Comment by gnosis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gnosis | Hacker News Reader

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"SO is a superb solution for the person asking the question because they do get fast answers."

You want an even faster answer?

Ask on IRC.

As far as programming questions go, freenode is usually the best place to go (with a minority or apps and projects off on some other irc networks, sometimes).

That said, HN, forums, mailing lists, usenet, and SO are usually better for preserving answers for others to learn from once the question has already been asked by someone else.

The quality and depth of the answers can sometimes be better in these other media that are more well suited to longer, uninterrupted, essay-like answers.

On the other hand, that's not always the case, since on IRC there is a much higher level of interaction and you also have the ability to interrupt the speaker and ask for clarification on any point, with immediate feedback.

As a very rough analogy, I generally find IRC to be more like having a real-time spoken conversation with a teacher (or teachers). Whereas those other media are something more akin to correspondence via letters and email.

Of course, you don't get upvotes or points for answering questions on IRC. But the system works very well anyway. And, honestly, who really cares about these silly tokens anyway?

I've asked a question in freenode channels then idled for the better part of a day, or even a few days, with little traffic and no answers. SO is faster, often much faster.

It really just depends on what you're asking about. My opinion is that IRC is a better medium for common languages with popular open-source implementations like PHP, Python, or C and SO is usually a better medium for languages with popular closed-source implementations, like C# (though freenode's ##c# is sometimes helpful) or ActionScript/Flash. More enterprise people are on SO than IRC, I guess.

It could have just been the case that more experts for the particular area you're interested in were on SO at the time you asked that question. Had you asked a different question on a different topic, perhaps there would have been more experts ready to answer it on IRC than on SO.

Having spent a long time on IRC, I can attest to seeing many people's questions getting answered there constantly, and usually (on the active channels, at least) very quickly (ie. often within seconds or a minute or two). Fifteen minutes is usually considered a long time to wait in an active channel for an answer to a question that isn't really obscure.

Of course the likelihood of an answer decreases with the obscurity of the question, the lack of popularity/appropriateness of whatever it is you're asking about, and depends on when and how you ask the question. The same goes for any other medium of communication.

I'm happy that you've had a positive experience on SO, and sorry that you haven't had much luck with IRC. But that doesn't mean that your experience is a typical one.

I'll take it as encouraging that I've reached the level of expertise where my questions are more quickly answered on SO--I will grant that "where do I find an Ubuntu driver for my video card" will almost certainly be answered more quickly on #ubuntu than on Serverfault or Superuser.

"I'll take it as encouraging that I've reached the level of expertise where my questions are more quickly answered on SO"

This attitude of yours says more about your lack of experience with and appreciation of IRC than it does about its relative merits in respect to SO.

That's not an attitude. That's an appropriate response to assertions you made about the obscurity of questions and unpopularity of platforms that will receive no response on IRC. I realize it was not a humble response, but it was not an attitude.

As to inexperience, I'll admit I've only been on Efnet's #help since 1997-ish and Freenode since around 2005, but that's still much longer than I've been on SO.

>I'll take it as encouraging that I've reached the level of expertise where my questions are more quickly answered on SO

You have no idea how devs actually function then.

Almost every open source project that is active and of a certain size has an IRC dev channel where they hash stuff out.

I've worked at more than one company where dev and ops idled in private IRC channels as well.

My questions are not of the sort "Why hasn't my patch been committed?" I consider this a difference in type of expertise more than a difference in level of expertise.

> Ask on IRC.

Nearly every time I asked a programming question on IRC I've had bad experiences with arrogant users who think you're wasting their time with your noobness. Now of course I don't believe that everyone on IRC is like that, but it's really the last place I'd recommend for newbies.

I used to agree with you, the "old" IRC nets are full of rude, mean and cruel people. But FreeNode is an excellent place for programming. I have the most experience in the python, haskell and freebsd channels and the people there are excellent, responsive and friendly. The C/C++ and Java channels attract slightly more grumpy people, but even those are generally quite helpful if you try and act with a modicum of sense (if you are on HN you probably exceed the requirements by far).

EDIT: Incidentally, freenode is also the home of the unofficial HN IRC channel (#startups).

You've been unlucky. Yes, sometimes there are people on IRC who are unhelpful to and/or arrogant towards newbies. And some channels are worse in this respect than others. Fortunately, however, that is the exception rather than the rule.

Some channels, like #help (or most other channels with the word "help" in them, like #linuxhelp) are especially patient with newbies.

That said, it certainly does help to know and follow IRC netiquette , and know how to ask questions[1].

[1] - http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

I'm in a non-US timezone, so all I get in most (software-related) IRC channels is crickets chirping. SO is like a searchable log of an IRC channel for when my question was asked and answered 4 days ago.

It's true that freenode is relatively quiet when most people in US time zones are asleep. But even then, it's rarely completely dead. In the larger channels, it's quite likely that someone will be awake and answer your questions even then.

But you're right about the searchability of SO. That is one of the strengths having a good, searchable archive of questions and answers. Forums, some mailing lists, and Usenet also share that strength, to some extent.

On the other hand, some IRC logs have been published, and google search results do sometimes happen upon such public logs.

You can also keep your own long-term logs, just by turning on logging in your IRC client, and leaving your client idling in the channels that interest you.

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