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Comment by lazybreather | Hacker News Reader

As much as arduino helped me in understanding electronics and building products, the forum has more or less been very discouraging. Stackoverflow and Instructables were far more helpful to learn and implement. Very often you see arrogance in people commenting against an honest query. For a post like "How do I use x to do y....?" , many would start with "Why do you need to do x?" Or even worse "Why do you need to do y?"

It would easily put off enthusiasts. Many I know just left Arduino and started using NodeMCU platform.

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> or a post like "How do I use x to do y....?" , many would start with "Why do you need to do x?" Or even worse "Why do you need to do y?"

Quite often this falls into the trap of the "XY Problem", where the initial premise starts off wrong. "How do I use this hammer to change the flat tyre on my car?" is best answered with "You should use a wheelbrace. Why do you want to use a hammer?" because it's important to find out how the person asking the question got to that place to begin with.

This exactly is the problem I was trying to point out. This comment does the same thing. When I articulated my observation with a decent level of clarity, it means I know to an extent what I was talking about. I don't know how to put this exactly, but there is some intuition which tells us from the comment/question how much the OP knows. The X and Y comparison is to say that "I want to do precisely what I asked for and I was not able to figure out a way." While there are beginner questions on the forum, there is high sense of entitlement with "high karma" members. Its frustrating after a while to be treated like infants when seriously searching for a solution.

It might seem frustrating for new users to not get straight answers but there’s countless questions along the lines of “I need more power output from an arduino, how do I connect 3 pins together?” Then after 2 days of back and forth, the details emerge and the question should have been “I’m trying to control a motor to automate a light switch, but it only worked twice before the arduino broke. Is there a better way to connect the motor, or a better way altogether?”

The answers could be more polite but what’s really missing is something that makes sure new users understand what an XY problem is, understand the limitations of arduino, and understand where to find good tutorials.

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