How to Ask Questions the Smart Way | Hacker News Reader

How to Ask Questions the Smart Way

catb.org

71 pointsxvirk17 comments

Open articleView on HN

You might want to look at the discussions from some of the previous occasions this has been posted. Here are just two:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2911381

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=682522

There are more:

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=ask%20questions%20the%20smart%...

More particularly, though, there are alternative documents that get a better response. I've submitted one of them here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9258946

It tries to be more aware of the "people issues" involved, and not be so "aggressively nerdish."

A smiley or two is usually OK, but colored fancy text tends to make people think you are lame. Seriously overusing smileys and color and fonts will make you come off like a giggly teenage girl, which is not generally a good idea unless you are more interested in sex than answers.

Ok then, ESR.

Reading through the Disclaimer and Introduction, it seems that a 'How To Write Reference Articles' might be in order. It's almost as if the article is a parody; the how-to that admins sometimes wish they could point their users at.

A cute, maybe self-referential bit at the end, in the section "On Not Reacting Like A Loser": When this happens, the worst thing you can do is whine about the experience...

Every time I read ESR's stuff, I get the impression that he believes all hackers think exactly like him. Even worse, I can't imagine anyone, hacker or otherwise, wanting to be around a person that was anywhere near his conception of hacker. There's some good information here, but a lot of stuff that's him pushing his belief system and claiming it represents an entire community.

The most absurd:

> Don't send e-mail in which entire paragraphs are single multiply-wrapped lines. (This makes it too difficult to reply to just part of the message.) Assume that your respondents will be reading mail on 80-character-wide text displays and set your line wrap accordingly, to something less than 80.

Sure. People still use 80 line characters. Riiiight.

I think it's more important to stress that people can't(and probobly won't)help you if you can't communicate your problem clearly, not that some person is going to rip you a one for disturbing the sancticty of their forum. I don't think very many people spend time berating stupid questions unless they like doing so, and most of those people are going to do so regardless of what you wrote.

RMS can be odd and backwards, but he basically founded FOSS, the community, and done a lot for the world. I really can't think of much ESR has really done for FOSS, and mostly just makes hacking look bad by claiming to hackers. If only he didn't come up so high on a google search for hacker.

Most people who need to read this never will. It's too long.

I think it would be better to have them remember the first four of the the 5 w's: who, what, where, when.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Ws

Then perhaps only after that, ask why. Perhaps 5 times:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_Whys

I do all of this at the start of the day. But after unblocking myself multiple times, I just don't have the juice to make sure I'm not asking a stupid question.

Aren't you worried about getting a lousy response?

Yes? No? Maybe?

I also expect my co workers to both ask and forgive a simple question once in a while. Otherwise it might be time to seek a friendlier work environment.

There's a pretty big difference between asking co-workers and asking on a public mailing list or chat room.

It's completely reasonable, even expected, to ask your co-workers dumb questions when you get stuck. If they can tell you in ten seconds and it would take you five minutes (and you're not interrupting them in the middle of something) then why not ask? It's a more efficient use of your team's time.

But on a public forum, where you're talking to people who are volunteering your time, and you get a wider audience, it's a different story. Asking before you've done all your homework is abusing the time of the other people, both because they give that time freely, and because using 10 seconds each from 50 different people is more than using 5 minutes of your own time. Here, if you don't have the time or motivation to sit down and work through the question properly, wait to ask it until you do.

You know, I used to be subscribed to a technical mailing list, around the time that .NET first came out. One guy started abusing the mailing list like mad. Asking extremely simple questions that he could have answered with a brief skim of the published documentation, or a web search.

After awhile, people started to berate him for this behavior. He apologized, but kept doing it. He kept getting answers, and kept learning.

Last I heard, he'd gone on to be a team lead, then run his own, successful company. He didn't let fear of public annoyance or seeming stupid hinder his own progress.

I'm not saying everyone should gleefully annoy others, but I've met far, far too many technical people who spend more time on their anxiety than they spend on actually learning and doing. You have to find a balance, and obsessing over the theoretical time expended across a group of people is probably not productive.

And that's the difference between management and us worker bees!

I won't deny that selfishness and abuse can work. That doesn't mean it's a good thing, or that I'll encourage it in any way.

If you're doing things right then there won't be any anxiety when asking your question in public, because you'll have done all you can on your own and be in a position to ask intelligently. If you're abusing other people's time because you can't be arsed to put in effort on your own, you should feel anxious about it.

you'll have done all you can on your own

But you'll never reach that point.

If you're abusing other people's time because you can't be arsed to put in effort on your own, you should feel anxious about it.

Why? What's the better thing they have to spend time on, and why aren't they already spending time there? You're talking about people who spend time on some forum because that is, essentially, a hobby for them. You're not "wasting" someone's time when their time has no particular value in the first place.

People who offer free help typically do so because they like to work on interesting problems, not act as an intermediary between a lazy programmer and the documentation.

You're assuming that all kinds of help are equal in the eyes of someone who practices this "hobby," and that's simply not true. It's basically the equivalent of, "You just waste your time in that soup kitchen anyway, why not come cook me a meal in my mansion instead?"

People who offer free help typically do so because they like to work on interesting problems

That's pure conjecture on your part. I rarely see newbies asking for help on interesting problems, yet I see plenty of people willing to answer their questions.

It's basically the equivalent of, "You just waste your time in that soup kitchen anyway, why not come cook me a meal in my mansion instead?"

No it isn't. It's the equivalent of, "you just waste your time in that soup kitchen anyway, why not allow me to come to the soup kitchen as well?"

Well glad I read this. What first came to mond was that ontologically framing a technical question is difficult. You can't ever seem to deduce a decent level of aptitude unless you become part of a comminity (working on it). So the first part, don't be stupid, well being ignorant pretty much leads me to believe I am stupid. Probably should prepend a statement with what I don't know. But spmetimes I have stupid questiin, just yesterday, I wasnt able to get why my `src` attribute was locating a local file. Simply, it was all due to a `/`. Talk about idiot. Secondly, the subject line, is it reasonable to assume that this can be a skill transposable from what social media marketers have been known to do? :p Everyone who is passionate about a facet of study should make succinct attention grabbing subject lines. Thanks for the reinforcement!! lastly it was revealing to get a better sense of how it's better to explain how you're stuck by phrasing the process you're taking to meet a goal. Thanks for letting me comment.

Skimming this just makes me sigh.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com