The question should be
"I want to do A. I have tried doing it using X, but it doesn't work. Can you help me find a better solution?"
In my experience, most people who push back and start saying "You really want Y" are simply not willing to listen to the story about A - especially if it will take more than 1-2 lines to explain it. I've found this to be the case both online and in person.
As a somewhat related example, a decade ago I was building a PC and had been given a huge discount on a pretty powerful Intel CPU. I figured out all the parts (motherboard, etc), and went to a well known forum to post it and solicit feedback.
Now the CPU was overpriced. You could pay 40% less and get another CPU that was almost as good. I knew this, but it was irrelevant as with my discount, I was getting it cheaper than the alternative.
I posted my question, and acknowledged the price discrepancy, and almost all the responses were: Don't get that CPU, get the cheaper one. I made it explicit that I wanted a technical answer and not an economic one. I even said "Well, assume I'm getting it for free."
The problem was that pointing out that I was getting my CPU even cheaper with a discount did not change anyone's response. Some people ignored it altogether. Others simply refused to believe I had a discount, claiming I was a wealthy newbie who was hell bent on paying full price just to get a tiny performance improvement and wasn't willing to admit it.
Eventually some people took me at face value and answered my questions, but I spent a lot more time justifying my choice of CPU than on the actual questions I wanted answered.
Also, asking:
"I'm trying to do X. I'm aware of Z and I agree it's usually the way to go, but I have some restrictions such that Z won't work."
Doesn't work.
"I'm trying to do X. I'm aware of Z but I really want to see if I can do this with X."
Doesn't work.
So you could have said you were gifted the CPU by a friend so you're stuck with it (even if you don't have it), or a friend can sell it to you for cheap (maybe the same price of your discount), and then go from there.
Obviously you shouldn't do this in-person, but this is good for stack overflow or random internet conversations.
pcmasterrace fanbois arguing about their tribal alliance to CPUs is a different matter.
If you're asking questions then confidence that the answer - which you do not know - is simple betrays the reality that you've become falsely confident of your understanding despite the fact that you don't know what you're doing or else you wouldn't have a question at all.
Asking questions is a skill, whether you are asking the questions of a machine or of people. An insistence that everybody else is doing it wrong because you get unhelpful answers is a mistake nobody else can fix for you.
That's a lot of assumptions without even knowing the question, and is symptomatic of troublesome responders.
A lot of times the question I ask is of the form "Yes/No".
As in "Is it possible to do it using X?" If the answer is "Yes" I may have follow ons, but it's amazing how often I cannot get an answer to this question. Even a "Yes, but it's a bad idea" will suffice, but I'm more likely to get several "You probably want to use Y". That's simply not answering my question at all.
"Can doing it via X handle a size of N?"
Sure, maybe doing it Y is usually better than doing it with X, but telling me that is not answering my question, and the majority of times Y will not solve my problem. I also may already know that Y scales better, but my point is that even stating that up front in the question will not get me the answer I am seeking.
Sometimes I'm just curious. I know Y is better, but I want to know what the limits of X are. It's an appropriate question.
Depending on how well I know the person, I may give context, which is part of the skill in asking good questions. However, in an impersonal online setting, this backfires more often than not. As the example showed above, it usually leads to a 5x more effort spent in explaining and justifying the context than in discussions that are on the route to my getting an answer.
(As an aside, I do come from an academic background, where it is the norm to explore, and be curious. A lot of the questions they ask and discussions they have are not for anything practical. Which then becomes annoying when they ask a question online and the other party has all kinds of assumptions on why I may want to do X.)
> Asking questions is a skill
Agreed, and so is answering questions. Jumping to conclusions on what the questioner is trying to do means the person has poor answering skills.
The issue is this: it is completely irrelevant why the person asking wants to do X or A. Stackoverflow and others are public websites and anyone who ever will want to do X/A will probably only find that page as an answer. It is beyond arrogant to assume anyone who could ever ask the question is just missing your guidance on what they really want to do.
To be concrete, I find myself in these situations due to company restrictions that I simply cannot lift. So I need to do something I know very well shouldn't be done or fail (and someone else will do that or worse anyway). So I search all over the web and find a Stackoverflow page... that tells me why I shouldn't be doing it. And since it's been "answered" no one else will ever bother, and if I ask anywhere I get linked to that page.