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Comment by bxr | Hacker News Reader

>If you want to piss off the most knowledgeable person in the room; simply ask if you can ask a question.

Don't forget the corollary: Never ask if you can ask a question on channels where they don't like answering questions. You should know that its not a channel for asking questions. If you are brazen enough to ask a question expect the following answer:

    <a> How do I XY my Z?
    <@b> !google XY a Z
    <bot> http://lmgtfy.com/?q=XY+a+Z

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Well, the point is you need to try to figure it out for yourself before you ask someone else directly for their attention. If someone simply points you to google, you should be able to tell them why that isn't an acceptable response to your question.

    <a> That won't help my XY is W and V. What can I do?
    *b has changed the channel topic to: Don't ask questions.

In my experience, whenever someone has proven to have sufficiently searched out for an answer themselves, this doesn't come up.

That said, my primary experience in help rooms is in ##java on freenode.

This is exactly what happens on the official Arch Linux IRC channel. The entire process stinks of condescension and probably drives quite a few people away from the channel (including myself).

What I found was that very few people on the distro channels have original knowledge - they just run some bot commands or link to some page they Googled for. If I ask a question that hasn't been answered before, nobody replies. That's why I usually end up going to the upstream channel instead, where they actually know what they're doing and are willing to help, even if that means you have to wait 12+ hours for a reply.

haha is happens as well, thats why I wrote that note to experts, cultivate a community and try to learn from others.

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