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Comment by alias_neo | Hacker News Reader

Another article source that uses a headline initialisation, "HBM"[0] in this case, and almost 30 times at that, and yet doesn't spell out what it stands for even once. I will point this out every time I see it, and continue to refuse to read from places that don't follow this simple etiquette.

Be better.

[0] High Bandwidth Memory

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"Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I don't feel like that rule works here? If you cut out part of the second sentence to get "Find something interesting to respond to", that's a good point, but the full context is "instead [of the most provocative thing in the article]" and that doesn't fit a complaint about acronyms.

To paraphrase McLuhan, you don't like that guideline? We got others:

"Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting."

The point, in any case, is to avoid off-topic indignation about tangential things, even annoying ones.

Yeah that one works.

While I understand, I can't find something interesting to respond to in this case because I refused to read it.

I'd argue that I also provided value by solving the complaint I made by spelling out what it stood for, for those who might not know.

I hear you and agree there's benefit in that; it's just that the cost (what it does to the thread) is larger than the benefit.

Totally fair. Thanks for taking the time to discuss.

They don't define HPC either, but I think the audience of this site knows these acronyms.

There were two reasons it was drilled into me in engineering-school; it provides context and avoidance of doubt about the topic, particularly when there are so many overlapping initialisms these days, often in the same space.

The second is that you should never make assumptions about the audience of your writing, and their understanding of the topic; provide any and all information that might be pertinent for a non-subject-matter-specialist to understand, or at least find the information they need to understand.

> Be better

They're almost certainly not on this forum, and they're not reading your post. So who is that quip directed at?

Presumably it's directed at anyone writing an article for public consumption.

> They're almost certainly not on this forum, and they're not reading your post

I don't know much about the site in the OP, but I work on the assumption that almost anyone could be reading comments on links to their site on this forum.

It's directed at them, you and even myself.

Why don't you email them directly then? You're just posturing here.

And it's directed at me? You don't know the first thing about me. PFO.

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