alt Hacker NewsEasy, if that’s how you feel, skip the comment and don’t engage.
Telling people who want to have that participation and discussion to “RTFM” is not a good response.
Often you’ll come across the authors on these posts that can shed direct, 1st person evidence, of what we’re talking about.
So please, when someone asks “what is that?” Don’t respond with “RTFM”.
Asking "what is this?" is fine. Treating "I was unfamiliar with this" as evidence that the post is deficient is not.
HN already assumes a baseline of technical literacy. When something falls outside that baseline, the usual move is to ask for context or links, not to reframe personal unfamiliarity as an author failure.
So please, don’t normalize treating "I don’t know this yet" as a failure of the post.