According to gemini, "Total Fertility Rate" ("average number of children a woman would have over her lifetime if she experienced the current age-specific fertility rates of her society").
This HN thing of casually using acronyms without defining them is baffling to me
It's baffling to you that people are comfortable in their niche and use their own jargon? Are you a baby that needs to be spoonfed every little bit of information?
To be fair, the use of TFR had approximately zero context to clue that person in to what it could mean. If you go back and read the first paragraph, there is no mention of children, birth, babies, or any other context clues that help the reader understand what the acronym is even relating to. It abstractly compares ‘TFR’ of several religious groups, it could mean anything. If you want to casually drop semi-obscure acronyms it’s good practice to give context clues by using words related to the acronym near the use of the acronym instead of being abstract like the OP.
I knew what the acronym was but I’ve spent time reading about religious groups and economic/social classes and fertility rates of those groups depending on the level of whatever you would call devotedness or strict adherence to the most conservative version of that belief system.
Which one of these two sentences makes it easier to guess what the acronym means or to google it? I could probably think of a better example using an acronym that has collisions, but this will have to do.
1. “The SOFR has not changed during 2026.”
2. “The Federal Reserve has voted to maintain the SOFR during 2026.”
I, myself, documented that ACE stands for AI Compute Extensions, on a post on HN that used it without defining it, and got a couple points for it. I'm pushing back against that everything has to be spoonfed to us and that we shouldn't be expected to do any of our own work to understand something here and complaining about it.
>This HN thing of casually using acronyms without defining them is baffling to me
You have a whole internet at your fingertips with which to look up terms you don't understand without diluting the thread, but if you need at all to do that you should consider that you might not have anything relevant to add to the conversation to begin with. Hacker News is supposed to be a forum of educated professionals and domain experts, we shouldn't have to dumb things down here.
One must be really deep in some fertility obsessed subculture to think that TFR acronym should be instantly recognized when placed in tech forum discussion about minority language.
Otherwise said, using full expression is not "diluting the thread".
Asking pointless questions that can be answered with a simple Google search and complaining about other people's use of language do dilute the thread.
It's explicitly in the guidelines that we don't complain about voting because it "makes for boring reading." Complaining about acronyms has the same effect.
Having to google obscure acronyms and having to guess which interpretation author meant makes for super boring reading.
It is way better when you see a question and answer just below. And bonus point, question and answer teaches others to not use all acronyms they learned in all the random subcultures.
>Having to google obscure acronyms and having to guess which interpretation author meant makes for super boring reading.
It doesn't, because we don't have to read that.
Also the interpretation can be gleaned from context, as @williamdclt did above. It's unlikely that, reading the thread, the "TFR" being discussed is "temporary flight restriction."
This HN thing of casually using acronyms without defining them is baffling to me