[Nifty3929]

Must I beg to have an acronym spelled out a least once, the first time it's used? Even if you assume 90% of readers already know, the other 10% (including me, in this case) will thank you, it doesn't take much effort, and it expands the reach of your communication or idea.

Exceptions for cases where the acronym is just so well known that a lot of people don't even know what it stands for even though they know the concept well. I recall one corporate training I was sitting through and they used the term "Border Gateway Protocol" and it took me a half beat to think through "oh, you mean BGP?"

Thanks!

[bawolff]

Which acronym do you mean? CTF? I think that acronym, just like BGP, is more well known by itself than what it stands for.

More generally, not every piece of writing is meant for every audience. Like if someone writes a blog post about CTFs aimed at people who like CTFs, nobody in the target audience needs to have CTF explained to them. Ultimately HN is a link aggregator, but sometimes its a bit like eavesdropping on a conversation. When you are just listening in you don't get the full context sometimes.

[0x20cowboy]

I dont know what CTF stands for so I dont know if I am interested in this article or learning anything about it. Maybe I am.

Are you really arguing for not just typing out whatever 3 words this stands for once in the name of clarity?

[bawolff]

Yes, i would argue that people writing articles about niche interests aimed at other members of that niche are under no obligation to clarify it for people outside the niche.

They aren't your teacher. They aren't trying to send the content to you. They are just blogging on their own website for their own audience.

And its hardly unique to this article. If you are writing about the nitty gritty of linux networking, you probably aren't defining what TCP or UDP means. If you are writing a super detailed article comparing and contrasting plot structures of different animes, you probably aren't going to start by explaining what the word anime means. Etc

I'm not saying the world should be all RTFM, but if you are reading some sort of specialized content, then yes i think its a reasonable assumption that the reader has some basic background knowledge on the topic at hand, or is willing to do the research themselves.

[SOLAR_FIELDS]

Especially when you can literally just paste the top paragraph into your LLM of choice and ask it to explain it to you. In the time it took the OP of this thread to write out their complaint they could have just solved it themselves

[PunchyHamster]

it's the first result I get on anonymous google search.

It's like complaining about not spelling C in "bake cake in 170 C"

[ruszki]

If it means capture the flag, then it means a completely different capture the flag for almost everybody. I searched for it, read the first paragraph, and I still don’t know what the fuck is the topic. According to Wikipedia it’s a very new meaning. I could figure out only because of searching for “HCKSYD” and others.

[jere]

Is 30 years old very new? We're on a site for tech people. I would wager most are familiar with this term.

[ruszki]

Its article is 5 years old… So, yeah, it’s new.

[sokoloff]

Most people on this site are also familiar with the “XKCD 10000”.

But not all, so: https://xkcd.com/1053/

(Amusingly, it even uses “30 years” as the timeframe.)

[fg137]

My search results for "open CTF format" beg to differ. Absolutely nothing even remotely related to "capture the flag".

Bear in mind that Google search results, just like ChatGPT output, are highly personalized and non deterministic, so "it's there if you do a Google search" means almost nothing these days.

In fact, I have no idea what's going on, so I came back to HN comments. Turns out it's "capture the flag" which I actually know, just not familiar with the acronym.

Which is why I am 100% with the top level comment here.

[mastermage]

There is so much wrong with this beginning with the fact that it would be correctly 170 °C (the degree is important because it implies an arbitrary scale)

Additionaly Bake Cake in 170 is very not clear, especially considering you have two major Temperature Scales in use in the Kitchen.

[fartfeatures]

"bake cake in 170" is genuinely confusing at first glance though.

[doublescoop]

Best practice in writing about technical concepts is to spell out acronyms like this on their first use. There is a ton of stuff I learn about here on HN that I didn't know anything about before.

It doesn't help that the linked article never bothers to explain this either.

[Aurornis]

For a general audience this is good advice.

This article was written for a specific audience who follows this blog because they know the term. If you start spelling out fundamental acronyms it makes the content look more basic and general.

This always upsets the general audience who stumble upon the article (like this) but it wasn’t meant for a general audience. CTF is extremely well known and the people who would be interested in this topic would wonder what’s happening if it was spelled out. It would be so odd that it would probably attract accusations of ChatGPT writing.

