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Comment by dmazin | Hacker News Reader

I love Hacker School (the entity, not the name) but Recurse Center is a strange choice. "Recurse" does not bring to mind the word "recursion" by itself, and while "School" is a meaningful word, "Center" isn't. It has no umph as a phrase. The reason for the change is completely sound, but the new name is just a little strange to me.

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We were mainly torn between choosing a name that was completely meaningless and one that was mostly meaningless, but which had some connotations to programming. We opted to do the latter. All the meaningful, descriptive names we could come up with -- like "Programming Retreat" -- are too generic and/or have the same problems as "Hacker School." (We also wanted to make sure we could get the .com, and we wanted to avoid making up completely new words.)

That is to say: We expect that for almost everyone hearing it for the first time, "the Recurse Center" will be meaningless. That sounds like a bad place to be in, however, it's a much better than where we were before. Almost everyone who heard "Hacker School" for the first time had to be convinced that one or both of the words didn't mean what they thought it did in this context.

Today is day 0. Our job now is to take these largely empty words (Recurse Center) and imbue them with our values and purpose.

Glad to hear you like who we are/what we do, regardless :)

Thank you for the reply!

I agree that meaningless phrases are good for brands, and much better than ones with baggage (as you say, in that regard Hacker School can't get much worse). And I believe that you will be able to properly add meaning to "Recurse Center."

My point with my "umph" comment was that "School" refers to an object/category, while "Center" refers to a blank entity, it's kind of a dead word (it also has a bit of a connotation of something formal and boring, like a business office center). I believe we like references to objects, not placeholders - "Sears Tower" and "Nokia Theatre" both sound better than "Staples Center." But I'm not offering advice, I'm just curious about your process. Did y'all consider things other than "Center"?

Yes, we considered a few others. For instance, we thought about "retreat" but decided against it because it felt too limited, and we considered "institute" but worried it would come off as pretentious.

Center is definitely kind of a "dead" word, but we'd rather err on the side of too little meaning rather than too much given our past mistakes :) (We also like the acronym "RC" more than "RR" or "RI.")

Thanks for the thoughtful comments!

> we considered "institute" but worried it would come off as pretentious.

Mildly so, but "Recurse Institute" still sounds awesome. :)

Heck yes, anything but "center". Even "academy". Anything.

I first saw Hacker School name-dropped on a blog. It was such an intriguing name I Googled it and read up. Sounds fantastic, like something I would really like to do some day. Seeing a reference to Recurse Center on a blog would not have the same effect on me. It would have gone uninvestigated.

"Center" sounds officious, beauracratic, stuffy, and boring to my ears. Exactly the kind of place I would like to avoid and would not bother to investigate. I second "Institute" as being better; it summons to mind the Instute for Advanced Study and other think-tank, idea-cauldron kind of places.

Off topic but your HN profile description still says Hacker School.

You aren't fond of the name, but you try it on for size anyway. You wince as you feel the name tighten around your body. The name is (re)cursed!

And the verb recurse is used in the name as an adjective when we already have a perfectly good adjectival form of the word—recursive—that is also more immediately familiar. People who consider recurse an ugly back-formation (preferring to recur) will wince, cringe, and decry the gramatical turpitude all at once.

But enough criticism—here's an attempt at something constructive: How about "Recursity"? The .com address is unregistered, and you can pretend it's a portmanteau of recursion and university suggested by a high-dollar naming consultant.

The Recursity is a free, self-directed educational retreat ...

Hmm. Maybe a mashup with the word sabattical could work.

"Recur" means something different, regardless of the origins of the word "recursion." By the logic that we should never have two words with the same etymology, we should merge "chief" and "chef" (or "recourse" and "recursion," for that matter). And I don't know why it's an adjective; if it were the "Bill J. Simpson" Center we wouldn't decide "Bill J. Simpson" were an adjective.

Sabatticode? Ah well, too late now.

Apologise I too really agree with the need to change name but don't really like the new name. With the illiterate 'curse' and 'center' it sounds like possible some health care center.

How about taking on a longer more officious sounding name 'the center for higher studies in code' or suchlike. That's possible more border friendly and I'm sure there's a bunch of options in that space.

Sounds like they're trying to stick to a name with more lasting weight and a sense of authority. A name like Recursity may be trendy (a portmanteau ending in the letter 'y'), but I suspect ten years from now it will look very tacky.

Flickr launched in 2004 and, at 11 years old, doesn't look very tacky (Yahoo's meddling aside). It also seems like a good problem to have - it needs to last ten years first. If the name's a problem then, the option to rebrand is still there.

I agree. Unlike "recursion" or "recursive", "recurse" has zero oomph.

Perhaps not having meaning is the meaning, although I do not know. What would you have thought of Inception Center?

It's more like a hacker reading group -- like an academic reading group -- except for coding. Reading group is not a catchy name though =P

I agree. As my purely 2c on the new name choice, the first thing that comes to mind is "Rehab Center".

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