Hacker News Reader

I know where the name comes from but still, the word Turk being used as the name of the unit workforce while making automation by using mass manual labor is a bit inconvenient. We already have an ambiguity with the name of our country in the English language, give us a break :)

View on HN

I thought you were just being a stickler referring to Mechanical Turk, but then I saw the PDF, and it didn't actually refer to a casino in Turkey. Wow, this is some next level confusion right there. What were the authors thinking?

I was thinking it is a catchy name.

You are turning a casino into a nexus for mechanical turks. What is complicated about it?

It's also not meant to be offensive, if anything it is a compliment to Turkish people. They are good at solving problems with no definitive solution.

What's complicated is that a "mechanical Turk" isn't a person from Turkey, and a "Turk" isn't an anthropomorphic automaton. "Turkish" means "from Turkey", not "a place where mechanical Turks operate".

It's like calling Wikipedia "wiki". A wiki is already a thing, using the word for the set to refer to an element is confusing, although I guess this is the opposite, and would be a bit like calling MoinMoin a "Wikipedia".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com