Hacker News Reader

Comment by mejutoco | Hacker News Reader

We agree. To elaborate. I agree it should be. Unfortunately it is not. This is why I compliment the economist. They do it as I believe it should be.

One example is the amount on comments here on hn about some acronyms thrown without explanation. There are, for instance, 1200 matches for 'What is IC' (Individual Contributor)

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

View on HN

I think most people still see Hackernews as a website for people in the software industry, where IC is common knowledge. Plus comments aren't written to educate or sell a subscription, rather they're to ask a question, continue a discussion, or contest some point, so it's natural for the writing style to lean towards the informal and be less patronizing. And of course the search you show is a great example of why this isn't too big a problem - since HN is a discussion board, if someone is confused and they can't find the answer on Google, they can just ask for clarification in the comments, often getting a reply from the person who made the original comment that confused them. With a newspaper you can't really do that - even in comment sections authors rarely answer questions, and other readers don't tend to engage with the comments unless they have reasons of their own.

Very fair points. I see now It was not an equivalent example.

I've been an IC for 10 years and never would have guessed that's what IC stands for.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com