IoT Market Projected to Grow 12x by 2023 - <AUTHOR> https://thetechladder.com/story/iots-market-projected-grow-16b-2016-195-billion-2023/ <comment><USER3> Also remember:

       The "S" in IoT stands for Security.

(Not my line, but applies here).

So security, or rather the usual lack thereof, will be a thing to keep an eye on.

<comment><USER4> Assuming your IOT device only connects to your server on the cloud, isn't it possible for amazon(or someone else),to just to sell you the communication module that gives you a secure link to the cloud , including updates etc - meaning you, as the embedded developer need only very little to none security expertise ? And you as the purchaser of an IOT product, know that security is handled by some serious player, and is probably handled quite well ?

Seem this could be valuable for the industrial IOT, at least.

<comment><USER5> There are some trying to do this. Shawn Fanning's Helium is one of them.

I looked at Helium. Problem is that when you sell your own design and don't publish your designs and standards you become a single-source vendor.

As a manufacturer, I can't go with single-source vendors. I need backups and pricing competition and etc etc etc. So here we are, still writing code for WiFi radios and leveraging legacy OSS stacks to do the encryption and transport.

<comment><USER4> Helium are interesting, and there's a need for second sourcing, but also, i'm starting to think that the real problem is about creating percieved value for the end customer, like i explained in my other comment:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14078560](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14078560)

I wonder what you, as a manufacturer think about it.

<comment><USER5> It's an interesting idea, and I've thought about it as well.

My first objection would be that I wouldn't put some black box module from a company like Amazon or Google on my design. Too many issues about what's inside and other things like Google's tendency to follow the shiny and discontinue products for no published reasons.

My idea was more along the lines of Amazon or Microsoft selling AWS and Azure- enabled hubs or concentrators that did all the backend lifting and presented a simple REST or MQTT interface on the local network for data ingestion. Then you could connect any 802.11 radio to it and send data over an encrypted channel without having to worry about the heavier layers about it (TLS, DNS, Certs, SAS tokens, endpoints, etc).

<comment><USER4> Yes, the router path makes sense. In a way, it's modular security - if the customer cares about security - he should pay a bit more for the right router, if not - it's his decision.

Btw, Amazon does some interesting stuff with AWS greengrass, including a router, it's quite similar to how you view it. And i'm sure they'll take of telling end users.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, greengrass looks interesting. At least until I saw this:

 _Devices need to offer at least 128 MB of memory and an x86 or ARM CPU that runs at 1 GHz or more_

My devices run on Cortex-M0s. That's not going to work at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think the biggest problem of IoT right now is the perception of what's possible... We've been building internet connected devices for decades, but that's still what people perceive as IoT ('we put a chip'-movement). However, I think the true opportunity for IoT lays in the combination of the cost of sensors going down, the range of sensors going up, and the advent of machine learning.

With cheaper and longer-range sensors we can create vast sets of data on a scale that we haven't seen before, and with machine learning we can extract useful information from this data. With that premise it's also not hard to see why IoT in the consumer market is not such a big success, but you see big industrial players pour billions into IoT projects [1].

There's some other concerns of course too, like the impact that all this data might have on society and that the state of IoT security reflects the state of web security around 1999. If you're interested in that, I did a talk about the subject last week at the AMSxTech conference (20 minutes) [2].

[1] [http://tech.newstatesman.com/iot/general-electric-billion- do...](http://tech.newstatesman.com/iot/general-electric-billion-dollar-iot- startup) [2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxwWmgbRxwU&t=7s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxwWmgbRxwU&t=7s)

<comment><USER7> True, I'd still start with proper security.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I believe in IoT. What I don't really believe in are 'smart devices' as they are currently being sold.

The major benefit of IoT is for the people able to harvest the data, there is generally little added value for the end consumer.

I see the first major growth area in industry, and I see this happening now. Major manufacturers are adding data acquisition to all their processes.

The second major growth area might be the public sector. Smart Cities are building up hype and I'll think we'll hear a lot more about these kinds of initiatives in the near future.

As for the consumer sector, I don't see major benefits for the consumers, but from a producer's viewpoint, adding telemetry to their devices might give them valuable information. So I think we'll see everything becoming 'smart', but not for our own benefit (and hopefully not on our bill).

<comment><USER9> The thing that I'm not super clear on is how IoT will benefit many of us when the data will likely be owned and kept close to the various companies that are harvesting all of it. I see why it would be advantageous of a smart Mr. Coffee sending data off to its servers so they can collect usage data, then they can improve their product and marketing.

But the real breakthroughs would be in sharing this data openly. Maybe people can make connections between coffee consumption and say...obesity, car accidents, productivity, family spending habits, etc, etc, etc. Like we might be able to put massive data to a lot of the experiments we hear about all the time that use a tiny case study of maybe 20 students at some university. And not only that but people could begin to act on the data and develop new products, solutions and services to our benefit and continue to get more data about them in real time. That's the advantage I see to IoT, but I don't see it doing much for us in its current stage as companies have no real incentive to share all that data.

Maybe some sort of open IoT is what we need to get things moving the right direction. But then we all know security is still a major pitfall of IoT to begin with.

<comment><USER10> We are an IoT company, and the data generally is owned by the device owner. There is the possibility some will share data though, potentially in anonymous form.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> IoT has it's place. But but the current bread of "Smart(TM) devices" is all but smart, and in many cases security and privacy threat. A toaster doesn't need WiFi. Not all IoT devices need a internet connection and phone home by default. In the end IoT is something which is around for decades. Industry devices are connected over Ethernet at least for one decade, that's normal. But the are usually firewalled off the internet, and can only be accessed in an internal LAN.

So it will be interesting if Smart devices as one area of IoT keep staying in the current phase or will evolve in 1) more LAN centric, more open industry standard or 2) sending even more things home and analyse the data in a datacenter.

</comment><comment><USER12> I think I am going to brand myself an "IoT Consultant". Get me a share of those Dollar$/Euroz/Renminbis.

Anyone else done that? Any IoT Consultants out there?

<comment><USER13> I bet we're going to start seeing a whole genre of IoT security specialists on the rise

<comment><USER14> Do iot company want to pay for that? A better question for someone in the know, what problems are they having that they would pay to have solved? Updates? Security? Plain old execution and delivery time of a new iot device?

<comment><USER15> That can be more difficult than one can anticipate. This isn't like a desktop or web app where there's a second layer of security, like firewalls/AV and sandboxes respectively. IoT tends to be neglected in terms of updates, and with the new version of the device coming out every couple months, I would imagine there would be devices that won't receive security updates not long after they're bought.

In case of IoT they're in charge of the whole device, and the security of those things aren't looked into a lot. Sounds stupid, but it does need it's own specialists. Otherwise you're going to end up with a lot more insecure devices.

Just an example: [https://www.reddit.com/r/controllablewebcams/](https://www.reddit.com/r/controllablewebcams/)

<comment><USER14> I guess what I am getting at is: do companies not want to pay for security of these devices because they only sell for a few months before the next model comes out? If that is the case forming a security company doesn't seem like a very profitable venture.

Has someone made the equivalent of ruby on rails for these devices? It doesn't work for everything, but for most it works well enough and gets it the job done in a fraction of the time that a complete custom job would require?

<comment><USER16> This could be a start: [https://hexdocs.pm/nerves/targets.html](https://hexdocs.pm/nerves/targets.html)

I happen to like Elixir the language a lot, but it does have legitimate advantages.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> A shameless plug for my recent talk at PyCaribbean 2017 on the topic of MicroPython, IoT, ESP8266 and MQTT.

It covers broad topics that a beginner to IoT will find interesting. It's a 45 minute talk so it only covers what can be covered in that timeframe.

Please forgive the lack of polish. I am not a natural public speaker.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ctB8VMm6RA&t=9s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ctB8VMm6RA&t=9s)

<comment><USER18> I was there and this was a great intro talk. +1

<comment><USER17> Wow, Small World!!!

Thank you for your very kind feedback.

<comment><USER18> You are very welcome. :)

Hit me up at firstname.lastname@example.com to catch up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Every time some research company makes a bold prediction _six years_ ahead I can only think of this:

> In 1997 Intel was the king of the hill; in that year it first announced the > Itanium or IA-64 processor. That same year, research company IDC predicted > that the Itanium would take over the world, racking up $38 billion in sales > in 2001. Wow! Everybody paid attention.

Six years is an awfully long time in this industry.

</comment><comment><USER20> Does anyone who doesn't stand to profit from high-ball guesstimates believe in "the market in [A] will grow from [B] billion to [C] billion in just [D] years" projections?

<comment><USER21> I do in this specific case. (Haven't read the article. Don't stand to profit.) Here's a simple argument for only one aspect of IoT:

Take all the electric equipment you use in your household, office, and so on. Lights, fixtures, fans, kitchen appliances, security systems, on, and on. What the size of that industry you think is at the moment? Just know that about 2/3rd of that industry would "die" and be replaced by exact equivalent devices that communicate wirelessly/remotely with your smart-phones and tablets.

Here's the slightly depressing news: likely majority of that market size would be retaken by giants like GE, Philips, etc, that are already the pre-IoT monopolies. But not too depressing because that still leaves quite a room for new players and acquisitions/aquihires.

But again, this is just one aspect of IoT. I haven't even mentioned new devices, appliances, because it's a little harder to quantify, much less the coming robotic revolution.

