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Comment by maxerickson | Hacker News Reader

A rebuttal:

It's okay to ask 'dumb' questions. People that get upset about them are jerks.

Very few people have a problem with so-called dumb questions, especially from someone who genuinely wants to learn. They take issue with low-effort, unresearched questions, and those from people with no interest in the subject, who just want someone else to do their research (or homework) for them.

There's no need to know where you should start before asking a question.

Continuing to expect spoon feeding quickly gets tiresome, but deciding just based on a sentence or two that a question is low effort or not is usually not the way to go.

True. If they can discern a newbie question from a idle do-my-homework for me question, people tend to be very good. I grant there are some exceptions, but few (though irritating).

I would expect them to ignore the question in that case. That isn't too much to ask in my opinion.

"Dumb" questions are fine, but they're completely different than lazy questions, which are often misidentified as dumb questions.

A dumb question might be something like "I can't log into my server with `ssh server.com`. It keeps rejecting my password when it asks for `user@server.com's password`. What's going on?" The user might not know to explicitly add `admin@` on the command line.

A lazy question is "My server that I bought doesn't let me log in!" Come on, you need to address 1) what result you expect, 2) the exact steps you take, 3) the result you obtain instead, and 4) any other details a non-omniscient being might need to answer your question.

The first one is not really a dumb question. They may have setup their .ssh/config so that the user is automatically taken from that file and password being rejected may simply be due to some other reasons (such as disabling password based login at the server). This is why people should not assume something or make a judgment.

The second question is more because of a misunderstanding about the particular platform. These type of lead-in questions are common in tech support and even many forums where they expect someone will get back to them with more specific questions (they may not have an idea what sort of information will be relevant). A simple comment clarifying this will not only prevent confusion due to arbitrarily closing the question but will help them make a better question.

The second question could be coming from someone that simply doesn't have enough context to lead off with that information.

Like maybe they don't realize there are different ways of interacting with servers. I wouldn't expend a great deal of effort helping someone asking a question like that, but I hope I wouldn't make a bunch of a priori assumptions about why they were asking that question instead of another one.

The second question simply fails to describe what actions the user is taking. In this case, it's not a matter of not knowing about methods of interacting with servers. It's a matter of leaving out steps, such as typing `ssh`, due to lack of their effort.

If I asked a question about something I have no idea about, such as training a sheepdog, I'd still be able to put forth effort into describing the steps I take to someone, so they know what I tried to do. The question "The dog isn't learning this command!" isn't bad because of my lack of sheepdog knowledge, it's bad because it omits tons of important information about my situation. Therefore it's a lazy question.

Corollary: There aren't 'dumb' questions, only 'dumb' people.

If there are only dumb people, and no dumb questions, the implication is that dumb people either ask smart questions or no questions at all. I don't believe the latter is actually the case, and the former seems contradictory. Thus I conclude that when dumb people ask questions those questions will tend towards being dumb, hence: How is babby formed?

It is the dumb person who doesn’t ask questions and do anything about them being dumb.

It is funny that you can also learn things like that without questions, but how could it be any other way? We are all born dumb!

I prefer to maintain that there are no stupid questions, only stupid answers.

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