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Comment by acjohnson55 | Hacker News Reader

To be fair, asking on SO isn't all that difficult. It just requires a little patience, to read and understand the guidelines, and to craft a high quality question. Unfortunately, when someone's blocked on some tricky programming task they've already been banging their head against for hours, it's probably a time when patience is in short supply. But, that patience is often rewarded with a solution.

I'm amused to see programmers.stackexchange get a positive call out, because it used to be the paragon of moderator intolerance. Perhaps that culture has changed for the better.

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> To be fair, asking on SO isn't all that difficult. It just requires a little patience, to read and understand the guidelines, and to craft a high quality question.

This is what is troublesome. There are far too many questions with many impassioned comments that suggests they were closed and reopened multiple times. It seems the interpretation of rules is done too stringently and arbitrarily for most people's liking.

> I'm amused to see programmers.stackexchange get a positive call out, because it used to be the paragon of moderator intolerance. Perhaps that culture has changed for the better.

I had a nice run there as a participant compared to stack. Even as a lurker, I don't find that many questions meted out the stack treatment.

I agree, I actually really like that there's a high bar for asking. It makes it more likely someone will be able to fully understand and give a good answer. And I would say probably 50% of the questions I start typing on SO, I actually figure out on my own by the time I've written it. I'll notice that I've glossed over the details of one part so I'll stop to dig in further and sure enough I had been making a bad assumption and fixing it leads to the answer.

> And I would say probably 50% of the questions I start typing on SO, I actually figure out on my own by the time I've written it.

The live search for related Q&As has been particularly useful for me for this. Do I sometimes feel bad I did all that typing first? Sure. But that's vastly outweighed by happiness at getting a solution.

The big problem with programmers.se is that the scope is woefully misunderstood. It started out as that "opinions" site everyone thinks would be such a great idea, and within days it became apparent that the same folks who like discussion questions in theory have their own hangups and prejudices in practice, and the whole thing was turning into a never-ending flame-war.

So by the time it was named "Programmers", the decision was already made to refocus the site on something a bit more useful: a site not about programming but rather dedicated to sharing information relevant to the profession of software development. However, actually communicating that effectively turned out to be a headache and a half.

6 years later, we're looking at just renaming the site again so as to avoid this endlessly painful confusion: http://meta.programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/8204/wha...

I don't agree that asking questions is easy, or limited only by quality barriers. That may be true for adhering to the rules, but it's not enough to get accurate answers.

If you have a problem which is at all subtle or complicated, it's frequently necessary to open by saying "I know about X and Y, that's not what I'm asking!" Otherwise, the fastest guns in the west will see the header, skim a few lines, and answer "Just do X!" Or, of course, mark as trivial because "X" is in the documentation.

I've found a lot of these questions when trying to grapple with broken APIs. Someone will go "I want to do this thing, but the method call to do it is broken in these specific ways", and get answered with "Just use the method call in the API, dummy!" Often, it comes with a downvote and they never get another answer.

You can work around this, I succeeded with "This method call is broken in this way, so how do I work around that?" But it's far from obvious, and it means learning to not just write good questions but preempt systematically bad answers.

> I don't agree that asking questions is easy, or limited only by quality barriers.

I didn't say either of those things, and I don't think either one is true :)

Asking quality questions is a skill, whether that's on SO or elsewhere. I'm just saying it's not rocket science.

Perhaps a better workflow could improve things. Almost like a wizard.

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