Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrweasel | Hacker News Reader

Somewhat off-topic: When writing like this, explain your abbreviations and who the various people and companies are. PE Target? Price to Earnings Target, that makes no sense. Perhaps Physical Education, no, that's not right either. 10-K (might bold to assume that the reader knows what that is). Even smb (which should be SMB, even if it doesn't help) is probably not Small Message Block.

Think what you will of their writing and opinions, but one thing The Economist get right is that they don't assume you know what things are, it's spelled out at the first mention. So first mention of PE would be: private equity (PE).

> And Sequoia’s (a venture capital firm) investment in Dropbox was a great one, second to Airbnb in Fund 12 (another venture capital firm).

View on HN

I think the people who need those abbreviations spelled out are not the target audience of the article. There is no possible way to think that PE == price to earnings/physical education here and if a reader thinks that they wont understand the article anyway. e.g. hamilton helmer, power, fund 12 being a sequoia fund not a different venture firm, etc.

Its OK for articles to be a short few paragraphs with a smaller audience rather than a few long pages and explain every single thing at a basic level to try reach everyone

>I think the people who need those abbreviations spelled out are not the target audience of the article.

I agree this is true for the economist readers, but I clicked the link thinking this was about how Dropbox (in a company) is an obvious target for privilege escalation (for red teams and hackers), which also sounds plausible and interesting.

But I don't mind, after a few seconds of loading my mistake was obvious.

In the context of a economics blog, and its audience, sure!

But this is being shared outside that context. Deciphering acronyms for the HN titles would seem like an okay start. There are several common use alternatives. Wouldn't hurt to be explicit.

> I think the people who need those abbreviations spelled out are not the target audience of the article.

Probably. But I like reading a lot of articles I'm not the target audience for, because I like learning things. Writing it like this excludes a ton of people who might not already be insiders to become insiders.

Maybe that's a choice, a way to keep knowledge away from outsiders, to feel better about knowing that people who read your article are cool like you, and that's fine. But if the goal is to educate and reach a broader audience, it isn't effective.

> Probably. But I like reading a lot of articles I'm not the target audience for, because I like learning things.

OK, but the definition of not being the target audience is you bear that burden, not the author. If the author bore that burden, you'd be the target audience!

Mild disagreement. I find this annoying -- this is a community and it's absolutely POSSIBLE to structure this headline to provide the information.

HN is a community and an attitude of "if you don't get it, you're not in it" is unnecessarily toxic. Universally applying this sort of rule would apply to the queue getting cluttered up with insider jargon that pushes EVERYONE out.

private equity should also not be for audience here

the only PE relevant to hackers is PE32 file format for exe files

This is a site run by a venture capital firm, private equity is far closer to the target audience for HN than file formats.

And privilege escalation.

Thanks, will do.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com