<comment><USER22> So that means GE, Phillips, etc get to join Google, FB, etc (not to mention the NSA) in tracking us in ever greater detail? And then your coffee machine, fridge, etc can push advertisements to you.

Not sure I see the value in this as a consumer. My dumb, unconnected appliances work just fine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> If you add an ethernet port to your coffee maker and it doesn't increase any sales, are these reports counting it as a growth in the IoT market and loss in the older market?

Who's pushing this stuff? Is everyone trying to hitch a ride on some buzz, or are there relatively few companies hiring PR firms to trick gullible investors into giving them money?

It's hard to tell, but it looks like Proctor and Gamble introduced the term. Their stock price shot up within a year of Google Trends showing increasing interest in the term. I wonder if they're the ones hiring PR firms, or if it's all organic at this point.

<comment><USER24> > If you add an ethernet port to your coffee maker and it doesn't increase any > sales, are these reports counting it as a growth in the IoT market and loss > in the older market?

Actually I think that's kind of the root. It's not that the number of coffee makers will change much, Mr. Coffee will just start adding "smart"s to more down range machines. And why not? Its another feature to add to the list to sound fancy which in commodity market has a lot of value, the cost to do such is pretty negligible and there are no rules for support.

<comment><USER25> > And why not?

Well for one thing, anyone watching that will miss any hidden growth in dumb devices, they'll appear to be losing market share.

<comment><USER24> But thats not really how markets work. It follows demands. If the ratio of ∂q_smart/∂t > ∂q_dumb/∂t then is what they will try to sell.

Eventually ∂q/∂t will reach near equilibrium, but even then, a smart device for most things a smart device that is never connected to anything is pretty much equivalent to a dumb device.

I'm not saying this article is right. I'm simply saying that IoT is less of a market and more a "feature".

<comment><USER25> That seems to be assuming that the market is perfect, but dumb TV's for one seem to be getting harder to find.

> a smart device that is never connected to anything is pretty much equivalent > to a dumb device.

From the consumers perspective, but the still bring risk: [https://arstechnica.com/security/2017/03/smart-tv-hack- embed...](https://arstechnica.com/security/2017/03/smart-tv-hack-embeds- attack-code-into-broadcast-signal-no-access-required/)

<comment><USER24> Oh no, I agree full hearty with you. I think the IoT trend is scary a fuck. Especially since there is no rules for support. Even if the vendor does a good job building the system, after it stops receiving updates it will become unsafe to use.

I'm stating why I think IoT stuff will take off. I think its terrible, unavoidable future. I'm not against the principle of smart devices, but we are making them just smart enough to be dangerous to our networks, and to sloppy to be safe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Security will improve as technology improves but the main challenge of IoT is that unlike traditional software running on common hardware - <USER2> and configuration is difficult due to the small form factor and awkward interface, hence why many IoT providers are going cloud first which makes sense from consumer level while it does not make sense from privacy point of view.

INSERT:

Btw while your toaster does not need to connect to your wifi many people forget what is the true value proposition here and why these devices need internet access - software - dumb devices that use the hardware only as operating shell but uses software to provide the smarts. In other words a toaster with WiFi connection will not provide you with a better toast but a toaster on your wifi might be able to serve toasted bread with broken hardware that is mitigated through a software upgrade.

The toaster example is extreme. I know! However if you look at Tesla you can apply the same principle at micro and macro level, i.e. the tesla already has the hardware for self-driving but it lacks the smarts yet - i.e. the software. Tesla converted the business of selling cars to a business of selling software - and that is way more valuable than just the car itself.

<comment><USER27> > upgradability and configuration is difficult due to the small form factor > and awkward interface, hence why many IoT providers are going cloud first > which makes sense from consumer level while it does not make sense from > privacy point of view.

Remotely pushing updates and configuration doesn't necessarily imply loss of privacy in practice. I think that's a red herring. I work for Resin.io - we do automated deployments and updates and configuration management for fleets of IoT devices, but that's totally independent of how the device's data is stored and shared (or not).

Remote updatability does open up the _possibility_ that somebody could remote connect in to read that data out, or push an update to get to it, but that's quite a different gambit to devices that automatically scoop all your data, analyse everything you do and resell that to marketers. It's also essentially unavoidable if you want to have IoT that can accept remote updates, which given the IoT security situation to date is sadly clearly necessary.

This move to cloud-focused IoT architecture isn't about upgradability at all. It's a separate decision, with sometimes (often?) dubious motives, and that's where the privacy concerns come in for me. We shouldn't let the necessity of keeping devices up to date lead us to sacrificing the privacy of all our data, they're not that closely related. Windows automatic update is not really a privacy concern, Windows 10's ad tracking and cloud integration is.

<comment><USER26> I believe that we should look at this in a very different way. I frankly have no issues with remote updates and I don't think most people will have issue with the core of the idea as well. Why would they? This is more convenient than doing upgrade via USB and it is more secure in the long run.

But what I have issues with (and I think everyone else) is that I do not know if the upgrade is either not compromised or if it adheres to the same contact that I signed for - i.e. not to sniff my data and do other things I did not buy into.

Hence why, it will be a huge innovation if somebody can come up with a way of proving that software work as intended. Then the contact is the software and not the the TOS and I can use other software to verify that the software adheres to the contact I bought into.

I am sure we will reach to that level of sophistication one day.

There is something else that I would like to add as well. The idea of having your camera hooked on a cloud solution only works today because frankly we have a technology problem. Most people will not run their own data caters and the only convenient way of hook up your iPhone to have a continuous data stream is by signing up for a cloud service.

However, I think that will change soon as well. The first company (probably Amazon) which makes cloud technology seamless, i.e. consumers do not think about it, will revolutionise the market for IoT because you no longer have to rely on someone else's infrastructure that you would not trust - obviously you need to trust your cloud provider :) but cloud could be much as ISP - something that most people will sign up for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I can see how IoT is extremely useful in industrial and infrastructure applications (e.g. monitoring leaks in pipes). I can see how if I was a retail store I'd wanted to track everyone moving through my shops. But ... are there any compelling consumer applications? Lights that change color don't count. Connected thermostats---I've never understood the appeal.

<comment><USER15> I think that's because, we tend to have a strict opinion of what IoT is. And that's apparent in industrial use, where it just collects data to relay it so that other people can make use of it.

But the IoT in our homes are much more subtle. People don't just buy standalone temperature sensors.

If you see carefully, the IoT wave we're expecting is coming in slowly, bundled with other things. These days most of the appliances which were dumb before, like fridges, coffee makers, security cameras, smoke detectors, washing machines, cleaners (roomba, etc.) and others are now connecting to the internet. I mean, a washing machine connecting to the internet might seem preposterous so some now, but I don't think that'll be the case when they get better.

Along with Alexa, Google Home, the digital assistants that are yet to come have a chance to really change the way people use their devices at home. If they get it right, and not close off communication to their own servers (Which, I sadly see is happening now and doesn't seem like it'll go away) I think there's a real chance they might have a big market.

<comment><USER29> But what is the actual benefit to the consumer? What is the user story here? "I want my washing machine connected to the Internet so that _________"? I can't finish this sentence - I have literally no idea.

As another commenter suggested, I expect the incumbent giants will add the IoT functionality to most mid-range consumer products anyway, whether anyone wants them to or not, and then it will be proclaimed a great success, while the consumer will be left utterly in the dark about why their fridge has a wifi symbol on it or what it can be used for. Perhaps it'll be less like 3D printers and more like 3D TV, which has apparently now quietly died a death (I tried it once on my TV, because I work in tech and felt some sort of weird obligation to - I'm sure many people never even tried those stupid 3D glasses that came with their TV).

<comment><USER15> Automation/Notification

1\. Your oven can cook the pizza in the oven, which will be ready by the time you are home.

2\. Your coffee maker can check your location to see if you're in town or not and decide to make coffee.

3\. Security cameras can upload video to cloud directly so you can see them from anywhere live. They can be motion activated to alert you so that you can check if it is a dog or a burglar.

4\. A fridge which recently came out with a camera which you can check to see what you need to buy[1]. Can be triggered when your location is close to a grocery store.

5\. Your smoke detector can send you a notification, turn off the internet connected thermostat and any other appliances. Can turn on the security camera inside so you can check if it's your family burning cookies or house burning down.

6\. You washing machine can remind you when your load is done. Can send you reminders that you didn't do laundry for a while.

7\. Roomba already does neat stuff that I don't need to explain here.

As I said, the real benefit comes when they all work together. There are custom solutions, but if one can set up everything so that it can track your location/schedule to automate things, that would make for a great increase in quality of life. You won't keep forgetting food in the oven, let the heat bill run up too high, forget your clothes in the washer, and a nice coffee as soon as you wake up.

This might seem insignificant, but I think it's similar to having a very smart housekeeper (although not as capable). Combined with all the data about you, like weight, heart rate, schedule, etc. intelligent systems can work pretty well.

[1]: [http://www.samsung.com/us/explore/family-hub- refrigerator/](http://www.samsung.com/us/explore/family-hub-refrigerator/)

<comment><USER25> 1\. How does the pizza get to the oven?

2\. Lot's of issues, my presence does not determine my need for coffee.

