5 ms·
Site Acceptance Test? SATtelite communication ? We don't know, but we now know it's hard.
by dusted 4y ago
Site Acceptance Test? SATtelite communication ? We don't know, but we now know it's hard.
- temporal828 4y ago[flagged]
- Dalewyn 4y agoA link/title should be informative and useful with no prerequisites. Personally, I thought this was something to do with satelites.
- Wildgoose 4y agoI'm sorry, but on a tech site full of people working in IT, I genuinely think this is obviously about Boolean Satisfiability. There has to be a minimum standard of expected understanding - e.g. "Rust" on this site is unlikely to be about corrosion.
- imadethis 4y agoAnd as a person working in tech for the past 10 years, I had never heard of Boolean Satisfiability let alone SAT until I read through the comments on the post and the linked Wiki page. I would suggest that this topic is not as universal as you think it is.
- doctor_eval 4y agoPretty sure if they’d used the term “Boolean satisfiability” even once, we would have been able to work it out. But SAT could mean a million things and if you’re not using this stuff on a daily basis then it’s simply non obvious. It’s not the authors fault, they can write what they want. what’s pissing me off is the utterly unhelpful attitude of people responding to questions about wtf the guy is talking about.
- bubblethink 4y ago>Pretty sure if they’d used the term “Boolean satisfiability” It is obviously used in the text, just not in the title. This random digression doesn't add anything to the topic. If the parent of this thread had posted "What is SAT ?" instead of the rubbish snark, someone would have replied, "Boolean Satisfiability". End of story. When did expressing one's ignorance become cool ? The OP (and others) could have grepped the article, or even just smashed a few keys in google, such as "sat np", and would have got the answer.
- Dalewyn 4y agoNothing is more ignorant than being willfully ignorant of the fact you aren't making sense to your audience. "You" in reference to the people posting these things here at HN, not the article author. We aren't the article author's audience, so he has every right to ignore our needs. Whoever posts these things here, though? Their audience is us, and they need to try and make sense of themselves. Just add "(Boolean SATisfiability)" after "SAT" and everything would have been fine. It's simply good practice to always explain the first use of an acronym anyway.
- 13of40 4y agoThis is a perfect use case for hyperlinks.
- 100721 4y agoThere are many, many people on here who do not have the slightest clue what complexity theory even is. Let's try to educate more and condescend less.
- temporal828 4y agoThen maybe go read one of the many introductions on the topic? Not every blog post has to start at the beginning to be interesting here. There is nothing condescending about not starting every piece of technical writing from grade school arithmetic and the author makes it very clear who the audience for the post is.
- doctor_eval 4y agoThe first sentence is literally, “An introductory post about complexity theory” but then goes on to assume we know about complexity theory. The author has the right to write whatever they want, however they want, and they owe us nothing. But your outburst when someone simply asks wtf, is nonsensical.
- temporal828 4y agoI interpreted "introductory post" to mean that it is introductory within the blog and possibly a lead in to further articles as the author hasn't written on the topic before. Not that it is necessarily an introduction to the topic. People on this site are so full of themselves thinking that random technical bloggers on the internet have to satisfy some unwritten Hacker News style manual.
- doctor_eval 4y agoReally we are just being curious. I like articles that talk about computational complexity, I wanted to understand it. But there was literally no hook for me to hold onto. I didn’t even know what to search for. SAT is such a common acronym. The blogger owes us nothing. You’re the one telling us that we should already have known. Maybe instead of criticising us, you could have helped us?
- stavros 4y agoStill, a title of "why boolean satisfiability is hard" would eliminate the confusion without any downsides.
- MikeDelta 4y agoArticles need to be aimed properly at the audience. Is it beginners or experts? It ir is not for beginners, then why start explaining Big O notation and SAT with some pseudocode? In my opinion, the article should explain what sat stands for because it is aimed at relative beginners. On a note: my take on the community here is that in general nobidy here wants to be spoon-fed or be insulted if they ask what an abbreviation stands for. What they want is properly written articles so that they can investigate further, and a discussion with the community. There are so many specialists reading HN and I am amazed at the level of knowledge and experience in the replies sometimes. They don't talk with snobbery about that users should read text books and not bother because they are not part of the select inner circle. Instead, they help out and educate. That is what makes HN great.
- dusted 4y agoIt's pretty damn clear if you have any idea what SAT and complexity theory is (which I don't), the DO eventually get around to mentioning in passing that SAT (the word in the headline, mind you) is short satisfiability, but look where.. I can't comment on the contents of the article itself, I know nothing about the subject, I only mentioned my frustration that, as someone who dares explore links on the Internet, even if they can't extrapolate the subject from the headline (the audacity, I know), it's impossible from the first paragraphs of that text to even find out what kind of subject we're talking about here.. And the SAT word, well, for me, that's what tripped me.. Look at this random article for comparison http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~lalla/373s16/notes/CSAT2SAT.pdf http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~lalla/373s16/notes/CSAT2SAT.pdf They explain it in the third sentence, and they told what SAT meant _BEFORE_ they used it for the first time, not half a dense page further down in passing. Sure, this is putting my ignorance on display, but I'm not going to apologize for not knowing about every subject in the corpus of human knowledge..
- jxf 4y agoYou don't know that the article is about complexity theory until you click through it, so the OP's point about the ambiguity stands. The title could be better.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- albertopv 4y agoCan we agree title alone is not so clear and maybe (I repeat, maybe) a bit clickbait?
- hinkley 4y ago“hard” is not a word invented by the Optimization community. Lots of difficult topics get posted here that have nothing to do with NP completeness.
- TazeTSchnitzel 4y agoThe post does explain which SAT it's talking about, though it's a bit later than you might have hoped for.
- meghan_rain 4y agoScholarly Aptitude Test