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by zeristor·9y ago·view on hn ↗
What does gravitational teleport even mean?

One would think that effect of gravitation could be forced to occur at a different place in the universe, nifty perhaps but not on the top of things I need.

It seems naming has turned into a poetic amalgam of words to excite. Stripped of meaning it is technobabble in its purest form.

2 comments
It appears that organisation is named Gravitational, and the project name is Teleport.

I don't think there's much basis for this critique aside from the poor title choice.

Engineers like names to be unambiguous as possible. Teleport tells us absolutely nothing about the software.
> Engineers like names to be unambiguous as possible

Such a wealth of evidence that this is complete bullshit.

Emacs, Gnome, Amarok, Chrome, Firefox, Git, Mercurial, Hibernate, Spring, Play, Om, Racer.

I'm still salty about Chrome, "chrome" is a technical term in browser development. It literally means the widgety parts of the GUI that sits on the top, the part that's not the webpage being rendered.
Some places do this on purpose in order to get into existing word-real-estate, and maybe even give the impression that their product is responsible for it.
unambiguous != self-descriptive

I may not understand what Emacs is by looking at just the name, but I'll definitely not think it's a breakthrough in quantum physics or a planetary engineering project.

We're now 5 replies deep into a comment by someone that shows historical & purposeful pedantry.

I would state that, in previous times, this type of comment thread would be killed fairly quickly given what you name something really isn't that important vs. what it actually does for helping secure infrastructure. Perhaps we're seeing the effect of viral irrationality manifest itself here, within our gates.

We're here for learning about technology. We're not here to have some meaningless discussion about marketing tactics.

Yeah, this is true. I should not have commented.
Second thought kills, so I killed second thought. ;)
Isn't Emacs short for elisp Macros?

GNOME is Gnu Network Object Model Environment.

a lot of these things it makes sense just to give a unique name (Git, Mercurial) followed by its 'type', e.g. "The Git VCS".

Editor Macros, I believe. There were several Emacses before GNU Emacs.
A yes, like ycombinator.
that isn't a product though, right?

It's a company, under which other companies are contained?

Gravitational teleport sounds like something out of cheap science-fiction novel. Magical device with pseudo scientific name which inner workings are never explained. It's only purpose is to act as a deus ex machina when author runs out of ideas.

On the other hand, future heralded by sci-fi is indeed now: you can download your gravitational teleport and you are free to use it :)