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Thank you for this! Abbreviations and acronyms are highly inefficient if not defined clearly and up front. It also creates a division between those who know an

Thank you for this! Abbreviations and acronyms are highly inefficient if not defined clearly and up front. It also creates a division between those who know and those who don't. I absolutely detested seeing "ISO" suddenly everywhere on Facebook and Nextdoor in place of "in search of". If you didn't know that before, you know it now, but you may also be annoyed by it not being about the international organization for standardization, which also goes by ISO, but not for any reason people would magically guess, without a background in Greek. (ISO explains that, since the acronym would differ in every language, ISO is actually derived from isos, which means "equal". Happy coincidence that it almost matches the name of the organization, but could also become obscure with time and lost history.) For our company, I've been very clear that we don't make up acronyms unless a layperson could reasonably guess what it stands for, and also not confuse it for something else.

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integralid 11mo ago
I assume this blog post is targeted for the security community, where IoC is universally understood. Of course it is confusing on HN, but authors are free to assume their audience - like we don't define what HTTP, MVC and "btw" mean every time we use it. Or, for a better example, HN and YC are used here all the time, but would be confusing for outsiders (and should be defined outside of HN context).
CaptainOfCoit 11mo ago
> It also creates a division between those who know and those who don't. Yeah, it's called "expertise" and it isn't as bad as you seem to think. Blogs for security professionals will use jargon and technical words aimed at other security professionals, and that's OK, not everything on the web is for everyone. Just like how in my game development blog I don't explain what a "loop" is because I'm assuming the audience knows basic programming already, otherwise every article would be balloon out of scope easily.
- akerl_ 11mo ago
  A quick skim of https://iverify.io/blog https://iverify.io/blog makes it seem pretty clear that iVerify’s audience is people who are interested in security, not just existing industry experts.
  - CaptainOfCoit 11mo ago
    But then skim the submission article and try to evaluate which audience it seems written for. Considering they have stuff like "Located within the Sysdiagnoses in the Unified Logs section (specifically, Sysdiagnose Folder -> system_logs.logarchive -> Extra -> shutdown.log)" in the article, my guess is that they're aiming for people who at least have a basic understanding of security, not general users, as those wouldn't understand an iota of that.
    - akerl_ 11mo ago
      This argument seems neatly circular. Any example where somebody says an article doesn’t do a great job defining its terms just becomes proof that the authors only wanted readers who already understand the terms.
      - CaptainOfCoit 11mo ago
        Some stuff is written for some people, other stuff is written for other people. This shouldn't be hard to understand, nor particularly novel either.
      - pcthrowaway 11mo ago
        I think it's fine for the magazine, but I would have liked to see it expanded in the HN submission title, since many of us are not cybersecurity specialists.
    - eviks 11mo ago
      Considering there is actualy not an iota of technically security challenging stuff (specifically, any computer user can understand your quote that there is a log file located at some path, there is 0 security understanding required there), using your own logic we can deduce the general audience was the target
alexjplant 11mo ago
The web already had terminology for this in online enthusiast forums: WTB (Want to Buy), FS (For Sale), FT (For Trade), etc. The slow death of the open web in favor of platforms has evidently caused a lot of rework like this. Other notable examples include backwards emoticons (: and DM instead of PM.
- scrps 11mo ago
  The corp platform model seems to excel at abstracted wheel re-inventing and then pretending it is innovation.

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integralid 11mo ago

I assume this blog post is targeted for the security community, where IoC is universally understood. Of course it is confusing on HN, but authors are free to assume their audience - like we don't define what HTTP, MVC and "btw" mean every time we use it. Or, for a better example, HN and YC are used here all the time, but would be confusing for outsiders (and should be defined outside of HN context).

CaptainOfCoit 11mo ago

> It also creates a division between those who know and those who don't. Yeah, it's called "expertise" and it isn't as bad as you seem to think. Blogs for security professionals will use jargon and technical words aimed at other security professionals, and that's OK, not everything on the web is for everyone. Just like how in my game development blog I don't explain what a "loop" is because I'm assuming the audience knows basic programming already, otherwise every article would be balloon out of scope easily.

akerl_ 11mo ago
A quick skim of https://iverify.io/blog https://iverify.io/blog makes it seem pretty clear that iVerify’s audience is people who are interested in security, not just existing industry experts.
- CaptainOfCoit 11mo ago
  But then skim the submission article and try to evaluate which audience it seems written for. Considering they have stuff like "Located within the Sysdiagnoses in the Unified Logs section (specifically, Sysdiagnose Folder -> system_logs.logarchive -> Extra -> shutdown.log)" in the article, my guess is that they're aiming for people who at least have a basic understanding of security, not general users, as those wouldn't understand an iota of that.
  - akerl_ 11mo ago
    This argument seems neatly circular. Any example where somebody says an article doesn’t do a great job defining its terms just becomes proof that the authors only wanted readers who already understand the terms.
    - CaptainOfCoit 11mo ago
      Some stuff is written for some people, other stuff is written for other people. This shouldn't be hard to understand, nor particularly novel either.
    - pcthrowaway 11mo ago
      I think it's fine for the magazine, but I would have liked to see it expanded in the HN submission title, since many of us are not cybersecurity specialists.
  - eviks 11mo ago
    Considering there is actualy not an iota of technically security challenging stuff (specifically, any computer user can understand your quote that there is a log file located at some path, there is 0 security understanding required there), using your own logic we can deduce the general audience was the target

alexjplant 11mo ago

The web already had terminology for this in online enthusiast forums: WTB (Want to Buy), FS (For Sale), FT (For Trade), etc. The slow death of the open web in favor of platforms has evidently caused a lot of rework like this. Other notable examples include backwards emoticons (: and DM instead of PM.

scrps 11mo ago
The corp platform model seems to excel at abstracted wheel re-inventing and then pretending it is innovation.