4\. Sounds great but in reality you won't be able to see things hidden behind other things or if a sauce bottle is full or empty.

7\. What does roomba do that I need apart from a timer?

From your list is seems like we'll have an internet of half working things that everyone turns off after a week because they're more trouble than they're worth.

<comment><USER15> They aren't perfect. I don't really know what I was thinking with the first one, but I'll just rephrase it to remotely controllable oven.

You can read more about what Roomba can do here[1]. If it isn't for you that's fine. Not everyone needs to buy sauces all the time. Usually just a look suffices.

The problems you talk about aren't against IoT but just the use case I specify here. They're very solvable and there are many more uses than I can talk about.

I'm not a salesman for these products so I just said what came to mind.

When any new technology first comes to market and tries to blow everyone's minds away, it often fails to make the entrance it anticipates because, in your words, "they're more trouble than they're worth". But all they need is some rethinking and time.

When PDAs first came out, my dad scoffed at them and used a large notebook to write down notes. But today that's changed. I think that'll be the same with IoT. We're increasingly moving towards a more electronic home, and that's not stopping anytime soon.

It just needs some time to reach proper attention just like phones did, and we'll have standards (hopefully) which can harness the power of connected devices in your home. As the other commented to GPs reply said, a great factor is energy saving too. Intelligent devices can figure out by themselves when to turn on and off, and that can do a lot of power savings.

[1]:[https://store.irobot.com/default/robot-vacuum- roomba/](https://store.irobot.com/default/robot-vacuum-roomba/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> So there was a nice little JRPG series by the name of Mega Man Battle Network (Rockman.EXE in Japan) [0]

Aside from its obligatory antagonists, the world presented in it seemed more or less like a utopia. What I _really_ wanted to come true from it was how every device – from doghouses to alarm clocks to ovens – had a standard interface that you could "jack in" to with the "Navi" (AI avatar) in your smartphone-like PET (Personal Terminal)..

In current world terms, ideally that would be like:

• Every electronic appliance will have an standardized wireless interface, with no physical controls other than maybe hard reset/power buttons.

• Whenever you get a new device you'd physically tap it with your phone/wearable to register it on your Apple/Google/Microsoft/other cloud account.

• You'd get different tiers of controls for each appliance based on your physical distance and the level of authentication on your primary phone/wearable. e.g. to unlock your front door you have to be standing right there (like how unlocking a MacBook with Apple Watch works) but you can turn the lights on/off from across the world if you've unlocked your phone and entered your cloud password – and only from that phone.

• Personal Assistants (I hope they get to be called Navis at some point) would be interchangeable and customizable – like ringtones and wallpapers – each with its own visual avatar and personality. You could even have multiple Navis, each with its own duties; a butler-like personality for controlling your home, and a chirpy R2D2-like robot that handles everything else.

We can see some of that happening with Apple's HomeKit and its integration with Siri, and of course their competitors' offerings.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mega_Man_Battle_Network](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mega_Man_Battle_Network)

</comment><comment><USER31> I tell people as a joke that back when I did device / integration work we didn't call it IOT we called it TCP. Really. Discrete values over wonderware sql or modems transmitting level readings. If course it wasn't internet scale but it worked. Just a new take on it.

</comment><comment><USER32> As others have pointed out, the current state of the IoT market is nothing short of crazy, e.g., regarding security, device ownership, and, ironically, connectivity. I wonder if this isn't a perfect time to finally monetize the mountain of distributed OS research from the past three decades.

After all, most of you "smart sensors" are actually fairly general purpose computers, and there is no reason why you shouldn't be using all of them, all the time, for computing. Additionally, distributed OSses usually came with secure, low-overhead protocols built-in, which people in the IoT sector seem to be struggling with...

</comment><comment><USER33> The EE hype sphere is leaking.

</comment><comment><USER29> It's 3D printers all over again!

</comment><comment><USER34> What's a good way of getting into IoT? Is there a "TensorFlow Hello World" to get started with things? What basics should I definitely not miss and what hot areas are out there?

<comment><USER35> ESP8266, buy a couple of them, learn how to make the light blink, connect using builtin Wifi, send data, etc. $3 from China to $10 in USA. Get the NodeMCU form factor, add usb cable. Check the YouTube videos on this device, many projects and cool hacks.

Or the ESP32, which is more money but has more RAM and a little more power, as well as adding Bluetooth. SparkFun has their ESP32 Thing for $20.

<comment><USER36> The ESP32 is specially cool, given that is powerful enough to run any kind of development environment from the 16 bit days (MS-DOS, Amiga, Atari ST, ...).

<comment><USER35> Given the neat things hackers have been able to make with the 8266, I look forward to seeing what is done with the ESP32.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Can anyone name good IOT sensors manufacturer.

<comment><USER38> Bosch. For example [http://bosch-sensortec.com](http://bosch-sensortec.com) or [http://bosch-connectivity.com](http://bosch-connectivity.com)

<comment><USER37> Thanks, I am looking to buy for some personal projects. I hope they are not just for the Enterprises.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> It's just things. Everything will be connected in the near future.

</comment><comment><USER40> Software _be_ eating up the world. :) Next iteration: smart _nano-agents_ capable of healing virus infected networks without need for traditional human programming.

<comment><USER41> How that next iteration will look like in reality: "smart" firewalls that deep-scan every packet looking for keywords to sell to advertisers, while incidentally sometimes protecting you from malicious traffic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Textbook bubble.

</comment><comment><USER43> o great more ddos botnets

</comment><comment><USER44> I want that chrystal ball!

<comment><USER45> Why? It's clearly broken.</comment></comment>


Want to learn another language? Take it one sentence at a time - <AUTHOR> https://wordbrewery.com/blog/learning/learn-language-one-sentence-at-time/ <comment><USER2> If it meets the guidelines, this might make a good 'Show HN'. Show HN guidelines: [https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

<comment><USER2> You're welcome. It is an interesting project and it looks like you have worked on it for a while.</comment></comment></comment>


History of American Protest Music: Nina Simone Sang What Everyone Was Thinking - <AUTHOR> https://longreads.com/2017/04/20/a-history-of-american-protest-music-when-nina-simone-sang-what-everyone-was-thinking/\ <comment><USER2> Last year I watched a documentary on Nina's life. It was vividly memorable for the music alone, but so was the heartbreaking story.

What Happened, Miss Simone? (2015)

"On stage Nina Simone was known for her utterly free, uninhibited musical expression, which enthralled audiences and attracted life-long fans. But amid the violent, haunting, and senseless day-to-day of the civil rights era in 1960s America, Simone struggled to reconcile her artistic identity and ambition with her devotion to a movement. Culled from hours of autobiographical tapes, this new film unveils the unmitigated ego of a brilliant artist and the absurdities of her time. At the height of her fame Simone walked away from her family, country, career and fans, to move to Liberia and give up performing. The story of her life leading up to that event poses the question, 'how does royalty stomp around in the mud and still walk with grace?'"

[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4284010/?ref_=nv_sr_2](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4284010/?ref_=nv_sr_2)

</comment><comment><USER3> I prefer the modern music inspired by her original. Such as:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDi9eHTvis0](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDi9eHTvis0)</comment>


Health and Wealth in the Roman Empire (2019) - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1570677X18302600?via%3Dihub <comment><USER2> I really wish we had more popular representations of the later empire. So many people believe that today's world where people visit and settle from all around is something completely new and perhaps bad. Perhaps if they knew what the Roman empire stretching from London to Palmyra looked like, it might amend their perspective.

(And for anyone who'd jump on this: No, it wasn't this mixing of peoples that brought Roman down. The story is much more complicated than that.)

<comment><USER3> But it was a contributory factor, probably the most ubiquitous in the fall of most empires.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Full: [https://delong.typepad.com/rome.pdf](https://delong.typepad.com/rome.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER5> Ancient Romans had a ritual of visiting the baths daily. Doing so helped them reduce the spread of diseases. I remember learning in highschool latin class that Greek medicine focused on curing diseases while Roman medicine focused on avoiding diseases. If you were able to go back to Roman times you would find that people were realitively clean and well fed, even the plebian class.

<comment><USER6> Tangentially I was blown away to read that the age of the court officials during the Ancient Chinese Three Kingdoms period could allegedly go as high as in the 70s which is pretty crazy for ~200AD

But supposedly disease was well contained in at court by the sparsity of people for the given area because everything was so vast.

<comment><USER7> Pretty crazy is how modern scholars don't see a difference between average lifespan at birth and at some age. Humans were always living up to 100, conditional on survival until some age.

Moreover, to become court official, one had to reach some wisdom first, hence the age

<comment><USER8> "Some age" doing a lot of work here. Yeomen in 14th Century England who made it to 20 years old still had a life expectancy of just 48-52 (depending on when in the century).

Source: [https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/standards-of-living- in-...](https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/standards-of-living-in-the-later- middle-ages/07CF2C52840B2D0320A12B3B9ABCE65B)

P.187

<comment><USER9> Doesn't that mean that for each one that dies at 30, there may well be another that dies at 70?

<comment><USER8> Life expectancy is mean not median, and the median wouldn't work like that either.

