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Comment by odysseus | Hacker News Reader

Maddening when you have to scroll through several paragraphs and repeated mentions of DFS just to find out what DFS stands for:

Dynamic Frequency Selection

To quote Elon: Acronyms Seriously Suck

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Most acronyms are more meaningful as acronyms than expanded.

Like this one for instance - have you actually learned anything now that you know it’s “dynamic frequency selection”? That’s not a good description of “an extra channel that sometimes isn’t available because radar uses it”.

It's way better when you learn the words. Now I understand it's about frequencies and channels.

DFS to a software crowd will always expand to depth-first search. I was trying to figure out if that's what was being discussed here (with plenty of skepticism, admittedly) until reading GP.

It helps in this article title some, but I usually see it written as “DFS channel”. In which case you already know it’s a kind of channel, so maybe it’s best to think of it as “sometimes-available channel”.

> It's way better when you learn the words.

Not always. I don't think learning what REST stands for helped anyone understand web service APIs

Yeah I'm specifically responding to the question above.

Some things like REST/HTML/XML are familiar enough that the initialism is as good as a dictionary word.

SOAP, on the other hand, I forget what that was. Hopefully it's not important.

It’s not about being familiar. It’s that “Representational State Transfer” is as meaningless as REST to someone who doesn’t know what REST is. (And honestly, even to those who do know what it means)

Another description: "dynamically picking channels to avoid radar activity". Seems more fitting with this one.

It conveys a lot more information than DFS.

Most acronyms are more meaningful when you don't have dozens of them conflicting on the same 3 letter string on the same area of knowledge.

Collision with “depth first search.” Which almost works — I could at least be convinced that there was some problem traversing these networks.

It’s right there in the Background section:

> This mechanism is known as Dynamic Frequency Selection (DFS) and is designed to mitigate interference to 5GHz radar by WLANs.

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