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auxiliarymooseyesterday at 10:32 PM1 replyview on HN

Sure, but if you are sharing with a general audience (where people aren't necessarily coming from your own domain) it's a good idea to make the writing accessible.

My first thought would have been Band-Pass Filter, which is also a filter potentially related to computer systems.

I work in an industry with a lot of Three-Letter Acronyms (TLAs) and eXtended Three-Letter Acronyms (XTLAs) (sometimes known as Four-Letter Acronyms (FLAs)), and there they are often overloaded in their meanings. So in my experience, being clear about the definition is helpful to readers so they can immediately understand the document without having to triangulate meanings from the rest of the document.


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hnlmorgyesterday at 10:38 PM

But again, this isn't intended for a general audience.

Anyone who might need this would already know what BPF is. And anyone who isn't familiar with the term BPF in this context wouldn't be the target audience for this.

It's also worth noting that BPF isn't ever referred to in it's non-acronym form. Literally no-one in the field calls this "Berkeley Packet Filter". Just like nobody calls PHP "PHP: Hypertext Processor" (or whatever backronym they've decided on this week), nor SQL as Structured Query Language. The name for this technically literally is just referred to as "BPF".

So while I agree with your point in general -- it's not really a fair complaint in this specific occurrence.

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