Of course, some people loved to 70, I think there would be virtually no circumstances where that would be expected (ignoring ad absurdum takes like "age 69 and 364 days")

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The paper seems to me to suggests that the Romans got sicker due to increased exposure to virus and disease as they got more integrated, wealthy and populous. Perhaps this was a hidden trend behind the fall of pre-industrial age civilizations. "Romans paid a price for their wealth with a deterioration of their health"

</comment><comment><USER11> Romans used lead to manufacture many everyday items, including plumbing related infrastructure, resulting in exposure to lead contamination.

Lead reduces your cognitive performance and makes you aggressive.

</comment><comment><USER12> A post of the full article would be nice</comment>


Chinese spy chip: Four more reasons to believe Apple's denial - <AUTHOR> https://9to5mac.com/2018/10/08/chinese-spy-chip-2/ <comment><USER2> 9to5mac also believed Apple on the whole 3rd party screen replaced iPhone 7/8 being bricked by OS upgrade was just a "bug and Apple is on top of fixing the situation". You know, after almost half a year of Apple playing stupid and ignoring angry customers.

</comment><comment><USER3> The four reasons listed are just three assertions:

1) From Apple, which has already made their position clear, so it's just repeating that essentially, although the forum is different.

2) & 3) From government agencies that are specifically tasked with deception when needed.

plus a report about what Brian Krebs said, which highlighted him saying that nobody should draw conclusions about the merit of the story based on the fact that he found nothing. Here's the quote: "I heard similar allegations earlier this year about Supermicro and tried mightily to verify them but could not. That in itself should be zero gauge of the story's potential merit."

So four "reasons" that really aren't.

Although I do tend to believe Apple on this, the four reasons listed in the fine article do not add much. I'm surprised the author gave this such a breathless tone. His earlier opinion piece ([https://9to5mac.com/2018/10/05/chinese-spy- chip/](https://9to5mac.com/2018/10/05/chinese-spy-chip/)) gives better reasons to believe Apple.

</comment><comment><USER4> Maybe:

1\. There really was a supply chain attack, but Apple and AWS did not detect it.

2\. Trump Administration staff worked with Bloomberg reporters on an domestic propaganda piece to expose the attack in a public way amid China-US trade war.

3\. They blundered coordination of their strategic communications, not expecting companies to question the story.

This allows us to consistently believe that:

a. There was a supply chain attack.

b. The companies mentioned were not those who detected it.

c. Intelligence and Tech have different perspectives/stories.

d. All actors/parties are acting in a way consistent with their missions, objectives, and incentives.

<comment><USER5> Given the people involved, #2 is a weak assertion.

<comment><USER4> Thanks, fixed.</comment></comment></comment>


SPDY: An experimental protocol for a faster web - <AUTHOR> http://www.chromium.org/spdy/spdy-whitepaper

<comment><USER2> I thought I'd seen this before - here are some related submissions:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1675699>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1006464>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=971878>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=963653>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=943486>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=940636>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=939938> <\- This has lots of discussion.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=939149>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=938841>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=938413>

</comment><comment><USER3> Although the white paper is a mega-dupe, there has been some recent progress in SPDYland. If you use Chrome, you're probably already using SPDY without realizing it; you can see it in about:net-internals . Also, SPDY draft 3 is supposed to be published soon.</comment>


EyeOS – Web Desktop, Cloud Computing Operating System and Web Office - <AUTHOR> http://eyeos.org/ <comment><AUTHOR> I felt bad that I first heard about this on one of those magazines distributed on airplanes. Has anyone used this?</comment>


Paul Carr on Facebook Privacy - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/09/fool-disclosure

<comment><USER2> What a massively unpleasant troll. All based on a simple fallacy:

"If all it takes to break a privacy system is for one of your friends to copy and repost your "private" photos or tweets then they're not private at all."

By the same measure, no email is private, no hand-written letter, no whispered conversation, no Top Secret document.

That's not how privacy works. Privacy is about trust between humans, and our understanding of what's private includes the assumption that we'll have to trust the other people involved. Where there's technology involved, there is a different standard: if it pledges to be secure, we expect the only leaks to come via the humans. I expect GMail to take pretty extensive steps to keep my email private, for instance, but I don't expect them to stop my friend forwarding my email to a third party.

Facebook was originally billed as a trustworthy piece of technology. Things could leak from it, but they'd leak via other people, not via the software. Now they've quietly changed the rules and are merrily leaking away. That's privacy invasion, and no amount of blaming the victim will change that.

</comment><comment><USER3> My point exactly ... i was channeling Paul only a few hours before his post. Want your data private? Simple: DON'T PUT IT ON FACEBOOK!!! Reminds me of an overweight person complaining about fad-diets not working ... simple again: stop eating you fat b@sterd. Get a grip ... facebook owes you nothing. Give it what you want.

<comment><USER3> My channeling was on the Wired article .. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1333502>. Go ahead, vote me down again alarmists with sense of entitlement

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I was specifically watching this story to see if it'd get flagged for the title.

Guess it just got changed, instead.

</comment><comment><USER5> There is Facebook privacy?</comment>


French government releases in-house IM app to replace WhatsApp and Telegram use - <AUTHOR> https://www.zdnet.com/article/french-government-releases-in-house-im-app-to-replace-whatsapp-and-telegram-use/ <comment><USER2> There was a recent episode of a Brexit podcast I was listening to where two MPs where saying that the vast majority of their "breaking news" communications happened over WhatsApp, which was very surprising to me.

I think France is doing an amazing job of taking control of their infrastructure, and I don't believe it'd be hard for other governments to follow their lead.

<comment><USER3> I'm not too surprised to be honest. WhatsApp is king in (western) Europe. I message all my friends, both Android and iPhone users, in WhatsApp because it's just accepted as the de facto standard since everyone is on it. Phrases like "WhatsApp me" translated into various European languages are common here and synonymous with "send me an sms." I'm part of a lab group at my university and WhatsApp is our main line of group communications, not Slack or email or whatever flavor of the month team chatting service is popular these days. I message my professor/boss as a primary contact point. He messages me to let me know he's running late for a meeting and vice versa. WhatsApp is just literally everywhere here.

E: I just found an issue one of the locks in my apartment. I whatsapped the maintenance guy my landlord employs to request him to fix it and he messaged me back he's gonna be here in a couple of hours.

<comment><USER3> Also, if you ever walk through a university campus library or anywhere else where a bunch of students are studying on their laptops, I guarantee you that most students will have WhatsApp open in a browser or the actual desktop version of the app itself side by side next to their other tools/PDFs/papers.

I can not state how pervasive whatsapp is around here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The company behind this is Matrix, the same one that was hacked recently due to poor security and had their keys exposed and more. The hacker even went and posted a bunch of their security issues on GitHub for them detailing all the terrible decisions they had made.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, but the problem was poor security of Matrix.org 's own homeserver which is the default on Riot, not with Matrix itself. Tchap should be secure enough considering the French government is hosting it on their servers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> So long as it's open-source and E2E encrypted, I'm extremely on board with this. Simply giving people a better option that actually has their interests - instead of corporate interests - at heart could be a great way to solve the social platform debacle.

<comment><USER7> The app they created is for government officials only : "Only official French government employees can sign-up for an account".

But they open sourced the code, so you run your own version of the app. But not sure how useful it will be if no one else is using your app. The network ( millions of users ) that whatsapp and telegram has generated is the primary draw now for them.

<comment><USER8> You have it backwards.

Matrix [1] (the protocol and network) and Riot (the client) are both open and used by many many people already.

The matrix team on behalf of the French goverment [3] developed a fork of the Riot app (TChap) [4] that connects to a private network of home servers with custom registration policies and probably other features as well.

1\. [http://matrix.org](http://matrix.org)

2\. [https://about.riot.im](https://about.riot.im)

3\. [https://fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/matrix_french_state](https://fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/matrix_french_state)

4\. [https://github.com/dinsic-pim/tchap-android](https://github.com/dinsic- pim/tchap-android)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> And a few hours later a french researcher[1] found some embarrassing flaws[2], including one from python's standard lib[3].

[1] [https://twitter.com/fs0c131y](https://twitter.com/fs0c131y)

[2] [https://medium.com/@fs0c131y/tchap-the-super-not-secure- app-...](https://medium.com/@fs0c131y/tchap-the-super-not-secure-app-of-the- french-government-84b31517d144)

[3] [https://twitter.com/fs0c131y/status/1119143946687434753/vide...](https://twitter.com/fs0c131y/status/1119143946687434753/video/1)

<comment><USER10> tl;dr: this app is supposed to be used only for governmental staff. It does so by checking if you have a @elysee.fr or a @gouv.fr email. He bypassed the check by using myadress@protonmail@email@example.com. He could access the "public" groups normally reserved for employees.

The hole has been plugged.

<comment><USER11> Yup, there was a single bug here (which I wrote; serves me right for blindly trusting a mail addr parsing library), which boils down to:

      $ python -c "import email.utils; print email.utils.parseaddr('email@example.com')"
      ('', 'email@example.com')
      $ python -c "import email.utils; print email.utils.parseaddr('email@example.com@gouv.fr')"
      ('', 'firstname.lastname@example.com')

We deployed a fix within about 90 mins of being alerted, and also released an security update for anyone else who is in the same situation (which is very unlikely):

[https://matrix.org/blog/2019/04/18/security-update- sydent-1-...](https://matrix.org/blog/2019/04/18/security-update- sydent-1-0-2/)

<comment><USER10> I am not a webdev so I may be totally out of the loop here but when I was still in engineering school I was told to never trust a user just because of their email because it can easily be spoofed. It is not the case anymore?

