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Ask HN: Cringe Acronyms

Infra, algo, ..., are we all on first-name terms with basic concepts or just trying to sound "in crowd"? Examples of cringeworthy acronyms requested, the more egregious the better, ...
( 14 comments | 2 points | on HN )
Re:Ask HN: Cringe Acronyms by mtmail on Friday January 13, 2023 @08:30AM (#34367362)
I accept FANG or FAANG to represent "big tech businesses", for me it's not really about which companies are included or not. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Tech#FAANG Lately, also in HN comments, people started using GAMAM, MAMAA and such.

i10n, i18n, but I've also seen k8s for Kubernetes

Re:Ask HN: Cringe Acronyms by ElfinTrousers on Friday January 13, 2023 @10:49AM (#34369390)
With the recent-ish renamings, we could now refer to big tech as "MANA", which is kind of cool. Plus that way we'd all get to enjoy the spectacle of watching Alphabet and Amazon argue about which one came first.
Re:Ask HN: Cringe Acronyms by hugs_vs_toph on Friday January 13, 2023 @03:17PM (#34373306)
I buy my decentraland parcels with mana
Re:Ask HN: Cringe Acronyms by ElfinTrousers on Friday January 13, 2023 @06:16PM (#34375236)
Wait, I thought you got mana from lands, not the other way around.

[shows self out]

Re:Ask HN: Cringe Acronyms by drpixie on Friday January 13, 2023 @07:50AM (#34366996)
crypto-anything

i-almost anything - usually mindless marketing.

Re:Ask HN: Cringe Acronyms by quanticle on Friday January 13, 2023 @08:25AM (#34367317)
"Cyber", when applied to anything, and even more when used by itself.

The fad of naming products i-whatever has thankfully tailed off.

Re:Ask HN: Cringe Acronyms by tacostakohashi on Friday January 13, 2023 @08:50AM (#34367622)
Not so much acronyms, but several popularly misused terms that drive me nuts:

* "physically", e.g. "I physically deleted the files", when in fact the meaning is more like "actually", "manually", or "using one fewer layers of abstraction", since physical deletion would presumably involve a hammer or shredder or something along those lines.

* "special characters", e.g. "the application breaks when users input special characters in the username field". Often people use this term to refer to anything other than a-z0-9, including things as mundane as spaces or punctuation. To my mind, any character that exists in 7-bit ASCII or has a dedicated key on the keyboard just isn't that special!

Re:Ask HN: Cringe Acronyms by ElfinTrousers on Friday January 13, 2023 @10:42AM (#34369284)
"Manually" is a little better, because at least you're using your hands to move the keyboard and mouse to cause the files to be deleted. But it still suggests the image to me that you're actually opening up the hard drive and striking out the data with a pen. It's also not as if I can think of a better antonym for "automatically".
Re:Ask HN: Cringe Acronyms by ElfinTrousers on Friday January 13, 2023 @10:47AM (#34369353)
Not an acronym, but whenever I hear the word "innovation" now, my reaction is basically the same as Jules in Pulp Fiction when the one guy won't stop saying "What?" (*).

(*) i.e. "say that one more time and I am not responsible for my reaction". Samuel L. Jackson put it a little differently though.

Re:Ask HN: Cringe Acronyms by greggarious on Friday January 13, 2023 @11:56AM (#34370453)
Neither infra nor algo are “acronyms”.

Webster’s defines an acronym as “a word (such as NATO, radar, or laser) formed from the initial letter or letters of each of the successive parts or major parts of a compound term”.

It’s a huge pet peeve, as someone between roles, when folks are imprecise in their terminology, especially if it’s a role that will involve writing code rather than say, being a penetration tester…

(Things like… that… require *lateral thinking*, not precision.)

Re:Ask HN: Cringe Acronyms by zach_garwood on Friday January 13, 2023 @01:20PM (#34371727)
A few years ago I started working on a project (that I never finished) that I tentatively named the Command Line Interface Tutorial. Thankfully I never finished the CLIT.
Re:Ask HN: Cringe Acronyms by the_only_law on Friday January 13, 2023 @02:54PM (#34373014)
Those are abbreviations not acronyms and neither are particularly egregious… they’re literally just shortened versions of the words “infrastructure” and “algorithms”.
Re:Ask HN: Cringe Acronyms by mattwest on Friday January 13, 2023 @03:07PM (#34373177)
ESG
Re:Ask HN: Cringe Acronyms by dieselgate on Friday January 13, 2023 @03:26PM (#34373409)
f.u.b.a.r. is the most literally cringe acronym for me.