if you don't know what an SRE is, you're not the intended audience. probably half of the articles posted to HN are unintelligible to non-practitioners of that particular subfield, don't see why this should be different.

I don't know. As a person who is part of a number of intended audiences, I still get frustrated when people (directing things at me) don't define acronyms when they're first used, since

1. it's a hinderence for people who are studying to become the intended audience.

2. sometimes I'm reading two literatures that use the same acronym, so it's momentarily stupifying.

That just makes this a problem with HN rather than with the blog. HN's audience is not narrow, and it's annoying to see so many interesting titles leading to incomprehensible articles.

It really helps when HN posters either clarify things a bit in the title, or if that's not practical, make a comment when you post the link.

Finding a balance is hard. Should you define SQL? DB? HTTP? where do you start and stop defining acronyms.

In my blog entries [1] I use the ACRONYM [2] tag with a TITLE attribute that most browsers will show when you hover over the acronym. I don't understand why it's not used more often though.

[1] http://boston.conman.org/

[2] I know, ABBR is the new hotness, but I'm still using HTML 4 for my blog and old habits die hard.

I've modified the title to expand the acronym. Apologies for the confusion; I forgot that not everyone's head is where mine is. (I'm not the author of the article; I just found it interesting and wanted to share.)

oh no apologies necessary. It's becoming increasingly common on HN lately and I can't fathom why people take the time to write a thoughtful piece to advocate a particular view and then immediately lose a massive amount of the audience with unexplained acronyms. Especially when it's so easy to just lay it out once.

AcronymFinder.com works pretty well when you encounter an acronym you don't understand. In this case, you'd have to hit the 'Information Technology' section, as will frequently be the case on Hacker News.

had to go all the way to her Google+ bio to find out that she's a Senior Site Reliability Engineer, so I'm guessing that SRE in this essay means that.

It's also in the title of the link on HN?

it wasn't originally

It stands for "site reliability engineer" but the term is as meaningless as "full stack engineer".

I honestly don't see a problem with it in particular. Not anymore than with other titles in the industry. The title gives you a clue, but it's far from being a very specific way to find out in detail the skills/responsibilities of a given person, and because no one enforces what it means companies will use them for similar but significantly different purposes sometimes (and yeah, sometimes just to be 'cool'). It does not come as surprise to me at all that specially relatively new titles are vague.

devops / sysadmin / ops / system engineer pick a name.