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Comment by ArloL | Hacker News Reader

I can recommend https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html

It's interesting to compare that guide "How to report bugs effectively with ESR's "How to ask questions the smart way" [1]. They both cover similar material, but the styles are extremely different. The latter is rather hostile to the reader: "If ... then you are one of the idiots we are talking about." "If you decide to come to us for help, you don't want to be one of the losers." It's also heavy on "us vs them", how we are experts and you need to treat us properly.

You know, it just occurred to me that the "How to ask questions" document is targeted as much at hackers and how they should maintain their "standards" than at users who are asking questions. For example, the document has approving examples of "logically impeccable but dismissive" hacker answers; these make more sense as instructions on how a hacker should respond than as something relevant to a user.

I guess my point is that I had read the "How to ask questions" document for decades and viewed it as an objective document, not realizing how arrogant and "gatekeeping" it is.

[1] http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

I agree, that "how to ask questions the smart way" article always left a bad taste in my mouth. Perhaps there should be a "how to answer questions" companion piece.

esr seems to have a pretty big ego, just based on his writings. (e.g. at one point he declared that he can tell if someone is smart or not just by looking at them)

Strange, he's old enough to have watched the first TV run of Lt. Columbo ...

He actually at one point wrote that he was a reincarnation of the god Pan, so he has/had a very literal god complex, too. It's such a shame that he was the person to interpret hacker culture for those of us in the future, because he's hardly a good lens

I don’t disagree with your sentiment, but that wasn’t meant as a literal “I am the god Pan” — it was figurative, hyperbole. At least, that’s my recollection from when I read it a couple of decades ago.

I've read it more recently, and he did mean it literally. I've cut this together because it's far too long to quote en masse, but the full thing is at [1]

    Desperate for something to feed my jones, I snaffled my other sister's 
    abandoned flute. And wow! I was a natural...immediately better with it than 
    with the guitar I'd been hacking at for months. [...] This was delightful but 
    mystifying. All I'd had to do was learn to play a scale, and this amazing river 
    of music poured forth with barely an effort on my part. It seemed almost as 
    though my hands and lips had always known what to do, had been waiting for me 
    to pick up the flute. [...] I got these stunning rushes of pure timeless joy, 
    when my consciousness seemed to expand outwards from the limits of my skin to 
    fill the universe and I could no longer tell whether I was playing the music or 
    the music was playing me. Nor were these effects just going on inside my own 
    head. [...] I was walking home, idly puzzling over this peculiar incident, and 
    damn near fell over when I finally got it. That girl had been trying to cope 
    with a theophany; she had looked at me and seen a god. A particular god. And I 
    knew, suddenly, with utter shattering certainty, which one it was. And that it 
    probably was not the first time I had inadvertently triggered such an 
    experience, and would almost certainly not be the last. [...] Not that I took 
    any of it seriously as a description of the real world. It was an intellectual 
    chew-toy, perhaps at best a way of understanding the pathologies that prevented 
    human beings from living the infinitely more desirable life of reason and 
    science. Until I realized, finally, belatedly, what had been happening to me. 
    Until the Great God Pan reached out of my hindbrain and thundered "YOU!". And 
    his gift is music and his chosen instruments the pipes and flutes. And his, too 
    the power of joy; magic so strong that when it flowed out of me, even before I 
    knew what I was doing, it amazed people into awe and incoherence and poetry. 
    [...] (And, oh, yes. The first time I handled a set of pan-pipes I could play 
    them. Fluently. Effortlessly. And knew I could before I touched them.)

[1]: http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/dancing.html

The https://WhatHaveYouTried.com guy backtracked after a few years in the linked follow-up article, ashamed of giving the geek world another way to gatekeep and tell unworthy people to get lost.

Gemmell made a mistake in assuming the shame and guilt of the people who abused his article. The article is just a tool. We should hold the abusers responsible for their gatekeeping and telling others to get lost.

Thank you! I’m definitely guilty of mongoose-ing and diagnosing in my bug reports so this is very helpful!

> diagnosing in my bug reports

It's probably fine, if you put it in a separate section, clearing indicating that you are guessing.

At work we have an optional "diagnostic" section in our ticket template, mainly intended for the team, but I'd be happy to see a user try to fill it. At worse it's harmless, at best it gives the actual reason, somewhere in the middle it can give ideas even if it is wrong.

> At worse it's harmless

I wish. It happens very often that such speculation derails the whole investigation. It really shouldn’t, but people are people. If the title of the bug report says that the foobar is broken it might take weeks until someone realises that they were wrong and actually the problem is in the frobnicator which feeds the foobar.

Especially when because of this we assing the investigation to the wrong team. The foobar people don’t want to appear as if they don’t take the bug seriously, but all they check everything looks normal on their side.

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