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Comment by jmillikin | Hacker News Reader

  > Imagine if there were 40 competing and completely
  > mutually unintelligible versions of html or text encodings

There are.

  > There really should be a one size fits all minimal
  > serialization protocol

There can't be.

  > just the same way there is a one size fits all network
  > protocol which moves data around the entire internet

There isn't.

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Every now and then I come across someone who thinks data is like water and we should have standardised 'pipes' and components for processing and transporting data and converting it between formats like we have pipes and valves for transporting and purifying water.

But data isn't like water, it's like 'chemicals'. You can't have a standard component for processing data the same way you can't have a single components that knows how to process sulphuric acid, crude oil, hydrazine, mercury and molten salt.

Data can be binary, delimited, fixed field, lossy, ASCII, Many variations of Unicode, executable, contain attack such as SQL injection, encrypted, have time sensitive delivery requirements, include checksums, require checksums to be applied in the protocol, be meaningless without metadata or other data, and have who knows what other constraints, limitations and requirements.

Building a data processing system is not at all like building a water works. It's more like building a chemicals processing plant.

All valid. But if you want to avoid a shock, please don't talk to people who transport actual water in actual pipes. I bet you'd be surprised how many different standards of pipes there are and the long list of features that separate one kind of water from the other. ;-)

If you want to offend both groups: Germany has a joke item called a "Gardena RJ45 Adapter"[0] which allows you to connect your garden hose to your network...

[0] https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-QkYNnuYZs8Y/Uf0y_mV-1uI/A...

Now I want to run my Cat 6 through a water hose, just to see the look on peoples faces.

Now that's a fat pipe.

Honestly that enhances the narrative. Just be like "data isn't like our idealized view of water" and "even water requires different pipes in different circumstances".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAuEoo3lgKM

An excellent point, thank you.

I think the point may include the fact a chemical plant and a water plant are not that much different in comparison to something which is would appear to be a radical shift in approach.

It is my opinion that this will be the function AI serves in reality.

Same thoughts on AI + data. Well, as a dream. In reality programming seems to be one of the last areas AI is applied to despite the potential benefits.

A "protocol" is just a good excuse to create a consciousness entity, which itself is designed to interpret the communication between two other entities.

I suspect the author hasn't read The Absolute Minimum ... about Unicode [0] (or why there's no such thing as "plain text")

[0] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/10/08/the-absolute-minim...

Almost all of that is irrelevant. Just use UTF-8.

Oh no, there are 40 competing standards. We must make one to unify them all! Oh no, there are 41 competing standards.

In fairness they are saying pick one, the earlier one.

He picks it up and adds one tiny modification (changing endianess). Others might need to change another detail making their version incompatible again.

He describes message pack, afaict. Then acknowledges it with tongue in cheek.

https://xkcd.com/927/

edit: scrolling down shows me this has already been posted 3 times in this thread (and will probably be posted a few more times before it's off the front page)

If you remove the indentation, your > will markup the text as a quote. The indentation marks it as unwrapped preformatted text, which renders this text illegible on mobile.

> If you remove the indentation, your > will markup the text as a quote.

No it won't. It just puts a '>' in front of the line. You can also put asterisks around the text to italicize it (as I've done here). But the '>' has no special support.

> This is just normal body text.

https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc

> The indentation marks it as unwrapped preformatted text, which renders this text illegible on mobile.

Verbatim/code formatting does totally break legibility, especially on mobile.

You sum it up nicely.

You're being completely disingenuous here.

Nothing is competing with HTML on being what HTML is. Nothing is even close.

All text encodings in common use build on top of ANSI. The de-facto standard (now) is UTF-8 and there's no reason to change that.

IP really does move all the data around the entire internet (that's kind of in the name right there!).

Yes, there are variations, extensions and incompatibilities, but these things are not being re-invented all the time, exactly because these things are ubiquitous standards.

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