And also I am a bit surprised that government employees don't have a way to authenticate themselves?

I thought at least the president and several military staff already had secure phone that used the (kinda unluckily named) Isis network?

<comment><USER11> the way the auth works is to send an email to the gouv.fr address to get the user to click a verification link. this should be fairly trustworthy (ignoring the bug here where verification mail got sent to the attacker's address :|)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is good. I like the initiative of a government actually trying to help and that they open source it. An benefit others also.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm just wondering, what will the government do when the yellow vests start using it to organize themselves. will they shut it down?

<comment><USER10> It is a fork of Matrix' Riot.im (ironical name in that setting) anyone can use it right now. This specific one is only for government employees and I guess is hosted on servers that are physically controlled by the government.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> What's wrong with plain old XMPP, imap with IDLE or even IRC with logging?

This stuff is a solved problem and the only thing that makes it complicated is that everyone want's to run the entire client on their iPhone, which is built by a company who refuses to cooperate with everyone.

<comment><USER15> One of the best things about Matrix is its encryption and focus on security while supporting modern features users want. Not sure why anybody anywhere should have to settle for garbage like XMPP. Hell, this is one of the purposes of Riot or Matrix existing. Providing an open source implementation and design as a basis to build whatever an organisation or person needs. I'm not sure I see the problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> smart, now matrix will get tons of security audits essentially for free

<comment><USER17> Much as we have the French to thank for having adopted Thunderbird many years ago, and also reportedly helping to improve its security features.

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=988299](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=988299)

<comment><USER18> did not know that... and PS: that's one old post!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Best feature: you don't need a phone number</comment>


Ask HN: How many characters per line do programmers typically prefer? - <AUTHOR> 80? 100? 120? Something else? Personal preferences preferred over some standard. <comment><USER3> It's interesting how 80 (the standard number of characters/line) comes from punchcards, where there were 80 columns. Somehow that number stuck and it's still the standard.

</comment><comment><USER4> Personally, I prefer 120, but I realize it is a preference. That said, I am irritated beyond belief when there is a project mandate that all code be 80 characters and no more. Pretty much everyone has a widescreen monitor these days, and the 80 character limit is a relic from the 4x3 monitor days.

Beyond that, I feel like a character limit that low puts a disincentive on the creation of meaningful variable names and function names. Maybe it's a hold- over from my Java days, but I really strive to name my functions and methods something meaningful. When I'm limited to 80 characters, plus proper tabbing, plus general flow control... it becomes incredibly difficult to stay under 80.

<comment><USER5> If you use tiling window managers, there is still a good reason to stick with 80.

<comment><USER6> I've been using some form of tiling manager for 4+ years now (herbstluftwm at the moment, though with stints using i3, awesome, dwm, bspwm and xmonad) and I've never had a problem with lines over 80 characters. I tend to use small font sizes, but I can't recall ever getting into a situation where 100 character lines were an issue. I can't recall any of the mangers I've used having a key combo to open up an 80 character wide terminal, though I could be forgetting.

<comment><USER7> Do you find herbstluftwm to be better than i3? If so, in which way? I've been using i3 for a few years now, I'm VERY happy with it and I'm curious if/how [0] some other tiling wm can be better.

<comment><USER6> I've been a huge fan of herbstluft since I started using it. Herbstluft's 'frames' definitely take a little while to adjust to and it took a few days to figure out how to fit hlwm's tools to my normal workflow, but I find the manual partition/automatic tiling within partitions system to be my favorite paradigm by far.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It depends; you have to use a good judgement - in general the further away from this 80-120 range the code is, the more doubtful the decision looks. I personally prefer 80, but occasionally have to allow for longer lines.

Initially 80 was a technical limitation - you could do more, but had to make much more efforts than seemed reasonable. Then GUI allowed for more - <USER2> there was some inertia of the habit. Gradually some started experimenting with longer lines, finding cases where that's more convenient. Then code guides started mentioning line length...

On one hand, a shorter line is easier to follow with eyes - when you need to go from right side of a line to the left side of the next line, that next line is easier to find if the line itself is shorter. However the code is usually much easier to read in this aspect than prose - line lengths are varying naturally. Yet if you're trying to always keep descriptive names of variables and methods, you're not only adding some verbosity, but also more often have to split lines - and that adds to making code more "blockish".

It seems there are natural limitations - but that still depends on the particular style of the code. Have variable names just right - and you won't need too much lines in a block, so long lines could be ok. Different languages, different conventions for external libraries... It seem to be hard to put a specific number that would be both a good match with existing libraries, work (look) well for all kinds of tasks and across different languages. Sometimes one doesn't even want to sacrifice inner structure of the line - e.g., when several similar lines have important differences which one wants to highlight some spaces are often added, leading to longer lines. Or sometimes line-by-line comments are really useful (say, Minix source code) - which definitely add to line lengths.

</comment><comment><USER9> 80 is my preference, but the coding standard for my team says 120. I prefer 80 because despite monitors getting pretty large, all the useful docked windows in the IDE eat enough space that there isn't really room for long lines. Plus it's hard to follow long lines even if they aren't cut off by other windows.

</comment><comment><USER10> 80 columns seems like an artificial limit nowadays, but it really helps when looking at multiple files or doing side by side diffs. Unfortunately, I have worked with Java code where there were type signatures longer than 80 characters. Thankfully, Haskell doesn't suffer this defect, so I usually stick to 80.

</comment><comment> alok-g No limits. I believe in dividing code into multiple lines naturally without regard to how many horizontal characters a few lines of code will end up getting to.

</comment><comment><USER11> Depends. I usually set a marker around 90 and mostly stay inside it. Func/method type signatures (especially in Swift/ObjC) I'll let run over without worrying as they can get a bit verbose and I don't need to parse them frequently.

Inside the body I'll usually stay under 75 and will split multi param function calls across lines. If lines start to overflow I'll often factor some piece out to another variable to keep it readable.

Switch cases I'll let run long if I can fit them all in as one liners. Having not worked on a shared code base for a few years I've developed a bunch of non standard habits.

</comment><comment><USER12> 80 to 90 for me anything longer gets hard to read

</comment><comment><USER13> 80-85 is what I prefer. I've worked at places where the style guide said 100, but j still kept my lines below that. 100 is too many characters on one line.

Standard typographic convention is 2-3 alphabets on one line. It doesn't quite apply with a mono space font, but 3 alphabets is 78 characters.

When I'm writing hard line wrapped prose, I even prefer to keep it to 72.

</comment><comment><USER14> Interesting reading this. I stop mine still at generally 78 chars. This allows it to print in a large enough font to be fit on a single 8.5x11" page without any extra wrapping.

I have also used 130 chars as the limit and printing source code on green bar paper. But at least to me, it just isn't worth it, IMO functions should never take more then 1 screen to view and that includes the limit of 78 chars and roughly 50ish lines. This makes code easy to grok and helps to make sure a function does only 1 thing. Not that there are not some exceptions but that is my general rule.

The 78 chars also comes from some older printers that had margin issues and if you went to exactly 80 they would wrap or add a blank line. Yea, I know, mostly stupid today, but it keeps the code super portable, predictable and very readable.

</comment><comment><USER15> I avoid going over 80, and try to keep lines even shorter, around 60 is when I start trying to break the line.

I very often put separate function arguments on separate lines.

I'm also always frustrated at the syntax of most non-Lisp languages and how difficult it can be to break lines sensibly. (Infix operators, the ternary operator, JSX, period syntax for property access, etc).

I like to use large fonts because they help me focus. And I also like to sometimes be split screen with a browser on my laptop, so "everyone has a widescreen" is irrelevant for me.

Narrow code when composed nicely still allows widescreen coders to use splitting along the vertical axis, but long lines are difficult for me to deal with with my (perhaps idiosyncratic) ways.

</comment><comment><USER16> Depends on the language. 120 for Java. 80 for Python, Puppet and shell scripts. I don't believe in mandating an absolute hard and fast limit but I'd reject a pull request with unnecessarily long lines.

</comment><comment><USER17> I generally try to aim for 80, but have 120 as my "hard" limit. In find it a good place to have two files open side by side and still have a little bit left over for editor UI stuff.

</comment><comment><USER18> I program with 2 panes on a 13" laptop, so 100 max, but usually smaller. But i'll never compromise my code clarity for the pure reason of the length of a line. Homemade abbreviations are a no go. I believe every abbreviation should be googlable, or something that is common vernacular in your particular company.

</comment><comment><USER19> I work in embedded C/C++ all day and have a soft limit of 80 characters per line and 60 lines per method. 99% of my code will conform but no big deal if you go over and don't lose visual appeal. 80/line is nice because you can put a .cpp/.h next to each other on a widescreen monitor.

</comment><comment><USER20> 80

</comment><comment><USER21> 80 because it makes (several) vertical splits in vim and tmux useful. Anything more and things start wrapping in your editor. When composing email or commit messages I usually go with 72 (so you can indent by 4 spaces to center or quote it 3 times).

</comment><comment><USER22> flake8 (python standard) has 70, which I find to be small and ugly. But then again I'm not a python programmer and I work on 27" and 24" screen iMacs, so yeah even 70 might work.