[jltsiren]

It's the common practice in technical writing. Even when you are writing for other experts in the same field, your target audience never shares as much context as you would prefer. The world is much weirder and more varied than you would think.

Informal writing about technical topics is another story. There you can assume a lot more shared context, as you are only writing for a specific subculture within the field. It doesn't matter much if other people in the field fail to understand you.

[dolmen]

But this isn't "technical" writing. This is member of a community talking about the state of that community. Jargon is expected. Even more, this what I look for, even as a foreigner.

[MobiusHorizons]

Does spelling it out help? From memory, it is a security competition where participants compete to gain certain objectives. I think capture the flag may explain how scoring is kept, but it wouldn’t help me find out what it is, given that capture the flag is also just the name of a game people play outside by running, or in laser tag or in certain video games.

[bawolff]

> There is a ton of stuff I learn about here on HN that I didn't know anything about before.

But that is about you right? Its a little entitled to expect every piece of content on the internet to have a 101 explanation attached. If they were specificly aiming to have the blog post appear on HN that would be one thing, but they (presumably) weren't.

[allenrb]

When I encounter new terms, I look them up. Just like any other new word. Been doing it since I was a kid with a dictionary. Now, it’s too easy not to. There is literally no excuse.

[ergonaught]

You could have just said “No”, if you had to say anything at all, rather than continuing the behavior.

Actively rude.

[MrSkelter]

It’s just bad writing. There is no such thing as a universally understood acronym. Even within fields. The cost of clarity is zero. Not elucidating means that over time the writing rots as meanings change and new “universal understandings” supersede old ones.

[watt]

If you think you know what every acronym stands for, I recommend CBT.

[razster]

What I see CTF I think Capture The Flag, Tribe player in me.

[lelandbatey]

CTF stands for "Capture The Flag" in the parent article. Just the security competition kind, not the FPS game kind.

[Gigachad]

The annoying thing is even if you know what it means, multiple groups will use the same initialisms for different terms. So without more context you can’t know what it means.

It isn’t common but I feel it would be best when posting to HN to just expand the initialisms even if the source title didn’t.

[shric]

You can also over use the same initialism: ATM the ATM is connected via ATM

[w23j]

CTF stands for Capture the Flag. So with that definition you have exactly zero more information about the article then without it. So I assume next you want a short description of what it actually means, like "CTF (Capture the Flag) are security competitions where the objective is to break...", which is completely ridiculous to include in an article aimed specifically at the CTF crowd.

[fartfeatures]

It is easier to search for keywords (Capture the Flag) vs acronyms (CTF) which likely resolve to other terms as well. Child trust fund is the first result when I put CTF into Google. Admittedly searching CTF security solves that issue. A quick link to an article on CTF to make the post digestible by outsiders seems reasonable enough.

[fragmede]

So right click on HCKSYD and Google search that to get there! The rest of us don't want to be treated to infants that need to be spoonful.

[xnickb]

Why should the author care to make it digestible to the crowd who is clueless on the matter? Their goal is to capture attention and start discussion within the community.

To me it doesn't seem reasonable at all. It's just entitled at best.

[fartfeatures]

I read it as a suggestion vs a demand but I can see why you felt it was entitled. The author doesn't need to care and can take or leave the advice. In many ways it is a shame we don't have the concept of the Semantic Web as an extension to simple Hyperlinks.

[briandear]

Good communication should be the goal of all writing.

[mr_mitm]

You wouldn't spell out URL, SSH or HTTPS on hacker news either. I understand it's frustrating, but you can't accommodate everyone.

[xnickb]

No one is in a position to dictate individual people what their goals are. That's another example of entitlement.

As an individual author they are entitled to write whatever they want in their blogpost. I as a consumer of their writing am not entitled to anything

[wheelerwj]

Good communication for who?

[thomascountz]

   ...which is completely ridiculous to include in an article aimed specifically at the CTF crowd.

What compels you to hold this belief?

[graceful6800]

Since this is the top comment at the moment: CTF stands for Capture The Flag.

