the license drama, and the "im 12 years old and i want a ricer civic" website theme, Im wondering if I'm being trolled. and their prototypical example: Do you need AI to get somebody a slack account?

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