I don't know who's making money with it, but are you using Google search more than you're using an LLM at this point? Most people I talk to aren't.

One of the few concessions I'll make to Sun: XDR was under-appreciated.

You can thank Tom Lyon for it. Tom pretty much did the entire RPC/XDR/NFS stack to kick things off.

XDR is like a four-octet aligned version of PER for a cut-down version of ASN.1. It's really neat.

XDR would not need much work to be a full-blown ER for ASN.1... But XDR is extremely inefficient as to booleans (4 bytes per!) and optional fields (since they are encoded as a 4-byte boolean followed by the value if the field is present).

The whole thing is super weird, because "Easter" isn't the canonical term for the day to begin with.

The Greek and Latin term for Easter is "Pascha". People are right to flag the noodling on the Germanic/English term as basically irrelevant.

I have never been to a Catholic mass that failed to share that message. It's not a subtle detail.

Maybe I'm being less charitable to Catholic churches on that. Truly a lot of Christian churches have failed on their messaging to others from what I've seen, and it's probably not just a Catholic thing. It's not like Joel Osteen is really sharing a truly Christian life and theology.

The fact there's a lot of people in this thread with this understanding should point to a lot of people not getting it though. I mean this is a whole thread of people not getting why it's "Good Friday" yet the Catholic Church has supposedly been preaching this point for over a thousand years.

I'm truly not anti-Catholic. I do think Catholics are unfairly painted by a lot of Protestants. As someone who walks between both worlds on a daily basis there's a lot of untruths and misunderstandings about Catholics out there.

:homer-into-the-hedges:

It's cool, I'm just saying: Catholics definitely believe this; it's "Good Friday" because "Good" was synonymous with "Holy", so there's not much debate around that. All the denominations agree about the holiness of the event!

Yes. GP is one of the most baffling comments I've ever read on HN. I really have no idea how one manages to arrive at that opinion.

This sounds dangerously like a suggestion that more people use ASN.1.

Understanding prior art and getting more comprehensive list of things that need to be considered is always good.

Not doing it is like inventing new programming language after just learning one of them.

Would you rather they reinvent the wheel badly? Thjat's what ProtocolBuffers is: badly reinvented ASN.1/DER!

PB is:

  - TLV (tag-length-value), like DER
  - you have to explicitly list the
    tags in the IDL as if it was ASN.1
    in 1984 (but actually, worse,
    because even back then tags were
    not always required in ASN.1, only
    for diambiguation)
  - it's super similar to DER, yet not
    not the same
  - PB was created in part because ASN.1
    had so little open source tooling,
    but PB had none until they wrote it
    so they could just have written the
    ASN.1 tooling they'd wished they had

smh

In complete fairnes to PBs, PBs have a heck of a lot less surface area than ASN.1. You could argue, why not use a subset of ASN.1, but it seems people have trouble agreeing which subset to use.

Why wouldn't you want to explicitly number fields? Protocols evolve and get extended over time, making the numbering explicit ensures that there's no accidental backwards compat breakage from re-ordering fields. Implicit field numbers sounds like an excellent reason to not use ASN.1.

This shilling for an over-engineered 80s encoding ecosystem that nobody uses is really putting me off.

The one thing that grinds my gears about BER/CER/DER is that they managed to come up with two different varint encoding schemes for the tag and length.

Meh. One rarely ever needs tags larger than 30, and even more seldom tags larger than twice that, say.

What should people use today, given the choice, that isn't ASN.1?

Edited to add: If they need something with a canonical byte representation, for example for hashing or MAC purposes?

How much of it do you need in that representation? Usually I see that need in either: x509 where you're already using der, or tiny fragments where a custom tag-length-value would cover almost every usage without having to touch asn.

All I really need is serialization for structs. I'm trying to avoid inventing my own format, because it seems to be footgun-prone.

First of all you should never need a canonical representation. If you think you do, you're almost certainly wrong. In particular you should not design protocols so that you have to re-encode things in order to validate signatures.

So then you don't need DER or anything like it.

Second, ASN.1 is fantastic. You should at least study it a bit before you pick something else.

Third, pick something you have good tooling for. I don't care if it's ASN.1, XDR, DCE RPC / MSRPC, JSON, CBOR, etc. Just make sure you have good tooling. And don't pick XML unless you really need it to interop with things that are already using XML.

EDIT: I generally don't care about downvotes, but in this case I do. Which part of the above was objectionable? Point 1, 2, or 3? My negativity as to XML for protocols? XML for docs is alright.

