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There's probably a lot of this going. Comes to mind right now the way the Navy had about two seal teams in the beginning, and then decided to name the next one
by sanoli 11y ago
There's probably a lot of this going. Comes to mind right now the way the Navy had about two seal teams in the beginning, and then decided to name the next one 'Team 6', to make it look like they had more. I've read about other examples, but can't remember right now.
- stvswn 11y ago"Delta Force" is not what it's called, either. The Army cycles through bureaucratic sounding names -- "Combat Applications Group" for example -- in order to keep it confusing. "Delta" comes from one of these names -- "Operational Detachment: Delta." This sounds like an unimportant support team for a Special Forces group. "OD: Alpha" is the main team of green berets (aka, "ODA" or "the A-Team"). They are supported by 'OD: Bravo" and "OD: Charlie" (logistics support, etc.). So "OD: Delta" sounded meaningless to an uninformed listener. By the time Chuck Norris made "Delta Force" a known name for the pinnacle of Army Special Ops, they weren't actually called that anymore in reality.
- lafytahoe 11y agoThe army of Western Virginia.
- freebasedgirl 11y agoThe army of West Virginia.
- run4yourlives2 11y agoThey are currently called "1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta". They haven't changed their name in years (or ever, really). What you are likely confusing is "Seal Team 6", which is now properly listed as "United States Naval Special Warfare Development Group" or DEVGRU.
- stvswn 11y agoNope, that's not what I'm referring to. This is in the public domain: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2010/10/delta-force-gets-a-name-change/64310/ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2010/10/delta-fo... I called them "CAG" in 2008. I'm willing to guess they're not even "ACE" anymore.
- beachstartup 11y agosmall companies do this too, because it works great. employee #63, invoice #51775. press 1 for sales, 2 for support. sure.
- nathanm412 11y agoAs a cashier when I was a teenager, I was told to ID and call in anyone with a check # under 500 with the assumption that low check numbers were less likely to be reliable. When I ordered my first book of checks a few years later, I started with # 1550 and was never bothered.
- spydum 11y agoas recently as last year when opening another checking account, the bank clerk told me to start my check numbers at atleast 500 (you can specify when ordering checks). I asked her why, and that was also the same reason given. I laughed at the silliness of the idea, but took her advice anyways.
- marshray 11y agoIt's not completely silly: a check number under 500 is still highly likely to be a newish account. The test is cheap and has low false positives, so the fact that the it is easily subverted only diminishes its effectiveness but doesn't make it useless.
- mattmcknight 11y agoBut who's actually rejecting low number checks? It seems more common to see businesses reject accepting checks altogether.
- marshray 11y agoYeah, most businesses seem to use a check verification service these days.
- xupybd 11y agoWow what country still uses cheques? Most stores won't take them anymore, here in New Zealand.
- 11y ago
- lazyant 11y agoOracle release 2, there was no R1
- BogusIKnow 11y agoI once wrote a paper at university about the psychology of version numbers.
- Already__Taken 11y agoYou must have had a bloody field day with all the moaning about chrome and firefox climbing the numbers.
- eponeponepon 11y agoWas it published? I'd be very interested to read it.
- kale 11y agoI would too! Do you happen to work for Microsoft now? Either in Xbox or Windows division?
- BogusIKnow 11y agoNo sorry, it was a.) philosophy b.) before the internet
- henesy 11y agoBump for paper if it's published.
- JonCox 11y agoMicrosoft are at it too with Windows 10. Sneaky beaky ;)
- speeder 11y agoThis one is to workaround coders stupidity, despite winapi having functions to give windows version numerically, lots of coders just used regex on windows name... and the regex for "windows 9*" is extremely common
- actaeon169 11y agoThe CEO at a very small company I worked for not too long ago made me do this when assigning phone extensions because "Having 4 digit extensions makes us look like a big company." The only people this would fool would probably need supervision to use a phone.
- Kucher 11y agoI also worked for a megalomaniac CEO who would go through a sales rep every two months and insist on leaving their voicemail and extension enabled in the company directory for the very same reason.
- azernik 11y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_tank_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_tank_problem
- T-hawk 11y agoThis actually hit my previous company in a software context. We would number hotfixes sequentially. Customers would be notified when hotfixes were to be deployed to their sites. One savvy client noticed the hotfix numbering sequence and worked out both that we had a lot of hotfixes (tens per week) and that they didn't get them all right away (if you don't ask for it, it comes to you in the next quarterly trunk release.) Many awkward discussions ensued. Solution: new policy to number hotfixes randomly instead of sequentially. Whoops, now sometimes hotfixes that had dependencies would get deployed in the wrong order. Solution: also name hotfixes by date. Whoops, now the client can figure out that two weeks elapsed before they got the hotfix. (For all your usual enterprisey red-tapey risk-aversey reasons.)
- Joeri 11y agoThe solution should have been to append a random string to the hotfix number. Still sorts the same way, but unguessable.
- jtolmar 11y agoThat doesn't help anything. You can't guess the next hotfix number, but you can still tell what order they were in and, after seeing a few examples to figure out how long the non-random part is, tell how many were skipped.
- azernik 11y agoThe canonical solution that the Wiki suggests (which seems like a fairly good idea to me) is to make your "serial" number an encryption of the actual serial number; that way your tooling can still get the real ordering, but customers will find it computationally hard to get that information.
- 11y ago
- dogma1138 11y agoGiving random numbers to regiments and battalions isn't new it's done partially due to historic honor and to prevent the enemy from getting accurate strength numbers by simply counting unit numbers.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- sanoli 11y agoNot the same thing but similar, a programmer wrote once how he made his software delay the answer to some user action to make it look like the program was hard at work. The process was actually very fast, almost instantaneous, so he added some message like " working - x seconds left ". Maybe it was on HN some years ago...
- seanp2k2 11y agoReticulating splines... I've also done this in some programs I wrote as a teenager to solve math / physics homework to make it seem like it was doing more than it was.
- elboru 11y agoI used to do the same, I remember adding labels saying "Processing" inside a while and then adding a dot for every loop, just to make it look like a "real" program. Good old times.
- headcanon 11y agoI had to do this for a program I wrote for a study - basically it pretended to be a networked game with other users, which meant I created fake "Loading" screens that had a random-ish delay.
- melloclello 11y agoI did the same thing once for a dialog box on an iPhone app. The check would fail instantly if the phone was offline. It didn't feel "right" and we didn't really have the time to change the UX so I just added a random delay of between 1.0 to 1.5 seconds. Still in production today.
- yetihehe 11y agoThere were many such programmers, myself including. I don't even want to check if that software still lives, it was security theater abomination.
- kagamine 11y agoNow there's an interesting UX paper if it hasn't been done already. In UX we hear that a milliseconds long delay directly affects user retention rates. I wonder how users feel about search reliability, or data integrity when results are faster than expected.
- davorb 11y agoThe Soviets managed to fool the US government into believing that they had many more strategic bombers than they actually did, using the same tactics. > At the Soviet Aviation Day demonstrations at the Tushino Airfield, ten Bison bombers were flown past the reviewing stand, then flew out of sight, quickly turned around, and flew past the stands again with eight more, presenting the illusion that there were 28 aircraft in the flyby. Western analysts extrapolated from the illusionary 28 aircraft, judging that by 1960 the Soviets would have 800. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomber_gap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomber_gap
- Shivetya 11y agosometimes attempting to fool or convince your own people you get the side benefit of doing the same to a foe
- arethuza 11y agoI don't think the US had any desire to accurately measure the threat from the Soviets as reality would have contradicted what politicians needed - the curse of all intelligence activities.