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I'm curious why they chose 'Cocaine' as the name of the project. Naming a project after a substance illegal in most of the world is pretty bold. I'm looking forward to how they market this outside of Russia.
it is illegal in Russia too
I met a person named "Cocaine". It was actually the name his mother gave him. Also, he had reached adulthood and hadn't changed the name or started going by "Cain". De gustibus.
Do we have to discuss the name every time somebody chooses something controversial? Yes, you're right; it's a controversial choice. What else is there to say about it? We do this every time.
I think it's a legitimate topic to discuss. I think the name of an app or project is very important to its success.

I'm not offended over the name, but simply curious as to why they chose it. I personally wouldn't choose a controversial name if I wanted my app or project to be adopted by others.

That's the conclusion this forum came to every other time we talked about it too :)
I'm not sure how "Cocaine experience" would look on a resume. The amount of extra explanation it will necessitate is a potentially large burden.
There are also likely to be misunderstandings when communities start forming local Cocaine User Group chapters. There might be difficulty in getting space for meetings, and it will be interesting to see who might show up.
I wonder if it will become a trend to name technologies after taboo items? Imagine if a product called Dildo comes out and it is the best, most easy to use piece of software that ever existed. People would just have to use Dildo and get over the name. It could start a revolution.
There's a javascript testing tool that was known as "testacular". Well, cool pun bro, but the name was changed to "Karma" when it grew up.
Cocaine is usually associated with providing a rush of energy, so I guess they're trying to say that their platform is fast.

My guess is, they hired an idiot who loves edgy marketing to name it.

Or, a simpler explanation: they named it while they were high on cocaine.
it is definitely targets market outside of Russia. Otherwise they would name it like "Samogon" (moonshine :)
Feels like some decision makers are doing cocaine and making them feel perhaps more confident than they should.
This theory is probably correct...
Other than the fact that they are using docker, what I found most interesting was that they are developing support for Racket!
Quite a number of Jet Infosystems (a company with a lot of products utilising Lisp) ex-employees ended up in Yandex.

  "Regardless of the name, these cocaine clouds represent a new force in the cloud services market and show the trending acceptance for Linux containers."
Ah, yes, "cocaine clouds."
They're going all cute with that name, calling web interface cocaine flow and clients cocaine dealers.
"Where Yandex uses Cocaine - Yandex.Browser - Internal Yandex infrastructure"

Think they forgot to list - the bathroom

"We are running on Cocaine." Seriously? They don't even have the excuse of being French (do you like Coq?).
Haha, I wonder if the name is just a clever way to get the word out, since yandex is fairly unknown in the west.
It's me or that beta.yandex.com search engine (that I've never heard before) is a complete ripped-off of google? I mean, I know it's a search engine. But in term of UI and design choices, the beta looks very similar.
It's a teaser for their "Islands" project. In its core, it's something actually new (letting you interact with other sites without leaving search pages). However, in terms of presentation, it is indeed quite similar to google.
I actually really disagree. Google is incredibly simple, it's essentially a header, footer, an input field, three buttons and an image.. It's designed to be as simple (and thus attractive to a larger/broader base) as possible. Maybe I'm not being very insightful here, but it's like comparing two sports cars that are white and saying they're the same.
Actually, Google search results are more and more cryptic with each year pass. Now you don't get organic web results too often, instead you are awash with images and captions with weird padding.
Very true. A lot of effort goes in to that cryptic design though.
It doesn't look anything like Google, unless they're split-testing screenshots.
Probably, it was natural design choice. Yandex has all the capabilities to invent and design without copying competitors. For example, they started selling contextual ads and launched maps project earlier than Google.
In my experience, although I know only a few Russians, they are not very politically correct. So calling it "Cocaine" is not that surprising.
Having lived their for a while, I think it's 1) their culture, but more importantly, 2) their company culture.
Compared to the US, any other country can be deemed politically incorrect :)
I'd say Scandinavia and the UK are on par at least
Oh, they are very much politically correct, they just happen to have different politics.
Couldn't tell by looking around but do you think this could be used to host multi-tenanted environments? How about untrusted code execution?
Yes that's the crux of it
The degree of reality distortion of the management who chose this brand name is very telling. Moscow, Russia.)

So what, FreeBSD jails based hostings are cool again? But, of course, Docker is much more cool and "innovative".

It's odd, they don't mention if it's possible to do rails.

Maybe with a couple dollar bills they can make rails happen, doesn't seem to work so far.

This kind of talk is probably going to send more than a few recovering addicts reeling back to rehab if not careful. ;)
I'm pretty sure my companys filter will block this only because of the name.
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After trying for minutes to come up with an apt comment, I think I will just pack my stuff and move to Russia.
This will be bad for cooperation between NSA and DEA.
I'd say quite the opposite, now they can detain more developers for 'using cocaine' and then blame it on misunderstanding after the fact.
If we leave aside the name.

Do people see potential for this?

I saw a short presentation on it at the weekend at PyCon Ireland, It was above my pay grade but it was intrigueing.

Its an unfortunate name
Regarding the name...

If lots of people started emailing each other, talking on social networks, etc about it, would that cause a corresponding extra amount of filtering work for the likes of the NSA?

If so, wouldn't it rather screw things up if we got loads of these like, Linux Bomb, Android Plot, OSX Semtex, Windows Terror and so forth?

Do you think people who actually use/sell/buy it call it be the medical name?
They probably call it coke, but that already conflicts with coca cola, and some other things.
Surely NSA's filters analyse probabilities of occurrence of words in different context like they do with sex bombs, plot diagrams, "Semtex Films", "Terror Inc" and so on.
It also makes it hard to Google. I'm guessing that a search for "Cocaine Reviews" may yield some results that would upset most corporate filters.
It would be nice naming versions after drug names, like Android with their sweets. But it should go from weakest to strongest - whoever starts with cocaine straight away, does not leave themselves a lot of space
Does anyone have any comments other than the name?

Seems like it competes directly against the soon-to-be-released Flynn[1] and Deis[2]. I'm tempted to poke at it a bit, but the documentation seems pretty scant. In theory an open source roll-your-own PaaS is pretty cool, right? Certainly Flynn got tons of attention and funding with a similar value proposition.

[1]: https://flynn.io/ [2]: http://deis.io/

I find the name pretty funny myself...

Speaking on behalf the the Deis team, it's nice to see another public PaaS getting an open source implementation. We're obviously bigger fans of the Heroku model than the GAE model, but that's the beauty of the new Docker PaaS world. Choice.

I just hope their Docker containers/images end up being portable. Some better docs wouldn't hurt either.