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Comment by pfraze | Hacker News Reader

Basically petnames change the addressing architecture from “one global mapping” to “many local mappings.” This means that petnames cannot be used as shared identifiers; you use a global UUID when you need to identify information between users. There are some contexts where this works great (the phone address book) and some where it doesn’t (Web URLs). In effect, if I wanted to drop a URL in this comment, the petname model requires that I use the UUID. You can share petnames with each other to help people, and you could publish petnames and do searches (but this creates trust questions - how do we verify a pet name is accurate?).

It may be an entirely suitable approach, but it basically means there are no global short names. I can’t tell you Im at pfrazee dot com if there’s no global dot com registry.

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> In effect, if I wanted to drop a URL in this comment, the petname model requires that I use the UUID.

Yes... or, not at all, depending on how you want to look at it. To use their phone book example, if I want to call my dad, I look up "dad", and I call him. I don't use his phone number (although obviously down in the internals of my phone it's going to use his phone number).

If you had a local mapping for a web site saved as "coolsite", you might post a link here on HN as "web://coolsite". Your browser would take care of translating that into a UUID under the covers, so the actual post would contain the UUID. When I read the post, though, I would probably see the link as "web://@pfraze => coolsite" (obviously your browser would need to post some metadata for that to happen - similar to how you can include a name with an email address) or if I already have the site in my local mapping I might see it as "web://thatawesomesite", or whatever name I'd chosen. Or perhaps my browser would go to something like DNS to reverse lookup the UUID.

This unfortunately only works in situations where rich text is available that can hide the UUID, which is not the case for HN. The person you replied to is correct: they cannot share the URL literally in that comment, without using the UUID visible to all.

Maybe... But maybe not. If the browser was the one with support for pet names, the browser could see the UUID URI and replace it transparently for you. Would we want the browser to transparently replace a URI in plain text, even outside an anchor tag? Maybe, maybe not - this is a good question. Maybe it would pop up the pet name in a popover if you hover on the URI? Or maybe we'd have some special markdown syntax for these links that has the URI, a suggested pet name for people who don't have one, and a link text (since markdown URIs at the end of a post are pretty much how we roll here on HN today anyways).

I wouldn't try to think about this as "What if we implemented a browser plugin that supported this?" Instead, think about if this was "the standard". Imagine a world where there was excellent support for it in all software that we use, and browsers and/or sites would find ways to make it transparent and friendly. Like, what if VS Code made it so when you hovered over a URI in a piece of code, it would look it up in your local pet name database, and show it in a popover? If this were just "the way things are done", then you'd never put up with crappy software that showed you the UUID. It would be like web sites that don't let you highlight or copy text - software that didn't handle naming resources correctly would be obnoxious software you'd hate to use.

I was kind of hoping we can just use long urls... as long as we are NOT typing them by hand :)

Previously, on HN (just this morning, still on the front page) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32493946

so if I wanted to share a document about how much water we need in total per day, I could just share you the complete url... or at least that's what I was thinking earlier. As long as I don't have to type it by hand, it should be ok, right?

https://numpad.io?#text/O4ewTgNgJg+gDiOBXCBDALgSxAOwAQC8eA7A...

my rough estimate calculation if anyone is interested, a cube that is about one kilometer and half (under a mile) on each side is enough water for all the people in the world for a day.

Right, if we're talking about what this could be like then it's instructive to consider what a client would look like that supported this natively. For example, we might have a "petname" tag that a browser could use to display a petname link like so:

  <petname ref="pet:4f30b43ec38b43c3abad5d422125900f" proposed_name="Google" />

The browser would then display this in the same way mentioned in the OP; if you already have an entry locally it shows your local name, otherwise it shows the proposed name and marks it as such.

So instead of having one global registry you have many local registries. If registries are also identified by UUID then you say pfraze dot com in the <registry uuid> registry. I like this because then you can have registries that correspond 1-1 with other real-life things that can be internally consistent without having to worry about global uniqueness, like a registry of all registered businesses in a state, or all trademarks, etc.

The next step is to create a system for "peering agreements" between registries, or meta-registries.

You can, but any shared address book needs to have a very clear scope of applicability. Basically: any users that are communicating need to either share the same registry, or have some clear indication that they aren't in order to avoid significant mishaps. I'm not totally sure how you accomplish that.

<del>The federated approach would be the same way that we distinguish cooluser@gmail.com from cooluser@proton.me; in this case, the server part would just determine who you're asking to map cooluser to a UUID.</del>

Actually, this is handled pretty clearly in the example article.

Urls / DNS names could be replaced with 12 decimal numbers allowing a format like: https://petname#123456789012 or https://123456789012>petname

A quick Google found "The .com and .net TLDs had a combined total of 174.7 million domain name registrations in the domain name base3 at the end of the first quarter of 2022" Twelve digits covers 40bits or 5bytes and should have more than enough space for all DNS entries.

The replacement for the web will have secure identifiers instead of "URLs", and the GUI will simply replace them with whatever nickname you gave, and all programs on your OS will share the same registry. Or I guess we'll just have another 40 years of misconceived ideas first, it's hard to predict.

Sure, but I'd offer an observation: you typically aren't typing in the URLs people link in comments here anyway! You just click the link and your browser takes you there. This works just as well for a human-readable name as it does for a UUID.

For sure. It might be a totally serviceable approach.

> In effect, if I wanted to drop a URL in this comment, the petname model requires that I use the UUID.

Could you drop the petname and let the clients resolve it via the UUID of the Hacker News website?

Edit: I believe the article calls this "edge names".

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