If it means capture the flag, then it means a completely different capture the flag for almost everybody. I searched for it, read the first paragraph, and I still don’t know what the fuck is the topic. According to Wikipedia it’s a very new meaning. I could figure out only because of searching for “HCKSYD” and others.

Is 30 years old very new? We're on a site for tech people. I would wager most are familiar with this term.

Its article is 5 years old… So, yeah, it’s new.

Its article was reorganized (moved from plain Capture the Flag to Capture the flag (cybersecurity)) 5 years ago. It's been on Wikipedia since 2004 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Capture_the_flag&...

Nice catch, I didn't read that part.

Most people on this site are also familiar with the “XKCD 10000”.

But not all, so: https://xkcd.com/1053/

(Amusingly, it even uses “30 years” as the timeframe.)

More acronyms?? What the heck is an XKCD??? ;)

Classic of course. The point being: don't make fun of people for not knowing something. In this thread we're making fun of learned helplessness.

You are making fun of people who are saying that this article is shit, without addressing that part at all.

consider 2 conversations

"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

The commenter above replied to me, who checked what it is, which is clearly stated in my comment. So your comment cannot be applied to the guy who came up the first with "learned helplessness" in this thread, who replied to me. That guy clearly just wanted to shift the topic from that the article is shit, because they cannot do anything with it.

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.

My search results for "open CTF format" beg to differ. Bear in mind that Google search results, just like ChatGPT output, are highly personalized and non deterministic, so "it's there if you do a Google search" means almost nothing these days.

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.

"bake cake in 170" is genuinely confusing at first glance though.

There is so much wrong with this beginning with the fact that it would be correctly 170 °C (the degree is important because it implies an arbitrary scale)

Additionaly Bake Cake in 170 is very not clear, especially considering you have two major Temperature Scales in use in the Kitchen.