Comment by spacedcowboy

Ok, so picture the situation:

1) You see a headline on HN about some open format being broken by frontier-level AI. You don't recognise the acronym.

2) You visit the site, you read the first few paragraphs, you still have no effing clue what the site is talking about

3) You come back to HN and read the comments to figure out WTF is going on. Oh, it's just some game style, so not a Cryptographic Trust File, or something you have to care about after all.

The point is you can't know what some opaque acronym is about until you visit the source of something that will hopefully explain this opaque acronym. Leaving the site being still none-the-wiser is a failure of the site, in my view. If you don't agree, that's fine, we're adults, we can differ, but it seems like a valid complaint to me.

FWIW (this means "for what it's worth" :) I'm not railing against acronyms in general, and HTTP is probably one of the most-used ones on the internet so I'm not sure it really applies as a good counterpoint. Using CTF without an explanation is more like using SSTP (Secure socket tunneling protocol) without one, IMHO (this means In My Humble Opinion :) ...