Comment by lucideer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lucideer | Hacker News Reader

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I take your point but I have two counterpoints:

1. I've experienced both (ai paste slop & ai providing helpful context that would otherwise have been absent) but the former has been a much bigger problem than the purported benefits of the latter

2. before the advent of LLMs, I had fairly strong contrarian opinions on the latter (clueless users asking questions with no detail) that I still hold to this day. A good proxy for my opinions on this is that I think https://nohello.net/ is a crutch for undersocialised (or overworked/near-burnout OR undiagnosed autistic) engineers & should not be normalised. The origin of this sentiment is users entering a quiet IRC room & saying "hello", then leaving & not being around when someone eventually replies: in that context nohello is pragmatic, but taking it beyond that to modern high-frequency realtime chat is an antisocial overstep. Leading with the entire context of your query may have some practical benefits but they're honestly overstated in exchange for killing natural social tendencies towards human dialogue. Similarly, a non-technical user giving you zero info about a problem is an opportunity for conversation & mutual education. It's relationship-building & helps build a foundation for further interactions with this person. It was never a problem in the first place; "solving" it is just another milestone on the road toward de-socialising humanity.

Well I mean… you didn’t come into this comment section saying “hello” and then waiting for someone to say hello back before commenting, right? And you don’t do that in emails either, right?

Because that would be super out of place, and you understand that intuitively.

That’s all nohello is about. It’s not trying to say “don’t be nice and say hi”, it’s saying “batch your hello and your question in the same message please”. Asynchronous communication mediums need an asynchronous communication style, it’s not that hard.

I've generally seen it used in Slack, which can be sync/async depending on context, but most commonly sync. I've never seen it used in online forums or e.g. email so not really sure what you're getting at with your comment.

Either way it was intended as an analogy - being annoyed that a nontechnical user isn't given you everything up front (because they don't know how) is essentially just being annoyed with having to talk to somebody. The solution to that isn't something the nontechnical user should be burdened with, imo, & doing so doesn't tackle the crux if the original issue in any meaningful way.

> Slack, which can be sync/async depending on context

Right, the nohello people are saying “don’t treat initial communication on Slack as sync.” At least not until after the conversation has started. Since you don’t know if I’m available to reply yet, just batch your question and the pleasantries together. It’s a super easy idea to grasp and it really ought to be universal. Just batch the question and the pleasantries together.

> I've never seen it used in online forums or e.g. email so not really sure what you're getting at with your comment.

Right because forums and email are more generally understood to be async. Slack has a lower latency for a message to be delivered, which can enable synchronous communication (for people who can type really fast at least) but it doesn’t mean you should just assume someone is going to be able to reply at typical synchronous communication times: they may be busy, they may be talking to someone else, they may have stepped away for a second. So until the conversation is “underway”, treat it the same as email and forums. Batch the pleasantries and the question together.

> being annoyed that a nontechnical user isn't given you everything up front (because they don't know how) is essentially just being annoyed with having to talk to somebody

It has zero. Zilch. Nada. Nothing. To do with technical anything. It would be exactly as important for, I dunno, sales reps to use this communication style between themselves. Or between a clothing tailor and a client. Or between, I dunno, farmers or something. (For scenarios you could imagine them using Slack at least.) In every case, if you have something you need to ask, you can just ask it in the first message. You don’t have to wait for someone in the channel to acknowledge your presence via pleasantries first.

It’s not about being “annoyed with having to talk to someone”, it’s about not wasting people’s time. It matters in every place where people’s time is valuable. So, everywhere.

(To extend an olive branch I’ll posit some places where the hello/pleasantries style is totally acceptable… group chats among friends or family, purely social channels, anywhere where the purpose of the communication is the pleasantness of the communication itself, ie. leisure.)

> The origin of this sentiment is users entering a quiet IRC room

For me, the origin of this sentiment is the culture for certain departments at $LARGE_CORP I used to work for. People would ping me on the internal instant messaging tool to ask for help with things. Sometimes they'd take the nohello approach and just fold everything together in a single message: "Hello, hope you are having a nice day. I'm trying to do X, and I see Y instead of Z. What am I doing wrong?"

And sometimes, they... don't.

"Hello." <wait>

"How are you today?" <wait>

A conversation that could have been done in 30 seconds drags on for many minutes, and the message trickle feeds just fast enough that I can't do anything of any complexity in between the IM app's alert lighting up again. Extracting what they actually want from them feels like pulling teeth. It's a complete waste of their time and utterly disrepectful of mine.

They are there to ask a question. I know they are there to ask a question. They know they are there to ask a question. I'm happy to answer the question, when they finally get around to asking it. Just ask the bloody question, ffs.

there is a site like the OP one for this: nohello(dot)net

You are right - and this has been the case for me before, but unfortunately human resource constraints are not something most orgs optimise for, including my current one.

I would love to spend more time and talk to the people with their issues so we can come to a common understanding… but neither have the capacity for this, and now things are getting worse I think.

Maybe someday agents are good enough that we just discuss direction and implementation details, and every “developer” becomes more of an executive in a company, free to chat about more than just work, focusing on building human relationships and leaving “the tech stuff” to their agent teams…

And old geezers like us who actually know how to write ourself out of a for loop would be the premium - wizards holding forgotten knowledge, incomprehensible to mere uninitiated mortals. I wonder what distinctive dress and hair styles will we develop :-D

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