Ancient Temple dedicated to Zeus discovered in Egypt
livescience.com
livescience.com
Were that expat / refugees from Greece? Greek wife of some Pharaoh? Greek soldiers of Roman legion? Or Phoenicians deciding to troll future archaeologists?
Egypt was ptolemaic, thus hellenised. Cleopatra is famously Greek, not Egyptian.
This is a topic I'm also ignorant of, and I'm glad to see a discussion spark up.
I disagree. There's too much noise already. This isn't StackOverflow. Wikipedia exists. People should take a moment to read up on whatever subject before they ask questions rather than wasting other people's time coming up to speed on fundamental knowledge. (It's not like ancient Egyptians and Greeks are particularly obscure, eh?)
We can have much deeper discussions if people ask informed questions.
The great thing is, we can do both. If you don't like the question that was asked, find another or ask one yourself. I fundamentally disagree with feeling people should be silenced because they are not asking the right questions.
How much research should be necessary? How much baseline knowledge is "enough" to participate? Who gets to draw that line? Thank Zeus it's not you, and instead people get to draw their own lines by engaging, or not, with other commenters on this social network.
I'm not the Spanish Inquisition. The worst I can do is downvote stupid or ignorant questions that could be easily answered by a web search and ten minutes of reading.
> I fundamentally disagree with feeling people should be silenced because they are not asking the right questions.
That's not how I feel. In fact, I would say that "feeling people should be silenced because they are not asking the right questions" is a symptom of mental or emotional illness.
What I feel is that it's disrespectful at best to lean on other people for basic knowledge rather than doing one's own homework. Even if you don't agree that "lazyweb" is disrespectful, I would still argue that it wastes a lot of time and energy. If someone asks a question that could be answered by ten minutes of googling, they are just using the forum as a interface to google, eh?
There are plenty of other places on the Internet where people can go to get basic information, Wikipedia, Stackoverflow, Google, etc... Places where it's perfectly appropriate to be one of the "lucky 10,000" ( https://xkcd.com/1053/ ).
I don't think being "uninformed and asking questions should be appreciated" here. FWIW I do think it should be tolerated, because A) that's how some people learn (however disrespectfully and lazily) and B) occasionally ignorant questions lead to very interesting and informative discussions (which is the whole point of HN as far as I'm concerned) and we cannot reliably predict which ignorant questions will lead to such discussions.
You can also state your point eloquently, as you did. All I'm doing is expressing my counterpoint to yours in this public forum.
I think where we really disagree is that I don't think there is a clearly defined baseline for "common knowledge". You say it's something like "10 minutes of googling", but I think there are other valid definitions, like the information you have on hand at the moment. i.e. is this a research library or a cocktail party (or something in between)?
There's certainly a point where it turns to trolling, but questions asked in good intent are fair game as far as I'm concerned.
Well, part of my crankiness on this point comes from the fact that if you're on HN you're on the Internet, so the "information you have on hand at the moment" is more-or-less the information you can find in "10 minutes of googling", eh?
(I'm old enough to remember the day I realized that the 'net was as fast as my hard drive. It was like an expanding horizon, a kind of vision of cyberspace, all that information only milliseconds away... It still blows my mind if I think about it for more than a few moments. Effectively infinite information in a hyper-fractal sea.)
FWIW I do agree with you that condescending to people in re: ignorant questions is unproductive (not to same lame. It's emotional junk food.)
> Cunningham is credited with the idea: "The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer."[15]
The Babylonians were extremely active in that practice and Nabonidus was famous for it.
From the conquest of Alexander onwards, Egypt was hellenized so calling the temple 'ancient' in the context of Egypt is misleading.
Yes, Egypt was a Hellenic / Greek colony for a while, but seeing “ancient” I was under the impression it was much older. Hellenic / Greek period is something I associate with “antic” and not “ancient”.