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.
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.