3D mice and other hardware may run a local server for web applications to use them as input methods. The dialog can also show up if you are using network security software which proxies requests via private IP address range. Plenty of other non-nefarious reasons too...
Safari and Firefox allow this by default without a prompt or visible indicator (but maybe that has changed now that Chrome added its dialog).
Yep, I've been importing CDs to Apple Music (which I buy from my local music store) and adding them to my Android phone for personal listening. It's a great way to spend money on music in a way that supports local businesses!
This is why National Aeronautics & Space Administration (NASA) guidance is the following:
> Acronyms often confuse readers. Avoid them whenever possible. If an acronym is necessary for future reference, spell the full word and follow with the acronym in parentheses on the first reference. For example, The General Services Administration (GSA).
In fairness to the authors README, there isn't really any other BPFs in this domain and if someone didn't already know what BPF was, then this project wouldn't be of any interest to them (and would be a bad place to start on an BPF journey too).
So I can't blame the project's author for the lack of explanation about what BPF is. Particularly when it's just someone's personal project.
And before anyone complains about this comment: I do think the GP is completely fair in asking for clarification as to what BPF is too. There sometimes seems to be backlash on HN against people asking for a term to be explained. This comment isn't that.
Sure, but if you are sharing with a general audience (where people aren't necessarily coming from your own domain) it's a good idea to make the writing accessible.
My first thought would have been Band-Pass Filter, which is also a filter potentially related to computer systems.
I work in an industry with a lot of Three-Letter Acronyms (TLAs) and eXtended Three-Letter Acronyms (XTLAs) (sometimes known as Four-Letter Acronyms (FLAs)), and there they are often overloaded in their meanings. So in my experience, being clear about the definition is helpful to readers so they can immediately understand the document without having to triangulate meanings from the rest of the document.
But again, this isn't intended for a general audience.
Anyone who might need this would already know what BPF is. And anyone who isn't familiar with the term BPF in this context wouldn't be the target audience for this.
It's also worth noting that BPF isn't ever referred to in it's non-acronym form. Literally no-one in the field calls this "Berkeley Packet Filter". Just like nobody calls PHP "PHP: Hypertext Processor" (or whatever backronym they've decided on this week), nor SQL as Structured Query Language. The name for this technically literally is just referred to as "BPF".
So while I agree with your point in general -- it's not really a fair complaint in this specific occurrence.
Well, it's posted on Hacker News which is a general audience including people working on electrical/signal/audio/radio-frequency systems among other things (not just low-level network code) where BPF has a different meaning, so I think disambiguation is appropriate.
> Well, it's posted on Hacker News which is a general audience including people working on electrical/signal/audio/RF systems among other things (not just low-level network code) where BPF has a different meaning, so I think disambiguation is appropriate.
And it's been explained on HN exactly what it is. So problem solved.
By the way, I noticed you didn't follow your own recommendation for the "RF" acronym in your comment. Nor "NASA" in your first reply. Perhaps you should check your own comments before you criticize others for doing the same.
Maybe you should also leave a comment in the Mullvad story (currently #1 on HN) that nobody has explained the VPN acronym there. Likewise for the threads where people reminisce about BASIC, of which there have been many lately. They're also only obvious if you already know the subject matter.
Nitpick: eBPFs aren’t just for low level networking manipulations but also lots of other parts of the kernel. In fact the expanded version of the acronym is slightly confusing as it sort of implies being entirely to do with networking, which it isn’t.
~Well, if you asked a randomly-chosen person (technical or non-technical) they would probably say NASA is "the organization that does the space things" — it's pretty well-known~
~On the other hand, BPF means different things in different domains, and isn't ubiquitous in the same way~
Edit: I should have written it out, that's on me :-)
Alternatively, it is a conscious decision to help prevent users from causing complicated situations.
Given a highly configurable system, users will find ways to (unintentionally) tie it into knots, so adding some guardrails can help reduce complexity demons down the line (both in the technical implementation and the user experience).
I guess I prefer to give people making things the benefit of the doubt.
federated hardware (a bunch of raspberry pis networked into a high availability kubernetes cluster, hidden across various local coffee shops for free power and bandwidth)
Creo (and Onshape) both support STEP AP242 export, but customers may choose to export to an older version for better compatibility with third-party systems that have not implemented recent standards.
Generally, at export time, choosing the oldest format version which still has all of the features you need will make it most likely others will be able to open the data.
