More generally, not every piece of writing is meant for every audience. Like if someone writes a blog post about CTFs aimed at people who like CTFs, nobody in the target audience needs to have CTF explained to them. Ultimately HN is a link aggregator, but sometimes its a bit like eavesdropping on a conversation. When you are just listening in you don't get the full context sometimes.
It doesn't help that the linked article never bothers to explain this either.
But that is about you right? Its a little entitled to expect every piece of content on the internet to have a 101 explanation attached. If they were specificly aiming to have the blog post appear on HN that would be one thing, but they (presumably) weren't.
This article was written for a specific audience who follows this blog because they know the term. If you start spelling out fundamental acronyms it makes the content look more basic and general.
This always upsets the general audience who stumble upon the article (like this) but it wasn’t meant for a general audience. CTF is extremely well known and the people who would be interested in this topic would wonder what’s happening if it was spelled out. It would be so odd that it would probably attract accusations of ChatGPT writing.
Informal writing about technical topics is another story. There you can assume a lot more shared context, as you are only writing for a specific subculture within the field. It doesn't matter much if other people in the field fail to understand you.
It isn’t common but I feel it would be best when posting to HN to just expand the initialisms even if the source title didn’t.
Are you really arguing for not just typing out whatever 3 words this stands for once in the name of clarity?
They aren't your teacher. They aren't trying to send the content to you. They are just blogging on their own website for their own audience.
And its hardly unique to this article. If you are writing about the nitty gritty of linux networking, you probably aren't defining what TCP or UDP means. If you are writing a super detailed article comparing and contrasting plot structures of different animes, you probably aren't going to start by explaining what the word anime means. Etc
I'm not saying the world should be all RTFM, but if you are reading some sort of specialized content, then yes i think its a reasonable assumption that the reader has some basic background knowledge on the topic at hand, or is willing to do the research themselves.
It's like complaining about not spelling C in "bake cake in 170 C"
But not all, so: https://xkcd.com/1053/
(Amusingly, it even uses “30 years” as the timeframe.)
"hey what X means?" "X means it"
vs
"I dont know what CTF stands for so I dont know if I am interested in this article or learning anything about it. Maybe I am.
Are you really arguing for not just typing out whatever 3 words this stands for once in the name of clarity?"
The commenter could just say the first instead of deciding his learned helplessness is everyone's else problem
Also yes, search for CTF is not simple regarding security, because first you need to know that you are searching something in the topic of security. Because every other usage of this is way more frequent. Especially that there is an other way more frequent computer related usage. And the article doesn't make this clear in its first 173 words for laymen. Even I had a problem with this, who is not at all layman, just never cared about this part of security. It's a bad article.
In fact, I have no idea what's going on, so I came back to HN comments. Turns out it's "capture the flag" which I actually know, just not familiar with the acronym.
Which is why I am 100% with the top level comment here.
Additionaly Bake Cake in 170 is very not clear, especially considering you have two major Temperature Scales in use in the Kitchen.
Actively rude.
So, in fact, you must not beg to have authors include courtesy definitions for you. That's not reasonable. Instead, you should simply ask here, on the thread, without complaining about the article.
Personally I have never, ever heard that concept referred to by the initialism. Granted, it's almost never come up in my circles, so... shrug
> My first CTF was HCKSYD, a 48-hour solo CTF. I full solved it and won in 2 hours. I was completely hooked. That led me to win DownUnderCTF, Australia's largest CTF, with Blitzkrieg multiple times. Blitzkrieg was one of Australia's strongest teams at the time. I later joined TheHackersCrew, an international top-tier team that was consistently ranked highly on CTFTime, the main global ranking and event calendar the scene uses as its scoreboard. With them, I competed in some of the most prestigious CTFs in the world, consistently placing well within the top 10 until the end of 2025.
Are still completely nonsensical to even those that understand the acronym
To help everyone, this Capture The Flag is specifically Cybersecurity adjacent, there is a Wikipedia article on it as the top Google search result for me when searching "CTF". This is why the acronym is used, because searching for the full will get you to the wrong "sport" vs the cybersecurity one.
I don't want to explain what a CTF is. look at the Wikipedia article. It is there for a good reason.
As I remember it (and this was decades ago): Two teams, opposite ends of a large field. Each end gets a "flag". (We used t-shirts.) In our case, we split the field in half — our field happened to have a natural feature (a change in elevation, so like two separately flat areas separated by an incline) that worked well for this. If you were tackled¹ in the enemy's side, you were "captured", and "jailed". An uncaptured player could spring the jail by tagging those within it. Returning to your flag with the opposing team's flag was a win.
We played at night, so stealth was a large part of the game, but it was also fair to illuminate the area around the flag. (Which made approaching a guarded flag … tricky.)
I'm sure there's probably a million variations on the specifics.
¹…flag football flags would probably work nicely for this.
People are mad because we're literally on "hacker" news, so there is some expectation that people might be familiar with hacking or computer security.
In this context, CTF is almost exclusively referred to by the initialism, i think to help distinguish from other uses of the term.
This has been the most annoying HN so far until your comment appeared.
I think you only wanted clarification of CTF (Capture the Flag) and not AI (Artificial Intelligence) and not GPT-4 (Generative Pre-Trained Transformer version 4) and not CLI (Command Line Interface) and not MCP (Model Context Protocol) and not LLM (Large Language Model)
Quoting TFA (The Fucking Article): “just adapt bro”
lol at the BGP example
I don't know everything, there's tons of stuff I don't know about, but when I'm at my web browser, the least I can do about something is ask Google about a word or phrase or subject that isn't familiar instead of being spoonfed information like I'm a baby.
The best example is when an abbreviation can be expanded to more than one phrase, and both are widely used.
To me it doesn't seem reasonable at all. It's just entitled at best.
As an individual author they are entitled to write whatever they want in their blogpost. I as a consumer of their writing am not entitled to anything
...which is completely ridiculous to include in an article aimed specifically at the CTF crowd.
* googling "CTF security"
* asking literally any AI to explain the article
Yes, you must beg. If you don't know what a CTF is, and don't want to find out, why read the article anyway
In fact, I know what "capture the flag" is but am not familiar with the acronym. Still, the article confused the hell out of me, so I came back to HN comments for more context.
> Asking AI to explain the article
That's how we are expected to consume content these days?
Also well written articles allow you to figure out what they mean after clicking onto them. People often read to learn.
It's such a small but immensely helpful thing to do.
Spelling it out when 99.9% of your audience doesn't need it actually is the opposite of in-group signaling, it makes it feel like it's aimed at a wider audience, when it's not.
> An abbreviation whose expansion is provided the first time the abbreviation appears in the content
Content is the main body of the article (press tab ones you land the page, it will take you to the main content if you don't know what that is), which contains only one Acronym, “SC 3.1.4” → which is a link that take you to a place with its definition. I don't understand what you are fighting over. But I'm not going to reply more to someone who defends people who do not know how to write articles that are more friendly towards the reader.
CTF stands for Capture The Flag, which is a cybersecurity competition where participants find hidden "flags" in vulnerable programs or systems to test and develop their security skills. There are two main types of CTFs: jeopardy-style, where teams solve various challenges for points, and attack-defense, where teams defend their systems while trying to exploit their opponents'.
Exceptions for cases where the acronym is just so well known that a lot of people don't even know what it stands for even though they know the concept well. I recall one corporate training I was sitting through and they used the term "Border Gateway Protocol" and it took me a half beat to think through "oh, you mean BGP?"
Thanks!