[teraflop]

Also currently on the front page:

* An article about a null-pointer bug in GCC that doesn't explain what pointers are

* An article about Stripe that doesn't explain what Stripe is or does

* An article about the programming language Julia that doesn't explain what Julia is.

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.

[eganist]

> 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.

[teraflop]

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.)

[s9w]

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.

[munk-a]

The article on the null-pointer bug goes into technical details about what the exposed error case is - the fact that it's a bug is made super clear - the fact that it's a logic bug is pretty readily apparent.

The Stripe article starts with "I worked at Stripe for 3+ years" so Stripe is clearly a company, the article itself is focused on the operations & team cohesion side of stripe not on their line of business.

The article about Julia is hosted on `julialang` and within the first paragraph there is a sentence containing: "So I thought it might be helpful to the broader Julia community—and maybe even for other programming language communities—to actually write down Julia’s release process"

None of these articles give you a full and complete comprehension of their topics - walking away from Strip I don't know if they're a listed company or what their market cap is - but I was given enough information to make it through.

ACH is not a common jargon term, and even with common jargon there usually is some explanation, if someone writes a well-written article about some MySQL quirk, it'll probably have the term "SQL" somewhere in the first paragraph and it'll certainly have the term "database" and "query" - those hints are enough to grasp the general subject matter. The word "bank" doesn't show up in the article until paragraph three and the jokey description of doing it to "a dead person" immediately derails the users ability to grasp that it's a monetary transaction - it's perfectly logical that monetary transactions need to have error handling around dead, missing and not-yet-existing people, but leading with that point harms readability.

I think this article is a great example of a poorly written piece that with some very minor edits to clearly define the scope of the article would be a lot more legible.

[baddox]

> ACH is not a common jargon term

It’s not jargon at all, is it? It’s just literally the proper name for the specific payment network. I thought jargon is industry-specific slang terms for concepts that could otherwise be described with less industry-specific terms. There is no simpler or clearer way I’m aware of to refer specifically to ACH.

As for it being common, if you work as a developer on any web products that accept or send significant payments in the US, you’ve almost certainly heard of ACH. If you haven’t, then this article probably won’t be of any interest or use to you even if it had an extensive introduction about what ACH is.

[afarrell]

As someone from the US, though who now lives in the UK, I would feel the need to quality that with the phrase "needless jargon" if I wanted to refer specifically to jargon that could otherwise be described with less industry-specific terms.

[baddox]

So then would you say "jargon" is just any term for something that laypeople wouldn't be familiar with, even if it's the standard/only name for that thing?

[munk-a]

I think that's fair - with the exception of self-descriptive names, and acronyms can further obscure understanding, if you say you've got a Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus sure, it's for... like breathing, underwater... apparently self-contained which I'm not quite certain the significance of but like "Under water breathing thingy" is a very natural interpretation. SCUBA, to contrast, is much more easily recognizable due to pop-culture, but has no naming inherent to it's name, and is generally not written in a way that implies acronym-ness, "Oh, were you wearing your Scuba tank?"

[afarrell]

Yes

[Animats]

> ACH is not a common jargon term

It is for anyone involved with money. However, it is a noun, not a verb.

[M2Ys4U]

Maybe if you live in the US.

[kody]

Agreed. Even after Googling "ACH" I had to reconcile the article's usage of "ACH" as a verb, when it appears to be a electronic payment system.

[ryanmercer]

Oooh I got this one...

>* An article about a null-pointer bug in GCC that doesn't explain what pointers are

That's obviously the finger you point at people with, a null pointer is when you don't point at someone but just angrily stare at them.

>* An article about Stripe that doesn't explain what Stripe is or does

Obviously a stripe is those lines on zebras that make them zebras

>* An article about the programming language Julia that doesn't explain what Julia is.

Clearly the one and only Julie Roberts...

Obviously I'm being stupid but that's genuinely how I feel sometimes when I open HN

- "RUST does..." erm, why are they screaming rust, I know rust is annoying if you don't sand it down and deal with it quickly but why are we yelling about oxidation

- "ExFAT..." why are they talking about their weight loss on HN

- "Wave-based non-line-of-sight computational imaging in Julia" some woman named Julia used a computer to figure out how to best appear in photographs of them waving? Must be one of the royals.

- "A+, the Programming Language of Morgan Stanley" why do I care about Morgan's grades?

- "YouTube should stop recommending garbage videos to users" I dunno, I watched a really good one on landfills one time, I think it also recommended me one on how fuel trucks refill gas stations after that.

- "Curl exercises" yeah, I hammer curl on Tuesdays as some of my accessory work, not a real fan of bicep curls though.

- "Is Ringo Starr a Good Drummer?" I assume this is about the Beatle but it's probably about some computer programming language in some network security application.

- "Perils of Constructors " must be English as a second language, clearly they mean Perils of Construction, certainly a mod will fix that title soon. I'm guessing death and hemorrhoids.