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Comment by sentenza | Hacker News Reader

Given the name of the site, I'd like to add an off-topic remark on culturally sensitive naming.

Your site is named nshipster, which is fine, unless it will become the name of a product which you would ever want to market in Germany.

In public discourse in Germany, the two letters NS are commonly used as shorthand for National Socialism in the historical sense.

So if you want to sell, I don't know, your coffee break management app and call it ns-coffee, nobody in Germany will touch it with a ten foot pole.

Another two-letter combination for which the same holds (I'd even say it is a lot worse) is KZ.

KZ is the everyday stand-in term for concentration camp. So think twice before you name that Kazachstan travel app.

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NS is a common prefix for Apple-derived ObjectiveC classes. In that context it stands for NextStep, which Apple acquired many years ago. The NSHipster blog is a reference to this usage of NS. I understand that it has extremely negative connotations in Germany, but unfortunately you're going to have to take that up with Apple, not with the blog's author.

Yes, I know that. Just recently I talked with a friend about just that unfortunate naming decision by NextStep. I also didn't want to directly critique the site owner.

I just thought it might make sense to draw some awareness to the issue because non-German speakers have practically no chance of knowing about this pitfall. It's kind of similar to the Chevy Nova situation.

The "Chevy Nova situation" is an urban legend. http://www.snopes.com/business/misxlate/nova.asp

Alternative: Toyota MR2 in France :).

Funny how they repeated that mistake with the next generation. Called the MR-S in Japan, you could see how it could be shortened to "Mrs." in English, comparing the car to something a mother or wife might drive. So they named it MR2 Spyder in US and MR2 Roadster in EU.

NS is a common prefix for Apple-derived ObjectiveC classes. In that context it stands for NextStep

Ah, I'd been wondering what hipsters had to do with browser plugins (nspluginapi, which I think is from Netscape).

I thought you were going to talk about the insensitivity of using the word hipster, which seems to have been turned into a derogatory term about people who dress too well I guess...

NS is actually part of the Objective C naming history:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/473758/what-does-the-ns-p...

Interesting how we take for granted the potential cultural interpretations of something as simple as a couple initials.

I don't think most people consider a fedora and skinny jeans dressing 'too well', and those are the fashion items that come to mind when I hear the word 'hipster'. Then again, the word hipster seems to be context-sensitive... YMMV.

Haha the term seems to describe everything from Mad Men era suits to fedoras and skinny jeans, even to bringing back the Canadian tuxedo shudder (http://thecanadiantuxedo.com/blog/)

I'm sure you could find an unpleasant connection behind all two letter acronyms if you tried hard enough.

The site's name is an Apple/OSX cultural reference. It refers to NeXSTEP: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nextstep In particular, the core classes of Objective-c (and thus Cocoa and Cocoa Touch for iOS) use NS as a prefix: https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/cocoa/...

NS=NextStep

German people writing iOS software must be having a hard time then.

Seriously, even in the context of cultural sensitivity, this seems pretty silly to me. Really? National Socialism gets to own the letters NS for the rest of time? I mean, if it's an objective fact that Germans get upset by those letters, then I guess that just is. I still can't remember ever hearing of anyone being upset about letters that could stand for something else before. There aren't really that many letters, so I'm not sure how feasible it is to restrict two-letter combinations.

I've taken my time to ponder this because there really is a problem with getting this point across. I do not know of any other language where two letter combinations are connotated this heavily. Sure, there are some that are mildly weird/inappropriate, such as for instance FU in English, but nothing compared to these three in German (I stupidly forgot one in the previous post).

I think I've come up with a way of explaining how heavy the connotation is. So again, these are the abbreviations:

NS is bad, quite worse than any comparable thing in English (but not bad enough for Apple to drown in boycott mails, as you noted).

SS is significantly worse than that. Have those two uppercase letters together (better yet, standing freely together) and there is nobody raised in Germany who will not immediately think of the SS and/or death camps.

KZ is the worst. This one is an immediate, unconditional full stop. Now here comes the comparison: Putting that in your product name is _exactly_ the same level of horrible as using the word pedophile in your product name.

That is the level of connotation we are talking about here.

I hope this helps somebody.

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