PF: Packet Filtering (Open BSD Firewall). Saved you a click there.
>A few questions immediately pop into readers' minds on hearing this news. The ones I get most often are,
> Why now? What took you so long?
>which quite frequently combines with
> What changed? Are previous editions now useless?
Which somehow contribute to highlight the inadequacy of the reader for not knowing what PF stands for in the first place.
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.
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”.)
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!