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Comment by conroe64 | Hacker News Reader

The problem with your philosophy in the age of the internet is that the question and answer stays up for others to use a search engine to find for themselves. In the style of the Chinese proverb, "Give a man a fish on the internet, and you will be giving a million men a fish"

By requiring everyone to deeply understand every conceivable task they might need to do, you are limiting the amount of tasks a person can do in a certain amount of time.

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Instructions on how to use NSURLConnection are already on the internet in the Cocoa docs, Cocoa tutorials and Cocoa sample code. Anyone who has the desire to look for them can already find them. So in this case, "teaching him to fish" would be to encourage him to look up the already existing information on his own and spend the time to actually understand what it means. Learning how to do this will make him a better programmer and save him countless hours of time in the future.

Someone doesn't usually need to "deeply understand" an API in order to use it. But if they can't even create the simplest working code that uses the API, then they don't understand it at all. And if someone's just going to throw around someone else's code without even understanding how it works, they probably aren't writing code that's very useful anyway.

What if someone is rapid prototyping? Maybe they just need to perform some one-off task. Maybe they're an entrepreneur and have other things to do then learn an api when then just need to do one simple thing.

The guy probably doesn't speak English very well, and maybe resources and documentation in his native language is lacking, so he doesn't know where to look. Besides, him asking the question and getting an answer can help many more people who need to do the same thing.

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