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Jack Dorsey’s Square is changing its name to Block
- kwu777 5y agowhat's up with all the renaming? Sounds like a nightmare for the codebase & services or do the eng team just keep the old name internally?
- hn_throwaway_99 5y agoProgrammers rarely change codebase names when corporate names change - it has a huge cost for almost no benefit. That's why so many of Apple's Objective-C class names start with NS - which is for NextStep, the company Apple acquired in the mid 90s.
- baybal2 5y agoI would say I find a patter of meaningless name changes much more prevalent in "enterprise software" circles.
- willcipriano 5y agoFind and replace wouldn't be that bad with 'Square' I feel like, I don't think you use the word 'Square' too often while programming, if the company was named ';' or 'def' then id just find another job.
- brockwhittaker 5y agoit's never as easy as find-and-replace :)
- iso8859-1 5y agoYou use square all the time if doing linear algebra or geometry. ;)
- aaronbrethorst 5y agoI hope employees start getting called 'blockheads'. https://observer.com/2012/01/square-employees-are-called-squares/ https://observer.com/2012/01/square-employees-are-called-squ...
- stubish 5y agoLikely, if their systems cause blockages or they keep blocking payments.
- sschueller 5y agoI don't like large companies using basic words for their business. They take complete control of all trademarks and screw anyone who has anything similar. You want to call your band "new kids on the block" or your game "blocks"? Sorry there is a trademark on block and it's "too similar" to what we do. You don't agree? Go ahead sue us, oh BTW we have more money than you...
- voakbasda 5y agoThey absolutely should never be granted trademarks on such common words in the first place. The intellectual property system has become another example of regulatory capture, ready to be abused by those with deepest pockets.
- vldo 5y agohoping they'll merge with google as alphabet block
- FormerBandmate 5y agoWhy the hell would he copy Meta? That didn't work out particularly well for Facebook, got bad PR and Square is a much better corporate brand than Facebook. Who asked for this?
- Nasrudith 5y agoOutside of HN I have never heard anybody reference Square. Compare to Facebook which is hard to not hear about as their rivals angrily spam incoherent hit pieces. That may be his advantage however - while everyone called and still calls Twitter trash from just its restrictive character limit there isn't such a personal hatred to Dorsey. Unlike Zuckerberg he doesn't have a sizable deranged "secretly an evil android or robot" brigade repeating a variant of the "stab in the back" myth.
- stubish 5y agoBrave for a payment processor to choose a name meaning to hinder or impede.
- logotype 5y agohttps://block.com https://block.com That domain must have been expensive…
- reducesuffering 5y agoHilarious that they're using squarespace for that instead of their own product, Weebly.
- footlose_3815 5y agoLet's just trademark dodecahedron
- smnrchrds 5y agoIt seems like Square has an office in Montréal. They should rename that office to "Block Québécois".
- tasogare 5y agoBetter spell it as bloc to manage local susceptibilities.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]