Hacker News Reader

Comment by dylan604 | Hacker News Reader

The F___ Article

Usually, dang or someone will come along and post links to previous HN posts on the same topic. The actual article did that for us, so I thought I'd save dang a quick search.

View on HN

To put a slightly finer point on the explanation: The "F***" is often assumed to be a common insult-word, either to show annoyance that another person didn't bother reading the article first, or else to indicate that article itself isn't good.

However over the years I've also seen people refer to it as "Fine", where the initialism is a bit more neutral in tone (or at least, ambiguously sarcastic) so it isn't always the overtly annoyed version.

That's precisely why I left it blank to be filled in with which ever version one chooses. I prefer the more crude version personally, but at least allowed for it to be more ambiguous for this one post.

>However over the years

To me, it has just become accepted way to reference the actual article (regardless of the actual words in the acronym to the point of being a word not an acronym at all) the entire comment page is about vs the previous comment relative names like GP GGP etc. This quote isn't from a different comment, but instead lifted directly from the article the comment that is being discussed

Originally “RTFM”, or “read the (fantastic) manual”.

My anecdotal impression is that RTFM came first especially in the context of newsgroups/usenet, whereas (R)TFA arose later in a more web-forum/blog-comment era when there were really more A's to R.

I've seen some people refer to it as "the featured article". But the profanity definition is more common for sure.

Hah, it’s always been “The Featured Article” in my head… TIL!

Interesting. I never encountered what it stood for, but had always assumed it was "The Full Article".

Thanks! Familiar with RTFM etc, hadn't seen this.

Seems fair.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com