Hacker News isn't really intended for asking questions like this (see the Guidelines link at the bottom of the page - this post doesn't meet the "interesting" condition). Have you tried posting on StackOverflow?
Isn't that what /ask is for?
The answer to one person's Python programming problem is not of general interest. If everyone posted questions like that, nobody would want to read HN anymore.
I agree, CaiGengYang's questions are pretty basic, but this question has one comment which answers it and an entire subthread discussing its relevance. Simply allowing it to be addressed by whomever wanted to address it then leaving it alone to sink into the mire would have caused less of a disturbance to HN than trying to enforce a cultural norm that not everyone agrees on.
>If everyone posted questions like that, nobody would want to read HN anymore.
Well, everyone already can post questions like that, yet almost no one does. I don't really see a credible slippery slope argument here.
We are guests of ycombinator.com. They get to decide. We have influence, but there's no requirement for universal consensus.
> yet almost no one does
That's because those that do get flagged, and the accounts get banned.
I suspect that if they weren't there still wouldn't be enough to be more than a minor nuisance. There doesn't seem to be an incoming tide of terrible questions to stem to begin with, although I could of course be wrong.
And even if there were, it's not as if many of the questions in that section are that high quality anyway. Should I use this or that language? What is the best "X"? And a few that aren't even questions but somehow wound up on the list.
That is, we know that HN accounts are banned for posting too many low quality links. We know that StackOverflow has banned this user's account for having low quality questions, which means that SO considers this practice to be enough of a nuisance to ban its practice. I see no reason to believe the same couldn't hold here.
We can also review this user's history, and see about one low quality question every two to three days. One of them was on how to "cd into a directory". (See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10278804 .) I don't even see point of this post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10021045 in an HN context.
Those are far below the water cooler level 'What is the best "X"?' questions.
We can review the 65 available "ask" questions and see this user is the only one with two submissions.
We also see that detaro already cautioned this user that "HN isn't the best place to ask for this kind of advice better find a community specialized in the environment you want to use and look there + ask specific questions on Stack Overflow." - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9990406 . As you can see from the user's comment earlier ("Forced to post here on Hackernews"), the user hasn't understood detaro's comment at all.
All of these are signs that this user's practices are already a nuisance, and the user isn't trying to be aware of HN norms.
If there were a ton of flagged and banned questions, I would think I would see them, since I have showdead on. Maybe they just don't appear on /ask, though.
>At what point would you start cautioning people that their questions and comments aren't a good fit for HN, and they should look elsewhere for answers?
I wouldn't, unless they're being offensive, obscene or obviously trolling. I would let unpopular posts remain unpopular and sink to the bottom of the list, which is what's supposed to happen to them.
SO is already infamous for closing questions many people would find perfectly reasonable or interesting, because they don't meet their rather stringent and yet arbitrary requirements. They're not a discussion forum, though, and they only want specific questions with canonical answers to present to the Googlebot. Hacker News comments don't exist to generate SEO for YCombinator so I see no need to be as aggressive with "quality control" here.
If you don't like SO, maybe try a python/Django forum somewhere?