I've also felt that composition is unnecessarily hard in web & data infrastructure. I do game development as a hobby, and web + data technology is in the stone age compared to game engines when it comes to composability.
For example, say I develop some object (scene) in Godot Engine. It interacts with the environment using physics simulation, renders 3D graphics to the screen with some shaders and textures, and plays back audio from its 3D location.
I can send this scene to some other user of Godot, and it will naturally just work in their project, including colliding with their objects, rendering in their viewport (including lighting and effects), and the player will hear the location of the object spatially.
Of course there is much more you can do in Godot, too: network requests, event-driven updates, localization, cross-platform inputs, the list goes on. And all of these compose and scale in a manageable way as projects grow.
Plus the engine provides a common data and behavior backbone that makes it possible for a single project to have code in C++, C#, GDScript, and even other languages simultaneously (all of these languages talk with the engine, and the engine exposes state and behaviors to each language's APIs).
In fact, I've been thinking about making a Godot-inspired (or perhaps even powered) business application framework because it's just such a productive way of building complex logic and behavior in a way that is still easy to change and maintain.
So I imagine if Cambra can bring a similar level of composability for web & data software, it could dramatically improve the development speed and quality of complex applications.
Back in the days we had this in programming as well with palettes of drag & drop components.
It is kind of broken now, much thanks to using web applications (and applications that are basically just wrappers for web applications), but I don't know I if want to go back.
On one side it was much easier when I could hack together a program that was good enough (since everything was the same bland grey).
On the other hand some programs certainly looks nicer today.
And it has become easier to compose logic with solutions like Maven, Nuget and the various frontend package managers.
But yes, we lost drag and drop UI development, we lost consistency and we lost a lot of UX (at least temporarily).
I think there's a lot of potential for some more old-school UI in business software. People using points of sale, CRM/ERP/PLM/etc. systems, intranet portals, and so on don't really care about how nice it looks. Efficiency is more important.
Especially if it can be easy for non-technical people to build efficient UIs and databases (so they don't have to resort to spreadsheet contraptions), I think there's an opportunity here...
I've heard of people using Godot for non-game applications and I'm tempted to try something similar in the (near?) future because supposedly Low Processor Usage Mode makes it kinda feasible/sensible if you develop with that in mind from the start.
And while web pages can masquerade as desktop and mobile apps why wouldn't games be allowed to do the same? Godot for example can do desktop multi-window while something like Flutter (which is amazing in its own right) can't do.
But yeah, someone needs to spend time and build out UI toolkits for Godot and sadly that's not really a long weekend undertaking.
Still! It's nice to dream from time to time and imagine a reality where we can either do some generic cookie cutter UI because it's meant to get things done without much ceremony or we can pull out all the stops and plop a 3D scene to walk around the file system and shot files to delete them. And yeah, I'm aware someone did a thing like that in VS Code with Three.js (I think?)[0] and for Flutter you can do something similar in a webview inside the app proper.
Yet somehow I would rather do those things inside Godot for reasons unknown to me.
Your Godot scene doesn't work in Unreal Engine. I always felt that composition is unnecessarily hard in game engines infrastructure. I do web development as a hobby, and any .js file targeting the DOM works on any browser. I can't even run GDScript in Unity!
You're just comparing the wrong things. Yes, when you're locked into one environment, everything works together well. The moment you interact with outside systems, all hell breaks loose. If anything, what you're saying is just that platforms should have a much larger stdlib, or abstract platform differences properly (hint: this is only doable if you're a game engine and can afford to absolutely ignore _everything_ the OS does and just concern yourself with reinventing every wheel).
Not to say there's nothing good in the games side of things: a bunch of software could benefit from accepting that some systems like a big fat central message bus and singletons can be good when handled well.
You can just git submodule in the dependencies. Super easy. Also makes it straightforward to develop patches to send upstream from within your project. Or to replace a dependency with a private fork.
In my experience, this works great for libraries internal to an organization (UI components, custom file formats, API type definitions, etc.). I don't see why it wouldn't also work for managing public dependencies.
Plus it's ecosystem-agnostic. Git submodules work just as well for JS as they do for Go, sample data/binary assets, or whatever other dependencies you need to manage.
Safari and Firefox allow this by default without a prompt or visible indicator (but maybe that has changed now that Chrome added its dialog).