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Comment by JesseAldridge | Hacker News Reader

> 10. Don’t rush to StackOverflow. Think!

Disagree with this one. My rule is, "If you get stuck for more than 10 minutes, post to StackOverflow." I'll post my question then continue trying to solve it myself. Sometimes someone will post a good answer right away, saving me lots of time. Other times I'll end up solving my problem on my own, but I'll still learn something valuable from a comment or answer somebody posts to my question. Here's a good example of what I'm talking about:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6327396/set-time-part-of-...

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I second this opinion. My experience has been, when I post to stackoverflow, it forces me to explain the problem as clearly as possible to someone else. In doing so, I have sometimes found the solution in the code or a level of abstraction higher/lower.

Even when I post, if it's not quickly solved and gets very few hits, at least I justify the problem as being non-trivial... this is also useful in determining cost/benefit of even solving the problem (perhaps it's better to spend your time on other things).

It sounds like you value "getting things done" over "improving your skills." That's not a bad thing, but its not what the article was about.

I don't know about that. My point was that by posting to StackOverflow you can do both more efficiently. I don't see much of a point in trying to trial-and-error a problem, hunt through documentation, etc, when somebody more experienced can just tell you what to do in a few seconds. The same lesson is learned either way.

"The same lesson is learned either way."

Not at all. Learning how to find the solutions to a problem is very different from learning the solution to your specific issue. I'm not saying its always worth your time, but there is a different lesson learned when you find the solution yourself.

Yeah, that one stuck out for me. Pen and paper is a good way of solving problems in your own code. If your problem is interfacing with some external library/system/framework, which 95% of my difficult-to-fix problems seem to be, Google is often the only solution.

I'll post my question then continue trying to solve it myself

I also do that aswell. But it's a bit annoying when, within 10 minutes, my (unanswered) question is the top google result for the problem (due to high keyword relevance).

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