Yes, i would argue that people writing articles about niche interests aimed at other members of that niche are under no obligation to clarify it for people outside the niche.

They aren't your teacher. They aren't trying to send the content to you. They are just blogging on their own website for their own audience.

And its hardly unique to this article. If you are writing about the nitty gritty of linux networking, you probably aren't defining what TCP or UDP means. If you are writing a super detailed article comparing and contrasting plot structures of different animes, you probably aren't going to start by explaining what the word anime means. Etc

I'm not saying the world should be all RTFM, but if you are reading some sort of specialized content, then yes i think its a reasonable assumption that the reader has some basic background knowledge on the topic at hand, or is willing to do the research themselves.

it's the first result I get on anonymous google search.

It's like complaining about not spelling C in "bake cake in 170 C"

Does spelling it out help? From memory, it is a security competition where participants compete to gain certain objectives. I think capture the flag may explain how scoring is kept, but it wouldn’t help me find out what it is, given that capture the flag is also just the name of a game people play outside by running, or in laser tag or in certain video games.

For a general audience this is good advice.

This article was written for a specific audience who follows this blog because they know the term. If you start spelling out fundamental acronyms it makes the content look more basic and general.

This always upsets the general audience who stumble upon the article (like this) but it wasn’t meant for a general audience. CTF is extremely well known and the people who would be interested in this topic would wonder what’s happening if it was spelled out. It would be so odd that it would probably attract accusations of ChatGPT writing.

> There is a ton of stuff I learn about here on HN that I didn't know anything about before.

But that is about you right? Its a little entitled to expect every piece of content on the internet to have a 101 explanation attached. If they were specificly aiming to have the blog post appear on HN that would be one thing, but they (presumably) weren't.

When I encounter new terms, I look them up. Just like any other new word. Been doing it since I was a kid with a dictionary. Now, it’s too easy not to. There is literally no excuse.

CTF stands for "Capture The Flag" in the parent article. Just the security competition kind, not the FPS game kind.

You can also over use the same initialism: ATM the ATM is connected via ATM