</comment><comment><USER23> Poll: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11570745](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11570745).

</comment><comment> Const-me Code — typically within 50, sometimes up to 120.

XML documentation in the comments — up to 180: I find the smaller wasted height is, the easier it is to work with the code.

</comment><comment><USER24> 120 for me.

</comment><comment><USER25> Spawn any terminal, any real terminal, and it will be about 80 chars wide by default.

</comment><comment><USER26> 132 chars (derived from old line printers and PCL defaults)

</comment><comment><USER27> 120, at least. It's not 1989 anymore.

</comment><comment><USER28> 10

</comment><comment><USER29> 120</comment>


GitPitch – Markdown Presentations for Devs on GitHub and GitLab - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/gitpitch/gitpitch <comment><USER4> I highly recommend pandoc for this use case. Pandoc is amazing. I recommend it for all your markup. To write tech docs, books, presentations, blog posts, etc.

It lets you use Markdown to generate Html, Docx, Pdf, every other markup, and off course Presentations just like gitpitch.

[http://pandoc.org](http://pandoc.org)

It can also easily be extended to support more features.

<comment><USER5> Interesting, did not realize that was possible! Had to dig into pandoc a bit to find much information about presentations however as I have never actually read the manual to use it. Reference I found was page 60 of the pdf manual: [https://pandoc.org/MANUAL.pdf](https://pandoc.org/MANUAL.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Second slide of their hello-world example:

      ### No more Keynote.
      ### No more Powerpoint.

      ### Just Markdown. Then Git-Commit.

Doesn't look like a simple markdown for me.

<comment><USER7> Am I the only one that hates markdown? HTML just seems so much more intuitive to me. I can never remember how to make text bold or italic in Markdown. Is it 3 quotes? 2 quotes? Single quotes? Double quotes? Asterisks? Wait, is astersks for bold or asterisks italic? Try all the combinations and see what happens?

Compare that to  \-- b for bold!  \-- i for italic! Super intuitive!

And what about headings? Is it stars? pound signs? random rows of dashes? or is it equals signs? Does more pound signs make it bigger or smaller? What happens if the number of dashes or equals signs is different from the number of characters above it -- will my PC blow up? What if one of the characters is a Chinese character -- does it still count as 1 equals sign? Or 2? Or 3? Is it based on the number of bytes after UTF-8 encoding or the number of multibyte characters? Should I just screw it and use bold text as a heading instead of googling for markdown cheat sheets?

Compare that to
,
, ... same syntax as the bold and italic tags so you don't have to memorize a new syntax to do headings once you've learned how to do bold and italics. Isn't that revolutionary?

As a bonus, cleanly-written semantically-meaningful HTML you write can be styled to perfection with CSS in any old web browser without any clunky interpreters or middleware. You don't even have to install anything. Isn't that even more amazing?

Am I the only one that actually wrote a script to convert HTML to Markdown just so I can create those silly README.md files without having to remember some awfully inconsistent syntax?

<comment><USER8> You seem to miss the idea of Markdown.

In its original form it was simply an aid to get static html from _human readable text_ (<\- that there is the basis for md).

For better or worse, it's been forked a few times, adding new abilities or even in efforts to make it stricter. The main idea of readability still applies. I could hand over a markdown formatted txt file to someone and they'd probably read it just fine, whether they could code or not. Html in plain-text form, though? Not sure that would work.

It has quirks, but the whole I really like it. I've used it for writing guides, taking notes... Maybe even for web content at some point.

<comment><USER9> If you limited yourself to a small set of HTML though and kept the structure simple, then it probably wouldn't be much less readable than a Markdown document.

<comment><USER8> How simple, though...?

        # title

        - <USER2>
        - <USER3>

        some paragraph with an *italic* word

->

title

item1

item2

some paragraph with an italic word

<comment><USER10> You could have simplified that to:

<title>title</title>

item1

item2

some paragraph with an italic word

No need for body and html element, you can inject that afterwards.

I think the most important aspect of markdown is not the syntax but the standardisation of styles. No needing to worry about how to make it look nice it's not only time saving but very helpful when reading hundreds of other people manuals.

<comment><USER7> Really? The above HTML will look very readable if you just fire it up in a web browser. And if we all agreed on the location of an optional CSS file (e.g. ~/.default.css) anyone would be able to customize how all their documentation looks. It would be totally optional and just make semantically-good HTML go from readable to super-pretty per-user custom themes. Totally optional -- if you don't have it, you'll still have something extremely readable, well more readable than Markdown.

            <link rel="stylesheet" href="~/.default.css">

        ... your documentation goes here ...

The best part? If you don't think this is readable, just double-click and open the thing in a plain-old web browser and it'll be more readable than Markdown.

<comment><USER11> you have a point.

but you're just talking about _reading_...

when it comes to typing, and especially _editing,_ all that markup cruft becomes a distraction (at best), and usually much more like an irritating obstacle. and you glossed over the ’ which needs to sit in the middle of every contraction. like this:

      “if you don’t have it, you’ll still have something...”

ick. no thank you.

<comment><USER7> "if you don't have it, you'll still have something ..."

is perfectly fine in HTML. If you for whatever reason believe left and right quotes should make a difference,

"if you don't have it, you'll still have something ..."

will be fine in HTML as well. You don't need awful escape sequences for these. Browsers will render them just fine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi @mankash666, thanks for your feedback.

GitPitch was indeed launched with developers in mind. Devs often need to present and promote their work. Having worked as a software consultant for over 20 years I can attest to this. And with the rising popularity of tech meetups and conferences now more than ever making it easy to clearly present concepts, designs, etc. right alongside the actual code in your repo is a big win.

GitPitch is also seeing wide adoption across academia, particularly as a tool for delivering course materials, again right alongside the code.

As a final note, you mentioned a perceived drawback. GitPitch presentations are indeed automatically made available online just as soon as you git-commit and push to GitHub, GitLab or Bitbucket. But if you really want to host the presentation on your own domain or under your GitHub pages a fully self- contained bundle for your presentation is available for download with one click. You can then take the contents of that bundle (HTML/CSS/JS) and deploy it on your own Web server. No problem.

<comment><USER12> > GitPitch is also seeing wide adoption across academia, particularly as a > tool for delivering course materials, again right alongside the code.

Okay, you peaked my interest. This is the slide (built via PowerPoint) that I use to explain a nested loop structure to CS1 students [1]. Explain to me, as an academic mind you, how I can recreate this without learning CSS animations / JS magic?

If I have to, that's fine, but all I'm asking is to make a circular motion animation. I'm demonstrating I can do that in 6 steps with PP; if technical knowledge is necessary, then it's a bit of a lie to say it can be widely adopted to academia.

[1] [https://gfycat.com/UnselfishAcclaimedJellyfish](https://gfycat.com/UnselfishAcclaimedJellyfish)

<comment><USER13> Totally unrelated, but doesn't that graphic become innacurate when the inner loop consumes an array of size size greater than that of the outer loop?

<comment><USER12> Not quite sure what you meant with "inner loop consumes an array of size size greater than that of the outer loop" but I'd like to say no.

In the graphic, we create two separate variables. The outer loop is only controlled through the X variable, meaning only when X is greater than or equal to 3 does it cease. If X started at a higher than 3 number, it doesn't run at all, but that's not the point of the example. The confusing part comes with the Y.

Y is the controller of the inner loop, and only gets incremented when the Y loop iterates. Once the inner loop completes, it still has 2 more instructions to execute (that belong to the outer loop), so it does them. That last line resets the Y variable, so that it can run the inner loop the next time.

It's actually a good question I ask as a follow-up. Suppose I delete the "y = 0;" line, how does that change how the loop behaves?

At no point does my X variable manipulate my Y variable directly (through loops yes, but not like y = x * 2). Like if I went through an old fashion phone book or dictionary, there are 26 letters (outer loop), but each letter has a varying number of words (inner loop). Then it'd read something like

        while (x < 26)
        {
            while (y < NUMBER_OF_WORDS_STARTING_WITH_X)
            {
                y = y + 1;
            }
            x = x + 1;
            y = 0; // otherwise, Y never resets
        }

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Reveal-Md is similar: [https://github.com/webpro/reveal- md](https://github.com/webpro/reveal-md)

The pitch for git pitch itself appears directed at developers, who apparently have the time and patience to write markdown code for slideshows, but don't have the patience to output html/js via something like reveal-md. The drawback is the inherent advertising of gitpitch. With reveal-md your slideshow can be uploaded as a static page(s) to your own domain, or even directly to GitHub pages.

<comment><USER15> Or (for those on the Emacs side of the old holy war), directly from org-mode: [https://github.com/yjwen/org-reveal](https://github.com/yjwen/org-reveal)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> FYI: I've put together an alternative free (open source) presentation (slide show) static html generator from markdown called Slide Show (S9) - [https://github.com/slideshow-templates](https://github.com/slideshow- templates) Includes themes for reveal.js, deck.js, bespoke.js, s5, s6, and more. See PS: Since last year all theme packs / templates are GitHub Pages/Jekyll-compatible. See a ready-to-fork multi-talk site sample here - [https://github.com/henrythemes/jekyll-talks- theme](https://github.com/henrythemes/jekyll-talks-theme) PPS: I've used it for over 30+ talks in markdown, see some "real world" samples on GitHub - [https://github.com/geraldb/talks](https://github.com/geraldb/talks)

</comment><comment><USER17> Maybe it's the mercurial-using cynic in me, but this seems vary barely related to Git, and much _more_ related to Markdown.

