Hacker News Reader

Comment by m_myers | Hacker News Reader

That happens because of the "old shoe or glass bottle?" question.[1] When newbies (or even oldbies) ask how to do something, often the real question could be solved much better by taking a completely different tack. This has also been called the "XY problem".[2]

The best answers would ideally answer the question as asked (or explain why it can't be done) and also show a still more excellent way.

[1]: http://weblogs.asp.net/alex_papadimoulis/archive/2005/05/25/...

[2]: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/66377/what-is-the-xy...

View on HN

The best answers would ideally answer the question as asked (or explain why it can't be done) and also show a still more excellent way.

There are times I've asked how to do X, and for various reasons X is really, no kidding, exactly what wanted to do. Still, numerous people would question my desire to do X, turning the discussion into an inquisition on motives or skill comprehension.

I'm sure in some odd way they all meant well, but they were spending a lot of cycles not actually answering the question.

In those cases the better strategy is to, under some crafty pretext, bluntly assert that X cannot be done.

This will evoke numerous rebuttals with full details on just how incredibly wrong and foolish that claim is.

Both cases play to a trait all too common to many people on discussion boards: replying to questions with the primary goal of showing that you are, in fact, smarter than everyone else.

I've seen this argument often enough, especially on IRC, where people smugly assume that there must be a flaw in what the person asking a question is trying to do. Problem with this is, a lot of times, I just want the answer to a direct question, which I can't find easily in the docs (or maybe it's not documented).

Only, more often than not, people think they always know better and everyone asking a question must either not know the proper way of doing things, and why in the world are they trying to do <question_asked> ? This then leads to a debate about me trying to solve problem X which requires me to solve Y which requires me to do Z, which led me to ask the question. At the end, I get the exact answer I was looking for, but that took longer than necessary because other were looking at it the same way you described, that it's the XY problem. I can't help but feel that it mostly just wasted my time a lot.

You don't always have to know the entire story behind the code to give straight answers, is all I'm saying. :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com