Hacker News Reader

Comment by sorenjan | Hacker News Reader

This gets mentioned here everytime an article about LoRA is posted. Sometimes acronyms means multiple things, they're not in the same field so the risk of confusion beyond short headlines is negligible.

It's a bit like if someone reading a bicycling article and getting annoyed that FTP means Functional Threshold Power instead of File Transfer Protocol, or reading about machine learning and getting confused that MLP doesn't mean My Little Pony.

View on HN

"computer science" and "bicycles" aren't the same domain, it's fine to have the same acronym.

"computer science" and "tv shows" aren't the same domain, it's fine to have the same acronym.

"computer science" and "computer science" are the same domain, it's not a good idea to use the same acronym.

Large Models is in the title so it's obviously not about radio

The acronym is also spelled out in the title: LoRA = Low Rank Adaptation.

Context is hard!

So instead of LoRa and anything else, everyone now has to say LoRa (the communication protocol) or LoRa (the large model thing). Having to add context all the time makes everything so much simpler !

Low rank adaptation is abbreviated LoRA

Or potentially include the necessary context in the title of the post.

Or just pick another name

That does seem to be more reasonable than expecting people to pick up on context

Large models is not spelled in full, and doesn't explicitely says it's not about the communication protocol.

LoRa is radio communication so part of EE, not CS.

Otherwise, I'm going to toss TV shows as part of CS, since Amazon Prime and Netflix streaming are things. Also, it's the original programming.

> "computer science" and "computer science" are the same domain, it's not a good idea to use the same acronym.

But “radio communication" is not “computer science”, even though people sometimes plug radio transceivers into computers, just like “tv shows” aren't “computer science” just because people sometimes view or store their shows on a computer, and “bicycles” aren’t “computer science” because sometimes people mount computers on their bikes.

"Computer science" isn't really one domain anymore - the field split into several subdomains in the 2010s. Just try to get a job as a "computer scientist" now - the recruiter would be like "No, are you a web developer? Mobile developer? Backend developer? Data scientist? Data engineer? Cloud engineer? AI engineer? Machine learning developer?"

I think the reason this keeps coming up is encoded in your second sentence, in conjunction with the HN medium: LoRa and LoRA are both, unfortunately, things that the target audience are likely to be interested in and/or knowledgeable with, but a general audience is not.

Also, both use a non-standard case mix.

> Sometimes acronyms means multiple things

Exactly. Like WiFi: from ancient times it has meant "Wife's Fidelity".

Tell my WiFi love her

Finally! Some people have been screaming to change the acronym since 2001. But these tech bros group didn’t listen. Such hubris!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_naming_controversy

> This gets mentioned here everytime an article about LoRA is posted.

I wonder why!

Yes but radio protocols and AI methods are a lot closer than most overlapping acronyms. This is obvious from the fact that it gets mentioned every time an article about LoRA is posted.

But these are clearly both in the same field as everyone keeps saying mentioning it here! So clearly there is confusion. It certainly tricked me on first reading - "ah cool - efficient lora+ that sounds cool... Ah wait no it's just some machine learning spam"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com