Just give the man the fish (i.e. just answer the question) | Hacker News Reader

Just give the man the fish (i.e. just answer the question)

blog.plover.com

27 pointscamtarn15 comments

I’ve had similar experiences with the "XY Problem". When I was learning, I’d sometimes ask weird questions questions, like "Is it safe to call React's useState setter function outside the component it was created in or from an event handler?" Instead of a direct answer, yes it's safe, I’d often just get linked to an XY Problem website and told to explain what I was actually trying to accomplish. Then get argued with about whether or not this was an anti-pattern, without ever getting the original question answered.

I had similar experience with #perl on Freenode, the people there were very helpful and I don't think anyone there intended any amusement at my expense. But getting your weird questions answered was like pulling teeth.

Now, I always try to answer the original question first, then follow up with additional explanation about why doing something might be a bad idea or lead to future inconvenience.

This sounds a bit like today's default chatgpt verbosity - you usually get an entire printout of context and side thoughts and blah, with the answer you're looking for buried somewhere in there.

It's different, ChatGPT is usually pretty good about directly answering the question. It may hallucinate entirely inaccurate answers or produce yet another listicle, but it doesn't generally assume things about your question or context. It's also not as high-latency as talking with another person over the internet, so maybe it just doesn't feel the same?

At complete face value, I think I agree. At large, we used to have the phrase, "answer, then educate" in meetings. If someone asks a question, lead with the answer. But, crucially, be ready to expand with more.

It can be frustrating when you keep seeing what seem like low effort questions. At the same time, consider the frustration on the other side when you ask a question and then got a long answer that didn't exactly answer. Further, consider that frustration in reading a question online is something you bring to the situation. You can always not respond.

The part of the whole phenonmnon that most puzzles me is how much trouble people sometimes have with “you can always not respond”.

“He's wasting my time!” No, you're _choosing_ to waste your time; make better choices.

“But I can't help myself!” That's your problen, it's not the other guy's fault.

I've even seen people say literally that they were being forced to answer newbie questions.

(Edit: for example, see the comment in this thread that characterizes question-asking as “harassment”. Annoying, perhaps. Harassment? Spare me.)

This kind of gatekeeping behavior has been around for as long as forums have. It's a power game the more experienced users play in order to lord their knowledge and power over the less experienced.

They'll always have somewhat plausible reasons for why they shouldn't just give the information, but in reality they're just being assholes in order to watch the new guy squirm. How they add the fig leaf depends on the forum.

Sounds like you've never been an expert, harassed by neophytes. For them it's eternal September. How would you handle that?

Don't you think using the word “harassed” here is begging the question? What does this “harassment” consist of exactly? Are the neophytes calling you at work? Are they camping out on your front steps? Have they kidnapped your mother-in-law and won't release her until you tell them how to remove a character from a string?

Get real. All they are doing is asking questions in an Internet discussion forum. EFnet #perl was on IRC. IRC clients have a mute function. If you feel that someone asking questions on IRC is “harassment”, use the mute function.

My big beef (and this happens on S.O. all the time) is when I ask a detailed question about how to do some very specific ABC thing, and instead of answering, the responders try to question my requirements, turn the problem into a XY problem[1], or answer something totally different.

"What are you really trying to do?"

"ABC is not how I'd solve the problem I imagine you are working on."

"I don't know how to do ABC, but I know how to do DEF..."

"Why do you want to do ABC?"

I mean, thanks for all of your unsolicited design input, I guess, but I'm pretty specifically asking for help with ABC.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem

I also hate this. In asking the question, I frequently have to boil done what can be a very lengthy set of requirements and constraints and so on into a compact minimal version to demonstrate that I want to know how to use Y to X. But then comes the 'why you doing it that way', and the answer is because I have a lengthy set of requirements and constraints that I don't want to have delve into because all I want to know is how to use Y to get X. Frustration!

It's the XY Problem Problem. What you describe is exactly why I get annoyed when someone parrots "XY Problem! XY Problem!" in response to a question.

Sometimes the answer to the question would still be useful for people who need to use it for a different problem. I wish I had saved these examples, but I've seen numerous SO answers where they don't answer the direct question because it's an "XY Problem". Then someone asks the question again, but specific to a problem where it makes sense and ... it's marked as a fucking duplicate of the one that calls it an XY Problem.

Instead of marking this as duplicate or calling it an XY Problem, how about you X out Your browser window before we have a Problem?

A tangential problem occurs in business. I'll ask someone for some document and they'll reply "I already sent that to you" (contextually this is meant to be snarky - the intent was to demean for being disorganized or whatever). No document attached. Clearly I don't have it, or I wouldn't have asked. It's such a foreign concept to me to not respond with the fucking document even if I wanted to be snarky about having already sent it. The cherry on top is when they say that they already sent it, the document was clearly authored after the time I sent the request, and they don't even bother to apologize.

Same applies for questions that display “bad” ideas. “How can I resolve this problem in a for loop… that I’m using to build a SQL query that trusts user input”.

Give the solution and the reason why it is a bad idea.

I concur. What's cool about fish is you can clone them. But you do need a de novo specimen to bootstrap the process.

Light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.

Don't teach a man how to fish and feed yourself. He's a grown man, fishing's not that hard.

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