Why specifically "Robinhood", though? Robinhood is a fairly well known brokerage.

Why not Robin Hood or some other unique or generic name?

I don't think there are many people who will confuse an in-house load balancing service used at dropbox with a brokerage even if both are called Robinhood. Similarly, I don't think that people will confuse said brokerage with an old character of English folklore (and no I don't think it's the space that's important).

Context matters. There simply isn't a risk for meaningful confusion here. So what's the issue exactly?

I think it's quite easy to confuse the two if one is diagonally reading the HN frontpage and sees a headline that begins with "What's new with Robinhood [...]".

maybe dropbox didn’t optimize naming their in-house software for HN readers

>(and no I don't think it's the space that's important).

That space or the lack thereof is important.

To date I only know of two Robinhoods, the brokerage and the load balancer, and I only learned about the second with this thread.

> I don't think that people will confuse said brokerage with an old character of English folklore

I don't know about that. Why do you think people would not link a financial company to the folklore character famous for redistributing money? That's kind of disingenuous claim to me.

When I first heard about it, I actually assumed it was a reverse Robin Hood by taking money from the poor to give back to the rich type of scheme.

Many things are named after Robin Hood. It's not as though the brokerage invented the term or has any right of exclusive use. You'd have to be quite dim-witted to muddle up a brokerage and a load balancer.

Many things are named after Robin Hood, but I only know of two things specifically calling themselves Robinhood and one of them I only learned from this thread.

In fairness the load balancer presumably came first, but the point remains.

I think Robinhood the brokerage was _fairly_ obscure til 2020 or so, no? This appears to have gone into production in 2020, so is likely older than that.

Robinhood is a large filesystem policy engine and maintenance tool since 2004, too. Soo Robinhood Markets are already late to the game. :)