Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by JimDabell | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

JimDabell

Which is the correct response to this question?

> How do I shoot myself in the foot? I’m pointing the gun at my foot and pulling the trigger, but nothing is happening.

Is it:

> A common reason for guns not firing is that they aren’t loaded. Try loading the gun and trying again.

…or is it:

> Woah, hang on a sec! What are you trying to achieve exactly? It seems like you are doing something very wrong here. I’m sure there’s a better way to do whatever it is you are trying to do.

There are many technical questions that give the very strong impression that somebody is asking how to shoot themselves in the foot. It’s not responsible to blindly answer the question regardless of the consequences. Yes, people sometimes overcorrect for this which can be annoying, but they are only trying to steer newbies away from shooting themselves in the foot.

View on HN

When a user is describing exactly how they're aiming at their foot and pulling the trigger but nothing happens, I'd assume they actually want to shoot themselves in the foot...

Thus, the first response is the correct one.

On preventing people from doing what they intend to do...I think the main issue is the world is a large place, people face many situations, and most advices given in good faith only have an extremely limited view of what people might need to do. And it's kinda awkward to ask for someone's whole life to decide if they are right in wanting to straight rename a table column on their live production DB.

Something could be a bad idea 99% of the time. But that leaves millions of people in the 1% for whom it's the best course of action.

> There are many technical questions that give the very strong impression that somebody is asking how to shoot themselves in the foot.

Sure, but some of the stuff I've looked up in the past is answered with helpful comments like "You won't need to do this, your CA will do this for you" or "this is handled by your certificate verification stack, you don't need to be involved in this stuff".

Well, thanks, but I'm actually implementing both of those things right now and I'm having an annoying issue with figuring out how the API for the (very popular but IMHO poorly documented) library I'm using for part of it hangs together.

> Yes, people sometimes overcorrect for this which can be annoying, but they are only trying to steer newbies away from shooting themselves in the foot.

I think sometimes its because comparatively the respondents are newbies, and are repeating received wisdom.

How I usually try to answer these kinds of questions is "Shooting yourself is generally not a good idea, for these reasons. If you really want to do it, you can try loading your gun and pulling the trigger again, but a better alternative might be to take off your shoe by untying your shoelaces and carefully pulling on your shoe, following the curve of your foot."

But it's hard! On the one hand, you don't want to teach people to do the wrong thing (especially not on SO, where answers are often copied wholesale and pasted into production code), but also not answering the question as asked usually doesn't help the OP at all.

If it's not clear what they're trying to achieve I usually leave a comment asking for clarification rather than answering, though.

The correct answer is obviously the first one. I come to StackOverflow because I want to learn some piece of information about some specific technology, not to be lectured by someone who thinks they know better than me about what I should or shouldn’t be doing (and who is virtually always wrong).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com