And as a person working in tech for the past 10 years, I had never heard of Boolean Satisfiability let alone SAT until I read through the comments on the post and the linked Wiki page. I would suggest that this topic is not as universal as you think it is.

Pretty sure if they’d used the term “Boolean satisfiability” even once, we would have been able to work it out.

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.

>Pretty sure if they’d used the term “Boolean satisfiability”

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.

Nothing is more ignorant than being willfully ignorant of the fact you aren't making sense to your audience.

"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.