Personally I have never, ever heard that concept referred to by the initialism. Granted, it's almost never come up in my circles, so... shrug

[worble]

CTF is a game mode for popular online games like halo (or at least, that's how I know it), so paragraphs like

> My first CTF was HCKSYD, a 48-hour solo CTF. I full solved it and won in 2 hours. I was completely hooked. That led me to win DownUnderCTF, Australia's largest CTF, with Blitzkrieg multiple times. Blitzkrieg was one of Australia's strongest teams at the time. I later joined TheHackersCrew, an international top-tier team that was consistently ranked highly on CTFTime, the main global ranking and event calendar the scene uses as its scoreboard. With them, I competed in some of the most prestigious CTFs in the world, consistently placing well within the top 10 until the end of 2025.

Are still completely nonsensical to even those that understand the acronym

[trescenzi]

It's also a game people play in person as well. It's the same as the Halo version except you tag each other instead of shooting. It's really fun to play in big open areas with large teams.

[deathanatos]

Yeah.

As I remember it (and this was decades ago): Two teams, opposite ends of a large field. Each end gets a "flag". (We used t-shirts.) In our case, we split the field in half — our field happened to have a natural feature (a change in elevation, so like two separately flat areas separated by an incline) that worked well for this. If you were tackled¹ in the enemy's side, you were "captured", and "jailed". An uncaptured player could spring the jail by tagging those within it. Returning to your flag with the opposing team's flag was a win.

We played at night, so stealth was a large part of the game, but it was also fair to illuminate the area around the flag. (Which made approaching a guarded flag … tricky.)

I'm sure there's probably a million variations on the specifics.

¹…flag football flags would probably work nicely for this.

[RugnirViking]

though this is not what the author is talking about. Theyre talking about a hacking competition, where you compete to get a secret word or something contained on some running server connected to a network protected with various means. They're complaining about AI agents removing a lot of the fun from this.

People are mad because we're literally on "hacker" news, so there is some expectation that people might be familiar with hacking or computer security.

[acters]

Yeah, but we have AI now, we don't need our blog posts to over explain or state what it all means to general audiences. The author name-drops a bunch of CTF events hosted by a variety of independent organizations and name-drops well-known teams.

To help everyone, this Capture The Flag is specifically Cybersecurity adjacent, there is a Wikipedia article on it as the top Google search result for me when searching "CTF". This is why the acronym is used, because searching for the full will get you to the wrong "sport" vs the cybersecurity one.

I don't want to explain what a CTF is. look at the Wikipedia article. It is there for a good reason.

[itsboring]

Unreal Tournament and Quake 2 for me.

[bawolff]

Just to give the actual answer, CTF in this context means a computer security competition. Generally the way they work, is you get some programs, and you have to hack them to get some string called the flag (e.g. maybe the server has a root owned file called flag, so you have to get root somehow to read the file). Team with the most flags at the end wins.

In this context, CTF is almost exclusively referred to by the initialism, i think to help distinguish from other uses of the term.

[OrangeMusic]

THANK YOU

This has been the most annoying HN so far until your comment appeared.

[tptacek]

Apart from everything else people have said in response to this, it's rude to presume that an article has HN as an audience simply by dint of it being available for us to link to. It's totally reasonable for people to write for an audience they know understands these terms.

So, in fact, you must not beg to have authors include courtesy definitions for you. That's not reasonable. Instead, you should simply ask here, on the thread, without complaining about the article.

[xnickb]

Exactly. Especially now in the era of LLMs where you can feed the article to a chatbot and ask it to spoon feed you at the pace you can digest at.

[pastel8739]

I think so many acronyms have meaning that isn’t explained by the words that the stand for. The other day I was explaining what CI is and they asked what it stood for; I realized that Continuous Integration is almost completely useless for someone trying to understand what CI actually is

[cco]

Semantic names are great, but that's a separate issue. With the full term you can now go search for yourself and find explanations more easily.

[circus1540]

“hacker” news, ladies and gentlemen

[RealCodingOtaku]

The comments are annoying. No matter the niche, it is always good to write the abbreviation the first time it is used, in fact, W3C recommends it[0]. Anyone who does not follow this either are not informed well enough, or has ableism. Most replies in this thread shows the latter.

https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/Understanding/abbreviations

[ajam1507]

This page has 5 abbreviations that are not spelled out before you even get to the body of the article.

[RealCodingOtaku]

You meant 5 acronyms, and each are links, which contains their abbreviations. So they do follow the guideline.

