Let's try to educate more and condescend less.
The author has the right to write whatever they want, however they want, and they owe us nothing.
But your outburst when someone simply asks wtf, is nonsensical.
I think the confusion is that the author is using "an introductory post" as a synonym for "my first post". In this meaning, "introductory"=="opening/initial/first".
But some readers interpreted "introductory" as an ExplainLikeIAm5 tutorial from basic principles.
The "this is my first post in a timeline" interpretation makes more sense when you see that all his previous blog posts were not about NP complexity : https://matklad.github.io/
This first introductory post about NP complexity also implies a planned series of future followup posts.
When browsing his past blog posts on other random topics, it seems that many assume the reader has an existing intermediate-to-advanced background on the subject.
People on this site are so full of themselves thinking that random technical bloggers on the internet have to satisfy some unwritten Hacker News style manual.
The blogger owes us nothing. You’re the one telling us that we should already have known. Maybe instead of criticising us, you could have helped us?
Ahm, from the text: "Boolean satisfiability, or SAT is a decision problem where an input is a boolean formula like [...]"
I mean, I did? While the reply was brusque I did name what the topic was about: boolean satisfiability, "It's pretty damn clear from the context of complexity theory that this is about boolean satisfiability."
The comment I replied to on the other hand was not constructive at all.
This is a link aggregator site and not an editorial site, the content linked to is varied and is not going to meet a single standard, or this site will become monotonous very quickly. I don't even click or read the majority of links here because they don't sound that interesting to me, which is fine. Not everything has to be aimed at the beginner or a particular audience.
When slightly less accessible content or just personally uninteresting content is posted I don't see how a content free snarky comment is at all constructive.
Personally, I thought this was something to do with satelites.
But SAT could mean a million things and if you’re not using this stuff on a daily basis then it’s simply non obvious.
It’s not the authors fault, they can write what they want. what’s pissing me off is the utterly unhelpful attitude of people responding to questions about wtf the guy is talking about.
It is obviously used in the text, just not in the title.
This random digression doesn't add anything to the topic. If the parent of this thread had posted "What is SAT ?" instead of the rubbish snark, someone would have replied, "Boolean Satisfiability". End of story. When did expressing one's ignorance become cool ? The OP (and others) could have grepped the article, or even just smashed a few keys in google, such as "sat np", and would have got the answer.
"You" in reference to the people posting these things here at HN, not the article author. We aren't the article author's audience, so he has every right to ignore our needs. Whoever posts these things here, though? Their audience is us, and he needs to try and make sense of himself.
Just add "(Boolean SATisfiability)" after "SAT" and everything would have been fine. It's simply good practice to always explain the first use of an acronym anyway.
It ir is not for beginners, then why start explaining Big O notation and SAT with some pseudocode?
In my opinion, the article should explain what sat stands for because it is aimed at relative beginners.
On a note: my take on the community here is that in general nobidy here wants to be spoon-fed or be insulted if they ask what an abbreviation stands for. What they want is properly written articles so that they can investigate further, and a discussion with the community.
There are so many specialists reading HN and I am amazed at the level of knowledge and experience in the replies sometimes. They don't talk with snobbery about that users should read text books and not bother because they are not part of the select inner circle. Instead, they help out and educate.
That is what makes HN great.
I can't comment on the contents of the article itself, I know nothing about the subject, I only mentioned my frustration that, as someone who dares explore links on the Internet, even if they can't extrapolate the subject from the headline (the audacity, I know), it's impossible from the first paragraphs of that text to even find out what kind of subject we're talking about here.. And the SAT word, well, for me, that's what tripped me..
Look at this random article for comparison http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~lalla/373s16/notes/CSAT2SAT.pdf
They explain it in the third sentence, and they told what SAT meant _BEFORE_ they used it for the first time, not half a dense page further down in passing.
Sure, this is putting my ignorance on display, but I'm not going to apologize for not knowing about every subject in the corpus of human knowledge..
And as stated in the article: "This post is my attempt at an explanation. It assumes some familiarity with the space" The audience is simply not beginners.