Here I want to ask a question: did any of the HN users ever get helped by anything put into the "Help" menu in an application?
In software with big, deep menus with an unclear logic/organization, I've used this quite a bit.
She was just ready to google a solution, as I asked for using help menu, which indeed helped her. She used it before but typed in "remove" instead of "delete" (or vice versa, in reality it was entfernen vs löschen)
I was typing a response in this post and I wanted to italicize a word. I know different systems have different ways to do that, so I just guessed and tried <i></i> like in HTML, which I learned in fourth or fifth grade. No go, which didn't surprise me because nothing takes HTML input anymore. So I tried [i][/i] as if typing a message on a phpBB forum. No go. So I clicked to edit the post again and just surrounded the word with /slashes/ to indicate it was italicized in my mind. And then I noticed the little tiny help link next to the text box and clicked on it. Help, to use italics? Lame. But it worked (see what I did there?). Here is something interesting: that help link doesn't show up for an initial comment, only if you go in to edit it.
I do recall using it a long time ago, say, 15 years earlier to, to find my way around Excel and Word, but not in the last decade.
Especially "Check for updates", which is the worst thing you can do to a user who is looking for help.
But normally help doesn't help - it asks me for a foo-binding-string, I go to the help to see what one should look like for this program, the help says nothing more than "enter your foo-binding-string here".
It's basically spotlight/windows search for menu items.
Having said that - the HN audience is most likely a massively different audience to the sort of people that would ordinarily rely on the Help button - people like Joe.
I now use man pages and google mostly.