> I think it's your expectations that are out of whack. Not every article needs to explain everything as if the reader is completely unfamiliar with the topic being discussed.
Oof.
User s9w appears to be German. ACH is a USA construct. The closest analog would be PE-ACHes for SEPA, of which OP might be familiar. Without context and operating from a localized search zone, googling ACH may render results irrelevant to the topic at hand, requiring marginally more google-fu than might otherwise make sense just to embrace a hackernews thread.
Hackernews in general is pretty US-centric in terms of assumptions, and this comment is emblematic of this defect.
In the future, you could just answer the question, or you could opt out of replying entirely. You never know what constraints a person has encountered when trying to answer it on their own. For all you know, the user asking must work with an impairment or disability rendering simple web queries as taxing or arduous.
I certainly didn't intend it as a personal criticism, and if it came across that way I'm sorry!
There's nothing wrong with not knowing what ACH is and asking about it. But conversely, there's also nothing wrong with writing an article about ACH that doesn't bother to explain the background in detail, nor is there anything wrong with posting such an article to HN.
The only thing I take issue with is the suggestion that it's somehow unusual or noteworthy.
> In the future, you could just answer the question, or you could opt out of replying entirely.
I noticed that other commenters had already answered the question adequately, or else I would have included it in my response.
(For what it's worth, I just tried a Google search for "ach" in an incognito window with both region and language set to Germany, and two articles about the ACH system were on the first page of results. Again, I am not saying this to criticize for not knowing about it.)
Just for the record: I obviously could have googled it. But although I'm German, I spend a good amount of time in the "American internet" - and never heart of ACH. Plus the submission was upvoted like crazy. So I was pretty confident that this was either spam or I'm having a brainfart.
It seems though that there are things like ACH that are somehow very common knowledge but I've never come across until now.
Oof.
User s9w appears to be German. ACH is a USA construct. The closest analog would be PE-ACHes for SEPA, of which OP might be familiar. Without context and operating from a localized search zone, googling ACH may render results irrelevant to the topic at hand, requiring marginally more google-fu than might otherwise make sense just to embrace a hackernews thread.
Hackernews in general is pretty US-centric in terms of assumptions, and this comment is emblematic of this defect.
In the future, you could just answer the question, or you could opt out of replying entirely. You never know what constraints a person has encountered when trying to answer it on their own. For all you know, the user asking must work with an impairment or disability rendering simple web queries as taxing or arduous.