In this day and age, asking questions about what something is is a minefield of “just ask AI” and “You should know this”. Let’s stop putting down people who ask questions and root out those that have shitty answers.
I get why it feels frustrating when someone snaps "just google it." Nobody likes feeling dumb. That said, there’s a meaningful difference between asking a genuine question and demanding that every discussion be padded to accommodate readers who won’t even type four letters into a search bar. Expecting complete spoon-feeding in technical threads isn’t curiosity; it’s a refusal to engage. Learning requires participation.
I won't argue, but there is a middle ground between articles consisting of pure JAFAs and this:
> accommodate readers who won’t even type four letters into a search bar
I think it helps if acronyms are expanded at least once or in a footnote so that the potential new reader can follow along and does not need to guess what ACMV^ means.
^: Awesome Combobulating Method by VTimofeenko, patent pending.
Asking "what is this?" is fine. Treating "I was unfamiliar with this" as evidence that the post is deficient is not.
HN already assumes a baseline of technical literacy. When something falls outside that baseline, the usual move is to ask for context or links, not to reframe personal unfamiliarity as an author failure.
So please, don’t normalize treating "I don’t know this yet" as a failure of the post.
But not defining acronyms on first use is a failure of etiquette. Its your prerogative to not hold this to be true, but many of us do. There is little value in eliding the on-first-use definition.
I agree but if someone asks “What is this?” and it’s not covered by the article, what we shouldn’t do is put that person down by telling them to “just google it”.
If that is your answer, please just don’t comment.
You cannot explain everything to everyone all the time. Besides, this is not even a paper.
Sometimes you are not the target audience and have to put some words into Google.
Because I think the norm we reinforce here actually matters.
When confusion gets framed as "this is substandard writing", it rewards showing up and performing a lack of context rather than engaging with the substance or asking clarifying questions. Over time that creates pressure to write to the lowest common denominator, instead of the audience the author is clearly aiming at.
HN already operates on an implicit baseline (CUDA, open source, LLVM, etc.) and mostly lets comments fill in gaps. That usually produces better discussions than treating every unfamiliar term as an author failure, especially when someone is just trying to share or explain something they care about.
So yeah, I am genuinely curious why you see personal unfamiliarity as something the entire discussion should reorganize itself around.
When confusion gets framed as "this is substandard writing", it rewards showing up and performing a lack of context rather than engaging with the substance or asking clarifying questions. Over time that creates pressure to write to the lowest common denominator, instead of the audience the author is clearly aiming at. ... So yeah, I am genuinely curious why you see personal unfamiliarity as something the entire discussion should reorganize itself around.
(Shrug) The fact is that all major style guides -- APA, MLA, AP, Chicago, probably some others -- call for potentially-unfamiliar acronyms to be defined on first use, and it's common enough to do so. For some reason, though, essentially nobody who writes about this particular topic agrees with that.
Which is cool -- it's not my field, so I don't really GAF. I'm mostly just remarking on how unusually difficult it was to drill down on this particular term. I'll avoid derailing the topic further than I already have.
