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Comment by umvi | Hacker News Reader

> Another user actually did go through my code and the solution was trivial.

The solution may have been trivial - maybe even a single character fix, but this smells like you posted a wall of code and wanted someone to go through it with a comb for you. You likely got downvoted because you didn't provide a minimal verifiable example and instead posted way more code than was necessary to produce the bug.

If you post anything more than a few lines of code, you are probably providing TMI and need to spend more effort distilling down the problem. 9 out of 10 times, you'll find the root of the problem yourself during this distillation process, especially if the problem is trivial.

Then again, this is wild speculation, but I see this a lot when I am helping newbies.

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The problem with being a beginner is that you probably don't know what those few lines are that make the most difference. Mods haughtily saying "You're doing it wrong; come back when you can do it right; here's a wall of meta-documentation that only tells you why your post sucks and doesn't help you figure out what part of your code matters" doesn't help anybody. If the bar to getting your question answered is to figure out on their own with no actual guidance how to ask the question perfectly, then you've already eliminated the 1/2 of developers out there who need the most help.

I'll never understand the mentality of people who put themselves in a position of answering questions, but are genuinely perturbed by the prospect of helping people with basic/misguided/imperfectly conceived questions. If they're the kind of person who could just read the documentation and solve all but the most complex of their own problems, congratulations. They should feel free to set that as the bar for anybody you hire or collaborate with. Or even set it as the bar for questions that they answer, but don't penalize people who are coming to a Q&A for not living up to those standards. If you're of that disposition on such a site, you're probably more interested in stroking your ego and watching some arbitrary points accumulate rather than actually helping people. There are lots of hobbies in development that don't expose you to beginner questions: go join a more esoteric users group, or contribute to an open source project without looking in the users forums/chat channels. Just do something that doesn't involve alienating inexperience developers.

But if you answer such questions at face value, the asker still doesn't know how to write concise questions and will continue to post walls of code, since, after all, it worked and produced an answer for them.

It's almost like you need to pivot the question at that point to be "how do I isolate problems?" or "how do I debug?" because the asker lacks those basic skills needed to ask a good question.

False dichotomy. It's not like you can only tell the poster one thing. There are questions on SO where someone says "this is how you fix your problem. This is how I figured that out. Here are some good docs/articles/etc. on this topic."

Both pointing out the problem with the code/methodology/etc. and helping them see something from a different perspective so they do better next time are valuable educational goals, and I don't understand why so many people think SO should address only one of them. It's almost as if people think coding problems are OK, but helping people with more amorphous skills is either beyond or beneath them.

Troubleshooting is a skill that can be taught— having someone more experienced giving you advice is an invaluable asset when you're trying to learn how to do it. Refusing to help people because they don't already know how to do it themselves helps nobody.

The goal of Stack Overflow is to produce posts that are useful for others who stumble across them. There's every reason to be friendly to newbies, but not much reason to answer questions that will never be of use to anyone else.

Stack Overflow isn't a free tutoring service, it's a collaborative wiki of answers to common programming questions.

That being said, I agree that the current culture of "you're doing it wrong" is toxic, and should be replaced with a culture of "here's how to do it right".

And so very often as a beginner, I stumbled across someone's question that I also had, which was somehow deemed unacceptable by the bureaucracy so there were no useful answers, there was no link to where the 'correct' question with the correct answer was, and because there was often different exception, or a different library was being used, or something along those lines, I didn't have the skills to find it. So, maybe it's time to abandon that strategy and concentrate on actually helping people who need it.

>>The goal of Stack Overflow is to produce posts that are useful for others who stumble across them.

That's one of the goals. I wouldn't say it's the goal.

I would argue that the goal of any software should be to help the immediate user. If it is not, then why should the user continue using it?

Stackoverflow is successful because helping the immediate user has secondary benefits, namely that it also helps others. But that doesn't mean this secondary benefit should override the primary goal.

> I would argue that the goal of any software should be to help the immediate user. If it is not, then why should the user continue using it?

That's like saying "I as the immediate user of Wikipedia want to be able to upload my research paper and have it check if there are any mistakes in my citations. If Wikipedia can't serve that immediate need, why should I continue using it?"

Yet even if Wikipedia isn't good at auto-checking your homework, it's still immensely useful for the vast majority of other users who don't care about auto-checking homework.

You can't build software that satisfies everyone's requirements. It's okay if some users choose not to use your software because it doesn't fulfill their requirements.

Your example has nothing whatsoever to do with what I said. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia; it's primary (i.e. immediate) users are the readers who consume the materials.

StackOverflow is a Q&A site. Asking questions and receiving useful answers is the primary goal, and therefore the immediate users are the askers.

You might think that, but it is my opinion that the immediate users of SO are the readers, not the askers. The askers are but a small minority of SO's users. It's the readers coming into SO from Google that are the primary audience. Therefore, the site should seek to serve them.

Ultra specific homework questions do not help the immediate users (readers) at all which is why it is frowned upon.

yup it's all about that empathy, and having a constructive, vs. destructive approach to candid criticism and conversation. SO somehow swung far in the destructive direction. Candid discussion does not have to be toxic to be direct, no matter what Linus and co might say, and SO seems to embody.

I sincerely hope that you tell that to novices because they probably don't know any better. When you're new to development, it can be extremely difficult to distill any problem down to it's root elements. That's a skill that develops with experience. I would argue that it's one of the skills that makes a good developer overall.

Sometimes, all someone needs is a rubber duck. We can help by becoming that rubber duck.

I try to, but honestly SO seems hard for interacting with newbies. Half the time I say stuff to newbies I never get a response, upvote, accept, etc. I don't know if they even saw what I wrote and they just don't have enough rep to comment (is this still a thing?) or if they literally got hit by a bus, etc.

New users can't comment, except on their own questions; so if you ask for clarification on their question and they never answered, it's not because SO is preventing them.

With new programmers, you can't have the expectation that you're going to get a response or be upvoted. You help them precisely because you like helping, not that you expect anything in return.

Its the long term goodwill that eventually brings new programmers into the field, because programming is hard! Newbies need to know its ok to take risks and there will be a safety net.

I understand that, it's just hard to know if what I told them was actually helpful or not since I got no feedback

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