[wozniacki]

Give it a thought for a second.

Does the degree of inconvenience caused to you - in requiring you to figure out what LSAT means - necessarily require that you record your disapproval here?

The test for substance is a lot like it is for links. Does your comment teach us anything? There are two ways to do that: by pointing out some consideration that hadn't previously been mentioned, and by giving more information about the topic, perhaps from personal experience. Whereas comments like "LOL!" or worse still, "That's retarded!" teach us nothing.

Source:

http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

[andrewflnr]

It is potentially useful to tell someone that there is information missing in something they have written. If they're smart, they don't want to inconvenience their readers. In this case, it didn't matter much because the target market already knows, but you don't know until you bring it up.

[aw3c2]

Sorry, it was meant as constructive criticism. I guess I should have made that clear. Writing it out might help unsuspecting people like me figure out what it is all about. I could also imagine it to be beneficial for search engines.

My comment taught you that I had no idea what LSAT meant and that I thought it should be explained. Now look at yours for a moment.

[wozniacki]

I didn't mean to scapegoat you to highlight the existence of this widespread problem on HN:

People investing too little effort in figuring out elementary things and in the process adding to the clutter of posts that distract from the trunk of the conversation.

Someday in the not so future, perhaps all forum posts everywhere can be auto-condensed and auto-recomposed for the purposes of brevity and clarity.

Eg: The Natural Language Processing technology licensed from SRI International, that was at the core of Summly, the app Yahoo bought for $30 MM.

Until then, we could do what sensible HNers always did - resist adding anything that distracts or leads the conversation astray.

HN is hardly perfect.

People already bemoan, justifiably so, that not enough striking and incisive stories make it to the front page.

Despite efforts, there is plenty of voting-ring activity that bolts undeserving stories to the top.

The weighing of upvotes and downvotes (based on the standing of the HNer) could be better.

These are all known issues.

While these things are gradually improved, we could help by not adding to the tally with this kind of redundant clutter.

[gjm11]

Here's the constructive-criticism version of your comment:

"For the benefit of anyone like me who never heard of the LSAT before: it's the Law School Admission Test, a half-day test of reading comprehension, logic and verbal reasoning used by law schools in the US, Canada, and elsewhere."

(More work? Maybe. But all the information there is also in the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article on the LSAT, which you said you already checked.)

[rahoulb]

I disagree; the criticism isn't about the term itself, it's that the term isn't readily explained on the site.

If, as explained, the term is widely understood by the target market, then this criticism is invalid (but caused by the poster not knowing the target market). If the criticism was valid, and the target market didn't understand the term, then the site owner knows that he/she should add an explanation.

The actual definition is sort-of irrelevant.

[graeme]

As the original author, I agree. The comment in question made me check the adwords keyword tool for the search volume of "Law School Admission Test"

It was, as I thought, fairly small relative to LSAT searches overall. But it's good to confirm that.

Also told me that there's enough searches to make a post along the lines of "What is the Law School Admission Test?" worthwhile, to catch students at the very start of their journey.