Interesting. What do you make of PASETO[1] and specifically PAE[2], then?

[1]: https://github.com/paseto-standard/paseto-spec/blob/master/d... [2]: https://github.com/paseto-standard/paseto-spec/blob/master/d...

I don't understand how there can be 94 comments on this thread and not one of them is from someone who attempted (or succeeded) in mailing someone a potato. I am a homeowner. I have a address. I will receive a potato, or send one to whomever wants one. What's important about this story is "is is true?". Who's going to test it with me?

I did something pretty similar with USPS around 15 years ago. Walked into the post office, handed them a banana, they slapped a label on it, and off it went. A few weeks later I heard from my friend in Monaco that her mom had gone to check the mail and found her hand covered in rotten banana. Whoops.

> What's important about this story is "is is true?"

The URL is at usps.com, so I'm guessing this is about as official as it gets.

I've mailed a coconut before and it worked. Never done a potato.

I have mailed a potato before. Sent it to a friend to celebrate Columbus Day (this was back when we overlooked his atrocities because it was a cool Italian guy who trafficked exotic nightshades across the Atlantic). It arrived just fine. The postal worker was quite helpful about wrapping it up with the appropriate postage. Post your address on the public internet and I’m sure you will get a lot more potatoes than you would expect.

I sent a banana in the mail. I also sent a paperback book without any sort of box or wrapper. I think it was as Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.

Mailing a banana is something I was wondering about when I first saw this thread. I remember seeing a photo in a book many years ago of a banana with a postage stamp on it and I was wondering whether it was really possible.

Did the book make it to Magrathea?

As one of the wealthiest planets in the galaxy, I'm sure it did because of Magrathea's exceptional central planning infrastructure.

I would like a potato. Emailed you.

I have received your email and do hereby commit to sending you a potato.

I have the USPS notification service [1] where they send me an email with a scan of all my incoming mail. I look forward to seeing what this one looks like.

[1]: https://www.usps.com/manage/informed-delivery.htm

You wouldn't download a potato!

I’m still wondering if they are going to potato internationally, in which case I would very gladly exchange some continental taters with a colony-grown variety with you!

There's at least one who posted just a little bit before you. ;) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43724688

You do realize that you just inspired the "mail a potato" webapp, don't you? I give it approximately one week before we see a Show HN with that.

whoa whoa whoa. you can't post multimillion startup ideas on here FOR FREE! somebody's probably registered pota.to already!

There are already a few iterations of this idea out there!

If you're willing to give your address to a Hacker News user then you need to spend more time researching your cohorts.

I used to run a website / forum and for a few years we did a secret santa; we sent and received packages to and from abroad. Not complete strangers, and anyone not comfortable with it (we did have multiple victims of stalking etc) didn't have to participate of course. But I got goodies from abroad, including a pink NY hat and an acrylic 9/11 memorial display thingy. Because why not? I sent clogs back, of course.

I'm on a dad support slack, and we regularly mail each other holiday cards (well, not everyone participates, but I think I spend like a hundred bucks a year sending those things out!)

Few things can improve a dad support slack like regularly mailing each other potatoes.

When you say it, it sounds dirty.

It's like Promise Keepers but with potato instead of promise. What could be more starchy and wholesome.

"I (sweet) potato you I won't forget next time?"

You're right. Hallmarked.

Promises you can eat (after proper prep)

For like the last 20 years, the majority of people I have done business with are people I have met on Hacker News, where I post (like everywhere else) under my own real name.

I just think they're neat.

Shipping is a major cost center to hacker startups. Interesting stuff here...

Yeah how dare people have fun!

And yet no browser trusts it, and a single-digit percentage of popular zones (from the Tranco list) have signatures; this despite decades of deployment effort. Meanwhile, over 60% of all sites on the Internet have ISRG certificates.

You're right: it's a bit racist. It's also faulty reasoning: you went to a high school in Cupertino with a markedly higher population of second-generation Asian-Americans, and went to a high school in an extraordinarily wealthy area; in fact, I think you might be attempting to generalize from the zip code with the highest density of immigrant professionals in the United States. If you want to generalize from China, that by itself is 1.4 billion people; they're as varied as any large population.

There are no such things as "IQ scores by country". If you're thinking about the data behind "IQ and the Wealth of Nations", the Richard Lynn stuff, it's basically fraudulent.

First of all, no it's not.

Second of all, whether you wear earrings is drastically more heritable than IQ.

A good rule of thumb: unless the thread is literally about bioinformatics, the concept of "heritability" is probably an unuseful distraction.