<comment><USER18> It's related to Git because of GitHub and the fact that it does not work without GitHub. They should've called it GitHubPitchesPowerPoint.

Git is a magic word and GitHub knows it. Spell 'git' to summon professionals of all kinds. But by releasing GitPeach, GitHub wants to show that its average 'dev' user needs help with making presentations. Is that really a problem? Presentations? Thanks, I don't need GitHub for presentations.

What's next? GitCodesForYou? LetGitThink?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Please, don't take it for trolling or anything, but I was kind of blasted away by the color selection of the GitPitch name in its official page. Reminded me of a certain site right away!

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm afraid the organization logic is totally upside down. I would like to have all my "pitches" in a single repo, possibly modifying some of them slightly in branches - not one pitch per repo, or even worse, one pitch per branch (???).

Having a default PITCHME.md is convenient, but not if it is the only possible way. What's wrong with adding a filepath after the branch in the url?

<comment><AUTHOR> If you would like to have all of your "pitches" in a single repo you can absolute do that. As described in the Wiki:

"Sometimes you may find yourself wanting to build a series of related presentations within a single branch. Collectively these presentations may share common assets such as images, backgrounds, and even custom CSS styling."

For details see the following page in the GitPitch Wiki:

[https://github.com/gitpitch/gitpitch/wiki/Asset- Sharing](https://github.com/gitpitch/gitpitch/wiki/Asset-Sharing)

You might also be interested in support for modular Markdown which allows you to share not just assets but Markdown snippets across multiple presentations. See here:

[https://github.com/gitpitch/gitpitch/wiki/Modular- Markdown](https://github.com/gitpitch/gitpitch/wiki/Modular-Markdown)

<comment><USER20> Thanks for the reply, much better. I still don't get why the filename has to be PITCHME.md, though :)

<comment><AUTHOR> PITCHME.md is a convention. Simple and memorable just like README.md.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I would love to see a version of this where you can deploy your slideshow to your own Github Pages, with no external dependency on GitPitch.com.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi @rorosaurus please see my reply on this thread where I explain that any GitPitch presentation can be downloaded as a fully self-contained bundle (HTML/CSS/JS) with just one click. And that gives you exactly what you need to deploy your presentation wherever you like.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> This reminds me of the present tool [1] that the Go project created, which I like and use for my slides these days. Main reason, which it shares with GitPitch, is the simplicity. It works for my basic needs, and I don't want anything more heavyweight.

For an example, see .slide source [2], and the presentation result [3].

[1] [https://godoc.org/golang.org/x/tools/cmd/present](https://godoc.org/golang.org/x/tools/cmd/present)

[2] [https://github.com/golang/talks/blob/master/2012/chat.slide](https://github.com/golang/talks/blob/master/2012/chat.slide)

[3] [https://talks.godoc.org/github.com/golang/talks/2012/chat.sl...](https://talks.godoc.org/github.com/golang/talks/2012/chat.slide)

</comment><comment><USER23> Since conferences usually have flaky and broken wifis, does it work well offline?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi @izacus it certainly does. The offline feature was designed for this very reason. With one click you get a fully self-contained bundle that downloads onto your computer. Just open it and follow the simple instructions given here in the Wiki:

[https://github.com/gitpitch/gitpitch/wiki/Slideshow- Offline](https://github.com/gitpitch/gitpitch/wiki/Slideshow-Offline)

<comment><USER23> That's great to hear, will try it out for my next talk :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is very cool. One thing that I wish the docs made clearer was that this is a wrapper around `reveal.js`, so if you're familiar with reveal, then learning this tool is just a little more effort.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi @autarch, thanks for the helpful feedback. I'll make some changes to the docs to make this clearer so existing users of reveal.js will immediately feel right at home. It's probably also worth noting that you don't need any knowledge of reveal.js to use GitPitch, just write some Markdown and then git- commit.

<comment><AUTHOR> Shoutout to reveal.js added to GitPitch README and Wiki. Credit already exists on the GitPitch.com website.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I have been doing this for years with remark. Works on any git service, because it only needs a url to a markdown file.

See [http://andreineculau.github.io/go- remark/?//andreineculau.gi...](http://andreineculau.github.io/go- remark/?//andreineculau.github.io/go-remark/remarkjs.md) Source: [https://github.com/andreineculau/go- remark](https://github.com/andreineculau/go-remark)

</comment><comment><USER26> One more alternative: [https://remarkjs.com](https://remarkjs.com)

Code: [https://github.com/gnab/remark](https://github.com/gnab/remark)

Personally, I'm very fond of it, due to it's preview/note-showing feature which you will enjoy, after pressing C ( _clone_ ) and P ( _presenter-mode_ ) in the cloned window.

As with many alternatives, it doesn't pollute your slides with any unwanted ads or external dependencies.

</comment><comment><USER27> If you need advanced features such as graphs and charts, you should have a look at [https://www.neomobili.com/products/slidium-markdown- presenta...](https://www.neomobili.com/products/slidium-markdown- presentation/) The question is : can we use gitpitch with it? Both seems to use reveal.js internaly

<comment><AUTHOR> That looks very nice. Just fyi to anyone reading here it also worth mentioning that GitPitch has built-in support for graphs and charts powered by chartsjs.org.

See the GitPitch wiki here for details:

[https://github.com/gitpitch/gitpitch/wiki/Chart- Slides](https://github.com/gitpitch/gitpitch/wiki/Chart-Slides)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Please, please, don't mess with my page history. When I hit back in my browser, I don't want to go back a slide, I want to go back to the previous page.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi @andrewguenther individual slides appear in the history by default as it allows direct linking inside a slideshow. See Slide Direct Links in the Wiki:

[https://github.com/gitpitch/gitpitch/wiki/Slide-Direct- Links](https://github.com/gitpitch/gitpitch/wiki/Slide-Direct-Links)

If you want to disable this feature you can disable it using your PITCHME.yaml config file, just add:

history: false

<comment><USER29> You could use replaceState instead to change the URL but leave the history intact. [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/History_API...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/History_API#The_replaceState\(\)_method)

This avoids having to click back through each slide.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> What I'm seeing here is a simple and easy way for presenting step by step instructions. Imagine, here's Product X (e.g., class) and he's how to use it (or at least get to know it in a very bite size way). Sweet.

</comment><comment><USER31> I pretty much get the same result without needing a third party service by using a single Jekyll template with GitHub pages.

Running a couple lines in bash gets me latex formatted PDF handouts of my slides via pandoc.

</comment><comment><USER32> The concept was invented years ago with Reveal.JS. What's wrong with it? [http://lab.hakim.se/reveal-js](http://lab.hakim.se/reveal-js)

<comment><AUTHOR> Great question. There is absolutely nothing wrong with reveal.js. In fact I like it so much I chose it as the underlying presentation rendering engine for GitPitch.

When you view a GitPitch presentation it is rendered by the reveal.js library. GitPitch simply provides a new way of delivering presentations that are powered by reveal.js that works seamlessly directly within GitHub, GitLab, or Bitbucket.

If you prefer to use the reveal.js library directly, or use their hosted service slides.com or any other of the great tools mentioned in this thread, then go right ahead. There is something for everyone. GitPitch offers it's own unique approach. And for some, that makes the most sense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I've been doing this for years using pandoc and beamer.

</comment><comment><USER34> Why not use something like Google Slides and try to make it via md?

If it is so important to be able to find the pitch of a github repo, just put the link in README.md.

<comment><USER35> something like that ? [https://github.com/googlesamples/md2googleslides](https://github.com/googlesamples/md2googleslides)

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Cicero [http://cicero.xyz/](http://cicero.xyz/) does this using reveal.js

</comment><comment><USER37> Tried to go fullscreen in a presentations and it couldn't exit the fullscreen mode again, not a fan...

</comment><comment><USER38> Awesome! But I can't use it if I need to make my slides public. Do you support private repositories?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi @alihcevik, GitPitch does not support private repos. However, if you want to keep your project code private but share the knowledge about your project using GitPitch then you can of course create a public repo just for your PITCHME.md presentation markdown.

<comment><USER39> Would you please not @reply people? HN has threaded comments; the usernames are right there. Repeating them is redundant and has the same cloying effect that it would on regular conversation.

(I'm one of the mods here.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure. My apologies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Marketing instincts came through; Gitch is waaaay to close to ginch.

</comment><comment><USER41> Add a markdown file to your repo and get a presentation. Very nice!

</comment><comment><USER42> Can the topic be changed to include BitBucket like the README does?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi @MaxLeiter I tried to include BitBucket in the title text but was limited to 80 characters so it simply did not fit. Apologies for the omission here but it was beyond my control.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> It would be cool to also "pitch" Github Gists. :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi @orschiro you can include GitHub GIST within any GitPitch presentation, see the GIST Slides section in the GitPitch Wiki: [https://github.com/gitpitch/gitpitch/wiki](https://github.com/gitpitch/gitpitch/wiki)

<comment><USER43> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Very useful. Hope it is adopted as well ad README.md

</comment><comment><USER45> Very nice.</comment>


Feds reviewed only one bid for Obamacare website design - <AUTHOR> http://washingtonexaminer.com/article/2537194

<comment><USER2>
        CMS officials are tight-lipped about why CGI was chosen or
        how it happened. They also refuse to say if other firms
        competed with CGI, or if there was ever a public
        solicitation for building Healthcare.gov, the backbone of
        Obamacare's problem-plagued web portal.

