Hacker News Reader

Comment by busy_m | Hacker News Reader

How To Ask Questions The Smart Way Eric Steven Raymond

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

It's related, certainly, as are mine, Charles Cazabon's, and Mark-Jason Dominus's. But it's not addressing what the headlined page is, which is largely a thing that is a behavioural issue on interactive real-time chat fora.

* https://jdebp.uk/FGA/problem-report-standard-litany.html

* https://jdebp.uk/FGA/questions-with-yes-or-no-answers.html

* https://pyropus.ca./personal/writings/12-steps-to-qmail-list...

* https://jdebp.uk/FGA/put-down-the-chocolate-covered-banana.h...

* https://perl.plover.com/Questions4.html

None of us really cover the case where someone is employing a human version of the Nagle slow start algorithm. (-:

This section should be required reading to get on the internet http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html#not_losin...

The scenario described there would be considered harassment under modern Codes of Conduct. Describing the reaction as behaving like a "loser" is likely offensive itself.

While you're likely right in describing the status quo, it's unfortunate that it has come to that.

The one thing that's really objectionable in that section is the last part about people who attack or flame without apparent reason. Such people should be called out by other community members in the same way ESR describes for newcomers in the first part of the section.

Agreed. The excessive, unprovoked flaming is IMO a case in which people should intervene, as per earlier paragraph, "Community standards do not maintain themselves: They're maintained by people actively applying them, visibly, in public." Other than that, spot on.

That's because that was not a required reading and the on-line communities (particularly around OSS) got overrun by people exhibiting the behavior in question.

I wonder how this comes across to younger members of the hacker or scientific dev communities today. The tone, while perhaps aligned with older norms of bluntness, might now be seen as needlessly harsh or even toxic by some. It raises the question of how values around communication and community have shifted over time.

I'm 27, and it resonates. Doesn't seem like he's encouraging rude responses to bad online discourse etiquette, he's just saying those responses are likely to happen unless you follow this very reasonable set of rules.

These topics are so important for junior engineers to grasp, because not only is it helpful for interacting with humans, providing the additional context to LLM's will get you much, much better answers.

I wish there was a good source of this information from a less polarizing figure.

People can choose not to be polarized by figures, especially where the controversies are firmly offtopic.

That being said I do find the tone of this guide somewhat annoying and condescending at times. It could use some editing to make it more impersonal and to the point. Justifications and explanations could be attached separately and most people won't read them anyway. When people ask poor questions, it's often precisely because they don't read longform text for some reason.

The unfortunate paradox is that the people who should understand and apply this won't bother reading it. For the rest of us, this is just common sense. So I don't think this document serves any purpose.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com