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Comment by raylu | Hacker News Reader

I suspect that a lot of that context (or "buy-in") was missing, as it was when you explained it the first time here, which is why you got the response you did.

A lot of people show up in programming communities asking for help with their intro programming homework. Once you see a few dozen of those, it's understandable if your knee-jerk reaction is at least somewhat insulting.

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Agreed, context is everything. In the context of a poor guy with just this dead-simple programming question going to someone for help, being shut down hard is rude and unfair. In the context of a small community of programmers who are barraged constantly by novice questions, asking for evidence of significant amounts of effort on the part of the question-asker is the only way to avoid chaos.

I'm almost certain that this anecdote arises purely due to the structure of the forum in which the question was asked, and has very little bearing on the vitriol and malice (or lack thereof) present in the denizens of #C.

I think I had told them that I narrowed it down to that line, as they specifically offered to help me debug it. I said I got the error pinned down to line X, but still... It might have been a fluke, though, as I think there was one person who instigated this whole bad treatment. Apparently he was well-known for it, because someone said something like "heh, hell will freeze over before X will just hand out a solution".

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