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Comment by potatolicious | Hacker News Reader

They're not the same thing. An "ask" is the item being requested, it is not the question.

"Can I have a cookie?" is a question, the cookie is the ask. An ask is implicitly tangible or substantial.

"What's the weather today?" is a question, it doesn't really have an ask, since the item being demanded is trivial. It exists in business jargon specifically to separate minor requests "can you send me that file?" from substantial exchanges "can we update this report to include the last two quarters?"

An "ask" is more "demand" than "question", without the negative connotations of demanding things from people.

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Alright, so 'ask' here is just synonym for 'request', then.

Looked it up... most dictionaries don't have a noun form of 'ask', though macmillan has a separate page just for it. (It's also a Scandinavian myth about the first man made from an ash tree, but that's probably not the intended use from the OP)

I think this is the simplest definition. Swap in "request" anywhere you see "ask" (the noun) and you'll keep the exact same meaning.

As I said before, the word is more specific than "request". Yes, it's an ugly term, but no, you can't make it go away by pretending it means something different.

I can believe you, but, having read your previous comments in this thread, I'm still not seeing the distinction between ask and request.

An ask is the subject/object of a request.

If you were to request a cookie, you would say "Can I have a cookie?". The entire question is the request, where "cookie" is the ask.

If that were the case, to 'make an ask' would in this case mean to make the cookie, which it doesn't.

It seems like 'ask' is a verb, not a noun - in which case it is synonymous with 'request'.

People seem to be arguing that it's a 'more specific' form of 'request', but I can't really see how you could make a nonspecific request.

Edit: Ha! I even confused myself... 'Ask' here is indeed a noun - like 'request' when used as a noun - but it still seems to refer to be entire request, not just the object (which is the point I was trying to make).

Yeah, it does seem a bit weird to "make an ask" if the ask is the object.

As to the "more specific" bit, I think people mean it has a slightly different meaning than a request.

"Request" is a pretty broad term. An ask is focused, specific, planned. It's something more like "negotiating point" or "initial position" or "requirement" or "demand".

Google "define:request" yields this for a noun: "an act of asking politely or formally for something."

An ask isn't "an act of asking", it's the object/subject of a request. So it's not really a synonym, IMO.

This is incoherent. Is the ask the item being requested, or is it a demand? Neither of these are how it's used in the article, either.

Which mostly goes to show that it's not a word with a definition as we think of it -- it's a word that displays familiarity with the tech scene and is used as a social signal.

It's not incoherent, it's an idiom.

My project is a paradigm too.

http://dilbert.com/fast/1991-11-03/

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