Can someone please explain to me on what grounds they are allowed to deny the public this information?

<comment><USER3> _"This is the most transparent administration in history," Obama said...._ many, many times, e.g. [http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing- room/news/283335-obam...](http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing- room/news/283335-obama-this-is-the-most-transparent-administration-in-history)

More seriously, it's absolutely no surprise after the good to great job they're said to be doing with CMS.gov and are clearly doing with Medicare.gov. I can attest that the latter is good, albeit a bit clunky, at handling claims presentation and Part D prescription plan selection and transmitting that to insurance companies.

As I've said elsewhere many times, the clear responsibility for this screw-up is with the CMS on up to the White House (including a 3+ month freeze in the process in the run up to the 2012 election), and just recently that the site now has a chance with CMS being replaced as the integrator by QSSI and the new fix-it czar acknowledging reality and saying his top priority is to stop feeding the insurance companies garbage, something no one else in the Administration was even willing to say was a big problem.

Prior to that management change, name your Google/Facebook/Lisper/whatever dream team ... there's no way they could have possibly won.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> [http://dailycaller.com/2013/10/25/michelle-obamas- princeton-...](http://dailycaller.com/2013/10/25/michelle-obamas-princeton- classmate-is-executive-at-company-that-built-obamacare-website/)</comment>


Mr. Robot, Ms. Robot - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/07/mr-robot-usa-gender-politics/399422/?single_page=true

<comment><USER2> Mr. Robot is an absolutely fantastic show -- my only worry is that USA isn't really a network known for this sort of quality, and I feat it'll end up going the route of their other shows like White Collar, Suits, or Burn Notice and become an episodic heist/case/espionage-of-the-day type show.

Mr. Robot (generally) gets tech right. There are a few weird parts and some overwrought moments, but they for the most part _get_ tech/hacking/code better than any other show. Also, it's just shot very well, reminds me a lot of House of Cards first season.

Highly recommended if you have not already started watching.</comment>


Gradle 2.0 - <AUTHOR> http://forums.gradle.org/gradle/topics/gradle_2_0_released <comment><USER2> Since I was unaware of what it is:

> What is Gradle?

> Gradle is build automation evolved. Gradle can automate the building, > testing, publishing, deployment and more of software packages or other types > of projects such as generated static websites, generated documentation or > indeed anything else.

</comment><comment><USER3> I port my iOS App to Android, Android Studio, Gradle and Maven dependencies management are the best things for any Android dev ever. Gradle build scripts and configuration are totally awesome. Dependencies management just work.

Basically, if you're using Eclipse and Ant for a new Android app, you're doing it very wrong.

<comment><USER4> > Basically, if you're using Eclipse and Ant for a new Android app, you're > doing it very wrong.

Until they fix the performance problems I will keep using Eclipse, even though I am not a big fan of it.

<comment><USER4> To those that downvoted me this was discussed at Google IO.

<comment><USER3> What performance problem? Android Studio is like, 2 times faster than Eclipse. If you talk about gradle build, yeah it kinda slow, but I'm ok with that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Gradle is fantastic and hopefully it helps bring awareness to the under appreciated groovy language.

<comment><USER6> I certainly appreciate the syntactic sugar of Groovy as a clear improvement over vanilla Java. But with time as a scarce resource I've opted to learn Scala and Clojure instead. It would be great if somehow we could smush Gradle and sbt together to build a best of all possible worlds build system for Scala.

Back in 2009, James Strachan (the creator of Groovy) stated that if he'd known about Scala first he probably wouldn't have built Groovy [1]. This Dr. Dobb's article [2] also has some good points on evaluating Groovy and whether or not it will continue to thrive. The simplicity of its syntax vs scala is a great point for Groovy though.

[1] - [http://macstrac.blogspot.com/2009/04/scala-as-long-term- repl...](http://macstrac.blogspot.com/2009/04/scala-as-long-term-replacement- for.html) [2] - [http://www.drdobbs.com/jvm/the-groovy- conundrum/240147731](http://www.drdobbs.com/jvm/the-groovy- conundrum/240147731)

<comment><USER7> > Back in 2009, James Strachan (the creator of Groovy) stated that if he'd > known about Scala first he probably wouldn't have built Groovy [1].

I wish people would stop quoting this as if it is some kind of damning evidence against Groovy as a language. It is sad because I often want to say generous things about frameworks and tools that are competitors to ones I am involved in, but then I remember how ruthlessly and persistently people exploit this line (almost guaranteed to get quoted in every Scala discussion if someone mentions Groovy) and I realise that in the real world you can pay a lot for being generous at the wrong time.

<comment><USER5> Very True. I'm pretty sure that quote wasn't meant to be a critique of the Groovy language, just an expression of interest in Scala. Yet its brought out every time somebody wants to dismiss Groovy.

Compare that quote to this[1] presentation where Paul Phillips lays in to scala for 50 minutes. Even when somebody does criticize their own creation I doubt they mean "Hey everybody, that thing I spent a bunch of time on? Throw it all in the garbage, its pointless".

[1][https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TS1lpKBMkgg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TS1lpKBMkgg)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> release notes here: [http://www.gradle.org/docs/current/release- notes](http://www.gradle.org/docs/current/release-notes)

</comment><comment><USER9> Why is nearly everyone who tries to drum up publicity here so clueless as to assume everyone knows what their product/app/library/whatever actually is?

What a terrible waste of publicity.

The very first sentence in any link should at least give a hint what the thing in question is and if it doesn't, it should not appear on Hacker News.

<comment><USER10> I don't think Gradle needs to spam HN for publicity. It is the #2 (subjectively ranked) build system for Java and other JVM-based languages, and is arguably on the cusp on overtaking Maven for the #1 spot if it has not done so already. It has a pretty tight relationship with Spring and Grails, two of the top three frameworks for doing Java web development.

If you've done any real Java development within the past five years, then you at least know what Gradle is. If you haven't, then you won't, and that is perfectly okay. Frankly, this maxim is true of half the announcements on HN. If I don't recognize something at all, then usually it's a random Rust or Julia thing... and I've grown to conditioned to simply ignore it and skim onward.

I do agree that any public announcements SHOULD include a blurb for the new people who are hearing about the subject for the very first time. As far as HN irritations go, however, that bothers me a lot less than the tendency of announcement threads to turn "meta". Fewer comments on the subject matter itself... more comments on the announcement's font selection or color scheme, copy verbiage, logo design, or just completely random digressions to discuss why Rust does it better, etc.

<comment><USER11> Does Grails and Gradle really have a tight relationship? In the past my experience has been that these two work really poorly together. Has this changed?

<comment><USER12> Both Grails and Gradle ship with the Groovy Language, and are its main two products by number of users - if they disappeared, Groovy's only use of any significance would be short scripts manipulating and testing Java classes. _(Though I 'm not sure if I'd describe Gradle build scripts as "using" Groovy, more like 50 lines using a tiny subset of Groovy's grammar and functionality.)_

And of course Grails is promoted by VM _Ware_ and Gradle by Gradle _Ware_. There's no info about GradleWare's true owners in the verbiage on their _about_ page. Either they want to be bought by VMWare, or they were started with seed money from them and effectively controlled by them.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Mysterious mechanisms at play at the edge of the event horizon - <AUTHOR> http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1515/

<comment> white-flame "While most of this matter is fed into the black hole, some can escape moments before capture and be flung out into space at close to the speed of light as part of a jet of plasma. How this happens is not well understood..."

Sounds like a run-of-the-mill game physics glitch.

<comment><USER2> Definitely, the programmers need to stay away from integration methods that introduce energy. Jeez, I thought everybody figured this out by now.

<comment><USER3> I hear it goes away if you take the accretion disc out of the gravity well and blow on it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Interesting that "only a few light-days" is considered "very close" for this application. For reference, even a single light-day is 6x greater than the orbit of Pluto.

</comment><comment><USER5> Could this observation be related at all to the AMPS firewall theory? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firewall_(physics)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firewall_\(physics\)) \- either a confirmation of it, or evidence that something else is going on? The theory seems to suggest that the firewall itself would not be visible outside the event horizon, however.

Recent pop sci article by Joseph Polchinski about the theory in April's Scientific American: [http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/black-hole- firewal...](http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/black-hole-firewalls- could-change-physics-forever/) (paywall)

</comment><comment><USER6> At this time, the title of the article is actually "ALMA Reveals Intense Magnetic Field Close to Supermassive Black Hole", and I believe it's a substantially better one.

<comment><USER7> The rules about titles on Hacker News are both stupidly strict and then erratically enforced: a bad combination. dang said he would bring more transparency to this, and he has done so where he comments, but I assume, his time being finite, he often has to focus on other things, which leads to the erratic nature of the enforcement. I do wish they would allow more freedom about titles and also about article submissions. I'd also love to see more transparency about why certain articles are forbidden, such as this one: [http://gawker.com/why-weve-decided-to- organize-1698246231](http://gawker.com/why-weve-decided-to- organize-1698246231)</comment></comment>