Hacker News Reader

Comment by auxiliarymoose | Hacker News Reader

I'm guessing Berkeley Packet Filter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Packet_Filter

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).

https://nasa.github.io/content-guide/abbreviations-and-acron...

There is also this longer memo on the NASA Technical Reports Server: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19950025292

View on HN

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.

Thanks for the catch! Fixed :-)

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.

To be honest BPF is one of those acronyms that I think might be more recognizable as the acronym than what it actually stands for.

Not quite as much as Radar or Laser, but halfway there.

And today I learned this has a name, anacronym! An acronym that has become so common, it's treated as a word instead of an acronym.

And to be really pedantic about it, an acronym is pronounceable, like "NASA", so BPF is actually an initialism!

An initialism, yet now an aninitialism.

Spelling out Berkeley Packet Filter doesn't really tell you anything about what eBPF actually is.

What's NASA :)

~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 :-)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com