[ajam1507]

An acronym is an abbreviation, and they specifically do not spell out the very first acronym on the page the first time they use it.

[RealCodingOtaku]

An acronym is a specific type of abbreviation formed from the initial letters of a phrase and pronounced as a single word. I was being more specific. And the ones you are pointing out are from the header.

> An abbreviation whose expansion is provided the first time the abbreviation appears in the content

Content is the main body of the article (press tab ones you land the page, it will take you to the main content if you don't know what that is), which contains only one Acronym, “SC 3.1.4” → which is a link that take you to a place with its definition. I don't understand what you are fighting over. But I'm not going to reply more to someone who defends people who do not know how to write articles that are more friendly towards the reader.

[fragmede]

We live in the goddammed future. Huamnity's knowledge is at your fingertips. Right clicking the Nth word of the article and putting in any semblance of effort to learn on your own is too much to ask?

I don't know everything, there's tons of stuff I don't know about, but when I'm at my web browser, the least I can do about something is ask Google about a word or phrase or subject that isn't familiar instead of being spoonfed information like I'm a baby.

[fullstackchris]

There are also widely accepted standards to written word.

The best example is when an abbreviation can be expanded to more than one phrase, and both are widely used.

[fg137]

As someone who spent years reading academic journals where spelling out acronyms on first occurrence is mandatory, the comments here are jarring. Think about it -- those are academic journals where most people do know what those acronyms mean.

It's such a small but immensely helpful thing to do.

[kortex]

This isn't an academic journal or general purpose news article though. It's a small blog about a subculture. It'd be like spelling out GPU on a blog for building custom PCs, or BDSM on a kink blog.

Spelling it out when 99.9% of your audience doesn't need it actually is the opposite of in-group signaling, it makes it feel like it's aimed at a wider audience, when it's not.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_principle

[mafro]

I didn't know what BGP is, but I did know CTF. YMMV

[snayan]

Hah, same. Always entertaining how people map their tendencies to the world at large.

[wglb]

If you wish to explore a new concept, perhaps ask duckduckgo "what is ctf" an you may well get a response such as:

    CTF stands for Capture The Flag, which is a cybersecurity competition where participants find hidden "flags" in vulnerable programs or systems to test and develop their security skills. There are two main types of CTFs: jeopardy-style, where teams solve various challenges for points, and attack-defense, where teams defend their systems while trying to exploit their opponents'.

[jere]

It's kind of amusing that you're asking for acronyms you don't know not to be used and acronyms you do know to not be spelled out.

[amirhirsch]

Let’s reduce this to absurdity:

I think you only wanted clarification of CTF (Capture the Flag) and not AI (Artificial Intelligence) and not GPT-4 (Generative Pre-Trained Transformer version 4) and not CLI (Command Line Interface) and not MCP (Model Context Protocol) and not LLM (Large Language Model)

Quoting TFA (The Fucking Article): “just adapt bro”

lol at the BGP example

[w23j]

For people who are confused by this comment: lol = laughing out loud!

[Den_VR]

Lots of love!

[amirhirsch]

ROTFLMAO made my day!

[ajnin]

Your two paragraphs are completely contradictory. I agree with the first one.

[alsetmusic]

At the same time, I did a search for "what is a ctf to play" and got the answer. We know how to find answers to these problems. I agree the blog post was poor form.

[plaguuuuuu]

you could try

* googling "CTF security"

* asking literally any AI to explain the article

Yes, you must beg. If you don't know what a CTF is, and don't want to find out, why read the article anyway

[fg137]

I had no idea "security" is the keyword to add, even after reading the leading paragraph and the first paragraph under "What makes me qualified to say this?".

In fact, I know what "capture the flag" is but am not familiar with the acronym. Still, the article confused the hell out of me, so I came back to HN comments for more context.

> Asking AI to explain the article

That's how we are expected to consume content these days?

[watwut]

Using AI to get factual information?

Also well written articles allow you to figure out what they mean after clicking onto them. People often read to learn.

[toofy]

i try not to over feed tangents but this is precisely how i feel every time i speak to someone who is recently enlisted in the military. i have to constantly stop them and be like “i have no idea what you just said” over and over and over again. it’s like trying to make sense of a random bowl of alphabet soup.