Comment by samuell

3 months ago

Sidenote, but I wish it became the practice to explain abbreviations such as BGP, to make the post intelligible to people outside the field.

26 comments

samuell

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jpc0  3 months ago

Border Gateway Protocol

But I don’t even think people in networking would say that, it is canonically BGP.

This is kind of like complaining about the abbreviation HTML, sure yes it is Hypertext Markup Language but everyone knows it as HTML to the point that there are probably people that don’t know it’s an abbreviation.

  • federiconafria  3 months ago

    Adding to this, both for BGP or HTML if you don't already know what they mean, the "full form" does not really help.

  • bryanlarsen  3 months ago

    Agreed. There are almost certainly more people who know what "BGP" is than know what "Border Gateway Protocol" is.

    But it still would have been a favor to the original commenter to write "BGP (Border Gateway Protocol)". If you write just "BGP" you annoy the reader who doesn't know what it is; they'll think it's your fault. But if you write "BGP (Border Gateway Protocol)", they still won't know what it is but they won't be irritated at you anymore.

    • jpc0  3 months ago

      Someone linked a document a few weeks ago that address the topic of abbreviations and when the abbreviation is the common form it is acceptable to just use the abbreviation.

      I don’t think anyone in their right mind would open every article with HTML(Hypertext Markup Language) and CSS( Cascading Style Sheets).

      For networking it would be the same with BGP/OSPF/RIP.

      1 reply →

    • jakkos  3 months ago

      Funnily enough, I had no idea what "BGP" meant until I saw "Border Gateway Protocol" and then remembered "oh yeah the router thing".

      I did a networking course in school, and haven't touched it since.

  • chrisweekly  3 months ago

    This reminds me of a trivia night event last weekend; in a room of 12 6-person teams I was the only one who knew exactly what the acronym URL stands for. But I'm confident a majority would have been able to come up with a reasonable working definition.

  • k__  3 months ago

    Fair.

    I'm currently writing an article about Flowspec and had to comb a few RFCs to understand what's going on.

    I opened the Roto announcement and felt very smart, lol

  • bluGill  3 months ago

    A LLM response so don't trust it, but

        Biological and Genetic Programming: In biology, BGP can refer to methods or algorithms used in genetic programming or bioinformatics.
    BGP (Bureau of Governmental Personnel): In some governmental contexts, BGP may refer to a specific bureau or office related to personnel management.
    BGP (Bureau of Geographical Planning): In urban planning or geography, it might refer to a bureau that focuses on geographical data and planning.
    BGP (Big Green Potato): In agriculture or gardening, it could refer to a specific type of potato or a gardening initiative.
    BGP (Bilateral Grant Program): In finance or international relations, it may refer to programs that provide grants between two countries.

    Elsewhere someone posted a link to the wikipedia disambiguation page. It is very insightful to compare the two lists - you should do this.

    • NitpickLawyer  3 months ago

      This is what people mean when they say "prompting an LLM is like the old google-fu; some people have it, some don't".

      Try this prompt instead:

      "Please explain the meaning of BGP in the following snippet: The need for Roto comes from Rotonda, our BGP engine written in Rust. Mature BGP applications usually feature some way to filter incoming route announcements. The complexity of these filters often exceed the capabilities of configuration languages. With Rotonda, we want to allow our users to write more complex filters with ease. So we decided to give them the power of a full scripting language."

      1 reply →

    • ElectronCharge  3 months ago

      That was a pretty bad response, so I tried Grok 3, using the prompt "What's the likely meaning of BGP in a Hacker News article?"

      Its entire response:

      "In a Hacker News article, BGP most likely refers to Border Gateway Protocol, a key internet protocol used for routing data between different networks (autonomous systems) on the internet. It’s often discussed in contexts like network security, internet infrastructure, or outages caused by misconfigurations, as BGP is critical for directing traffic across the global internet. For example, a Hacker News article might cover BGP-related incidents like route leaks or hijacks, which can disrupt connectivity or enable cyberattacks.

      If the context suggests something else (e.g., a specific acronym in a niche domain), could you provide more details about the article? I can also search for the specific post if you have a link or title."

      Pretty good, eh?

      4 replies →

gaugefield  3 months ago

There is a convention in academic papers where you write the explanation for the 1st occurrence of the abbreviation, then leave it out for the rest of the paper. I suggest others to follow the same, except maybe for the most obvious ones (like HTML mentioned in the other reply)

  • diggan  3 months ago

    > HTML

    Did you mean Hypertext Markup Language (HTML)?

    It's a trite comment to make (the original complaint). Don't know an abbreviation? Takes two seconds to look it up. Not all content on the web is written for the lowest common denominator, and thank god for that.

    • bluGill  3 months ago

      Content should be written for the lowest common denominator of your target audience. If you are writing for someone who writes web documents all day then you can expect them to know what html is in great detail. If you write for plumbers they might not know what html is, and so you may need a couple paragraphs to define what it is. (I'm not sure why plumbers would need to know what a html tag is, but if you expect them to read a document where html tags are referred to you better define html in enough detail that they understand it)

      1 reply →

belter  3 months ago

Its a short blog about routing rules in a networking domain by NLNet Labs. The explanation of the BGP abbreviation is uncalled for, just because Rust tourists were attracted to click on it, the moment they saw the word...