Ask Hacker News(HN): Am I the only one that gets lost with acronyms?

[sptth]

I am rising this to see what is the general feeling about the arbitrary usage of acronyms across technical articles and documentation.

I've found this paragraph in the Google developer documentation style guide:

https://developers.google.com/style/abbreviations#spelling-out

Don't you feel this is not used at all? Am I the only one loosing a lot of time looking for the correct acronym meaning? Is there any resource collecting all or most of this technical acronyms like a technical dictionary or something?

Thanks!

[brudgers]

It is probably useful to consider acronyms as no more and no less than technical vocabulary.

In any technical discipline, there is a vocabulary that practitioners use to communicate efficiently.

For example "op-amp" in electrical engineering for operational amplifier.

Note that "operational amplifier" doesn't explain any more of the important engineering factors to a lay person than "op-amp."

To explore those important engineering distinctions, googling "op-amp" is as useful as "operational amplifier" (or maybe more so).

As for the style guide, there's only one Google, and people have to be well paid to follow it.

Practically speaking it makes sense to accept that, if you are curious, you won't understand most of what you read but that you will understand more of it over time if you keep at it.

Unfortunately, over time if you are a curious person you will also not understand things you once read and understood simply because you haven't been in the context for a few years.

These are the blessings and curses of continuing to learn as you age.

Good luck.

[jacquesm]

Acronyms are like macros with undefined behavior during expansion, out of necessity they map as many-to-one and I've had cases where my internal expansion of what I thought was a pretty clear case ended up being the wrong one.

In our reports we use them but we make sure to define each and every one at the first use, and to add a wikipedia link or other external reference to give background, to avoid confusion and to ensure that a particular acronym isn't going to end up being re-used with a different meaning within the same document.

[WalterGR]

Hypothesis: The extremely rapid movement in the ML space has created, as if overnight, hundreds of new acronyms that we in tech get exposed to.

I haven't otherwise observed a rapid increase of acronym invention in tech.

In the past two months, I have observed on HN what I believe to be a big increase in the number of submissions of Twitter, YouTube, and original academic papers. The former two could invite gratuitous acronym use due to space pressure, and the latter because the expected audience is hyper-focused on experts.

[lesserknowndan]

No you’re not alone.

Abbreviations and acronyms are meant to be defined within textual material unless they are effectively names that are more well known as the acronym like NASA or IBM.

I actually prefer what you might call a reverse definition such as SQL (Structured Query Language), rather than what is taught as the proper way, e.g., random access memory (RAM).

There are so very many overlaps like QA - is that Quality Assurance or Quantitative Analyst. It is especially bad when they are used in submission titles because this is such a general news site.

[jgrahamc]

No, you are not. And on the Cloudflare blog I've been fighting against them because they just create confusion.