Ask HN: A kind request please about the use of acronyms?

5 points by stephen82 ↗ HN
Fellow Hacker News' readers,

I need to confess something: as a non-English speaker, most of the time I'm embarrassed to ask what that 'X' or 'Y' acronym means.

To give an example, NLP.

Is it * Neuro-Linguistic Programming? * Natural Language Processing? * Network Layer Protocol? * Natural Language Paradigm?

...and so on.

9 out of 10 times, I have to patiently look for the comments and pray to find an answer somewhere in thread(s) to save myself from embarrassingly asking.

Now I have decided to take the risk to do so, as I have accumulated countless of acronyms, thanks to Web Development, and not only lol!

Are we getting lazier than ever to type a whole word, let alone a normal sentence, or is it my idea?

Can you English-speaking people help us understand your language better?

Thank you very much and please accept my apologies in advance if I have offended anyone.

3 comments

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Even as a monolingual native English speaker I absolutely prefer that acronyms and initialisms are defined before use, at least once.
I second that! Considering how crap Google results are these days, even usual methods to decode acronyms often turn futile
If an acronym isn't defined previous to use, or at first use, I consider it a typo.