Comment by 0x20cowboy
8 days ago
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?
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.
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
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"
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.
Is 30 years old very new? We're on a site for tech people. I would wager most are familiar with this term.
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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.
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.
"bake cake in 170" is genuinely confusing at first glance though.
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