Comment

Comment by mmooss

To me, the choices of names for clades seem like madness:

All apes (superfamily): Hominoidea; great apes (family): Hominidae; African great apes (subfamily): Homininae; Pan‐Homo clade (tribe): Hominini; human clade (subtribe): Hominina. [0]

The potential for error seems enormous, and also imagine speaking those words without creating confusion, or try forming singulars and possessives that, in text and speech, unambiguously identify the clade.

Can anyone on the inside shed insight on why they do this to themselves, and to everyone else who has even less understanding? Is it self-hate? Imagine a large codebase that named variables like that - there would be a lynching late one night when the bug was found to be confusion.

Despite my reaction, I guess there is some good reason that all these smart, experienced people make this choice.

[0] From the paper the OP describes: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC13485234/

parent mmooss 2 months ago

Discussion

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton