It’s a post in a BSD blog, specifically of the author of The Book of PF, that is in its entirety concerned with the question of whether a new edition of The Book of PF is coming. It’s not an ad in a computer magazine. It’s fair to presuppose that a reader of the blog knows what The Book of PF is. (It’s then arguably not fair to post it for a general audience on HN, but the author can hardly control that.)
Please don’t assume everybody who presupposes knowledge does so to assert their intellectual superiority. Presupposing knowledge is how we can communicate anything at all in a culture where one can be a dozen inferences or a couple of years of learning away from even understanding a question. And people who assert their intellectual superiority usually aren’t worth listening to at all—so if you end up concluding that every smart person is doing it, or even most of them, or most of them in a field, then you have a wide-ranging misunderstanding of some sort. This, about presupposing knowledge, is one that could be. (Another popular one is not understanding that, in mathematics, “obvious”, etc., does not mean “skill issue if you don’t get it” but rather “you’ve missed something important if you don’t get it, go back and think on it some more”.)
There has arisen this strange obsession on this website with every page having to explain what a project is about. This makes some sense for the marketing of the project, if there is for example a new version of some software. But for a personal blog it really does not. If a reader of a technical website is incapable of searching for "openbsd pf" then maybe they are indeed inadequate and are better off reading something else.
Right. It's a question of context. And here we all are on a website that is basically purpose built for taking things out of context. We might just need to manage our expections in this regard.
I just think it would be nice if "The Book of PF" was quoted so it's obvious it's a book title, not just a weirdly phrased sentence. After that, yeah, it's pretty obvious whether you care about the topic or can just move on without commenting on your apathy.
I've been rightfully downvoted above. My comment was not perceived as pH-neutral as I was imagining it.
HN is a place where people come to get exposed to a very diverse list of topics, from seismic faults to quantum computing.
As such, my expectation is that an article linked on the front page has a minimum of context for those coming from far away. In this case, the article that was chosen onto the front page not only lacks that context, but also is blissfully unaware of this expectation. Which is perfectly fine and normal for the author and for the intended readership.
I found that mismatch fun to read, in the "frequent questions" part of the article, and did not anticipate that my remark would be taken as caustic.
Ok, great, so we put Packet Filter in the title. Still doesn't explain it. So let's put Packet Filter for BSD in the title. You didn't explain what BSD is.
Eventually let's just put the entire article in the title.
> not knowing what PF stands for in the first place
I'm going to level you up 10x right now.
1. Select the text "Book of PF" in Chrome
2. Right click on it
3. Search with Google
4. Read the summary "OpenBSD's stateful packet filter, PF, is the heart of the OpenBSD firewall"
BOOM! You can now do this with anything you don't know! You no longer need to ask someone to explain everything to you!
