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Comment by ivanbakel | Hacker News Reader

>It's disrespectful and not giving the benefit of the doubt.

Unfortunately, a good number of users who post questions on StackOverflow have not earned the benefit of the doubt. Browsing the site, you will occasionally come across questions which are the tech equivalent of asking "Which screwdriver is the right size to stick in this electrical socket?"

Frame challenges are a necessary part of learning, so they belong on a Q&A site. If a user doesn't want their problem to be challenged, the onus is on them to clarify in the question why their particular approach is the necessary one. It's only possible to respond with alternative solutions when the problem is not specified enough.

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> Which screwdriver is the right size to stick in this electrical socket?

Note that this is a legitimate technique in UK sockets.

The live and neutral pins have a little gate over them that is retracted when you insert the earth pin, so you need to first stick a screwdriver into the earth pin in order to get your fingers into the live pin.

I can't parse if this is humour or a mistake. Putting your fingers on the live pin is not a great idea, trying this to get an euro 15 plug into an UK socket, also not great but in a different category.

Well, there's also a mains tester screwdriver which is a legit tool that you stick into a socket and also participate in the electrict current loop for the light on it to light up.

Good points.

I'm not so sure benefit of the doubt must be earned. More like, any participant in a discussion forum must show it when answering, and do proper research before asking anything. If all questions are good questions, there's no problem. But, as you say, they really aren't. I think poor question should be down voted with a brief explanation instead of trying to answer the "real" question. Or moved to a Frame challenge forum.

Are we trying to answer the question or to solve the problem?

> do proper research before asking anything.

Asking on SO is itself research. It is good to review the existing literature before taking contributors time, of course, but if the problem is not solved in the existing literature, then perhaps the framing issue isn't addressed by the existing literature either. In that case how could the learner know the best way to frame the problem in advance?

> I think poor question should be down voted with a brief explanation instead of trying to answer the "real" question. Or moved to a Frame challenge forum.

This precludes the possibility that some contributors might want to address the framing problem, whereas others might want to address the specific question as asked. They may have different opinions about whether it is framed wrong at all. It also means the OP is losing karma or getting penalized for no fault of their own.

The problem is, the answers are useful to more than just the original questioner. Sure, the questioner may be doing things vastly wrong - but the people who land on that question's page via search may have legitimate reasons for doing things a certain way.

The silent majority of viewers will benefit from an answer that does both of (1) explaining why the answer is probably not what is wanted, and (2) answering the initial question _as written_ anyway, for future viewers.

Then those other viewers will either benefit in the same way from the frame challenge as a learning experience, or they will have a sufficiently-specific problem that they can ask their own questions with more justification for taking a specific approach.

Answering the question as written has the risk that any solution will be blindly applied without appreciating why the approach itself should be avoided. This is especially true for those users who see SO as a "write my code" site, and copy-paste anything in backticks.

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