Ask HN: How to Ask a Question Properly? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How to Ask a Question Properly?

7 pointsstefanos829 comments

I have been thinking about this for a long time now and I wanted to ask everyone in here.

When you want to ask a question, how do you approach, for instance the HN community?

As a foreigner with mediocre level of English language, I cannot ask any question the right way, if that makes any sense to you.

How should I approach any topic I'm interested in, without causing any problem or offend anyone; what should be the way of asking a question without becoming misunderstood?

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I feel the same way in the second language I speak sometimes. I can't imagine comfortably participating on the equivalent of HN in that language. So good going, at least you are asking this question.

I think a simple framework for this could be: Beginning, middle, end...

In the beginning I'd address HN. About half the community seems to respond less negative-emotionally if they are addressed in a friendly way up front, as if they are a contributor to a community. "Hey everyone in the HN community, thanks for being here, I am really learning a lot from HN."

Middle, "Asking in case anybody knows: What's a good new-ish underdog programming language with really good docs that have clear examples? I'd like to expand my horizons a bit and would appreciate any names you can share."

At the end, IMO it clearly helps to say, "English is not my first language, thanks for your patience".

This should cover your informational and social norms, which can cause issues if they are non-existent or if the post is too informational.

You will be misunderstood, but even more than that you will be scrutinized. People who are very logical often like to ask questions about others' questions. So I think you should just expect people to ask you to clarify, even though your English is probably fine. Hope that makes sense.

Good luck, good q, and I'm sure you'll do fine.

Thank you for the valuable feedback; much appreciated :+1

This is my go-to reference for how to ask a question: http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

Of course, if I have a close relationship with someone or the question is trivial, I don't go through every step.

It's funny you mention that reference, because while I like it, I was interested to note that it doesn't go into other areas that happen to be within the sphere of my own career specialty, areas which I have learned can be relevant in question-asking.

Specifically, Eric's writeup is subject-focused (what YOU do / don't do in order to get a result) rather than object-focused (what to keep in mind based on how people answer; how they are meeting their own subjective needs by answering in specific ways; why that's important to you and relevant to getting good answers, etc.).

This in turn is helpful to know about, because it can help you focus on community patterns and discover important blind spots in group cognition.

As an example, you could end up discovering that your question is effectively unanswerable for your own intents, and implies a broken system of another sort, despite your having received hundreds of passionate and detailed replies to the original question.

IMO there are probably so many perspectives on communication via questions that it's impossible to address them all with a simple framework, but it's kind of a fascinating thing to try, and a neat topic to learn about.

Thank you for sharing this link by Eric.

Cathedral and the Bazaar changed my perspective about Free and Open Source development in general.

Also https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html

You just did it, and it was perfectly well-received by the community.

You approached a topic you are interested in, without causing any problem or offending anyone, and the question was not misunderstood.

Using this evidence, chances are you are already _sufficiently good_ at asking questions properly.

I agree with this too!

I think I know how you feel. I'm not a native speaker too, and for a long time I was not confident on how to properly communicate what I wanted.

Regarding HN, I think, you want to cut the fluff (contrary to what others said in the comments). You ask a question to get an answer. Here are two aspects of it:

- If you ask something, I expect you to have put at least some time and thought into your question beforehand. This could be a quick google search or go to Algolia [1] and see if someone asked a similar question before you. If you find something, but the question remains, attach it to your post. Others then don't have to start over again and can give you a better answer (or follow-up question).

- If you want to show good will (without clustering your post with disclaimers), actively avoid absolutisms. See what I did in my fist sentence in this comment: I can not possibly know how you feel. But I can tell you that I think I know it. I'm taking a step back and communicate that I might be wrong, but this is how I feel/ observe/ think/ reason/ etc. - you get it.

Edit: For example [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

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