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Comment by bhk | Hacker News Reader

The mentality of this author is problematic.

From the perspective of someone asking for Y, I've often been a victim of this because I'm met with a slew of imagined X's -- X0, X1, X2, ... an unending list of problems, often more complicated than Y -- due to their narrow preconceptions, making the whole exercise of asking someone not worth the time.

From the perspective of someone being asked for Y, yes, often I can suspect that there might be some mis-matched X there, but in order to be helpful, I try to answer Y directly and honestly, and then point out my concerns, describing my presumptions. If, indeed, the one posing the question has jumped to some invalid conclusion Y from X, then I've given them all I can. Trying to pre-empt it by telling them "don't do that!" is pointless -- if they knew where they had made an unwarranted conclusion, they wouldn't be asking the wrong question to begin with.

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Not sure why you are complaining about this author in particular when both of the examples in the link show exactly what you asked for: they answer Y and then ask for clarification on X.

Yeah, my comments about the author were mis-placed. This version redacts the source material in a way that comes across as nicer, although it retains the use of "n00b" to identify who is asking the question.

I may have confused this with the "Source 2" linked from the article:

http://mywiki.wooledge.org/XyProblem

In its examples, responses include an immediate "Why?" non-answer, an angry "ASK FOR WHAT YOU WANT!", and the observation "Literal answers to bad questions can be dangerous" from one presumed non-noob to another.

I very much echo this experience.

I have ben asked countless times to explain the problem, and in practice problems are harder to explain than attempted solutions. I once spent a long time explain the architecture of a multiserver supervisor dæmon manager because they insisted when I was looking for a rather simple answer regarding unix domain sockets.

The actual problem often requires an explanation of the entire design strategy of the software at hand, which is often much.

> but in order to be helpful, I try to answer Y directly and honestly, and then point out my concerns, describing my presumptions.

This works fine as long as Y actually does have a simple solution. Often it does not, and already the question for Y is really weird, but once you hear about the X you can give a quick and simple answer.

That said, sometimes X is really really complicated. But even in that case it'll help anyone you are asking if you quickly outline X in a short sentence, just so the one you are asking has enough context.

(I have been on both sides, but more often then not the simple X was missing from questions was really strange Ys. Though I also have asked for Ys (and even outlined the X) and have been annoyed by people who insist that I should do something else, and describe my X in more detail, but when I do, they can't answer either, because the X really complicated and Y actually was a valid attempt at solving it).

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