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Comment by vanschelven | Hacker News Reader

In similar vein, the best way to get help in Linux is by trolling: http://bash.org/?152037

Yeah, I've found ESR's old "how to ask smart questions" is very wrong. The more details you provide, the less likely you are to find an answer. (It's more accurately titled "how I wish people would have asked the question because I would have less work to do but it doesn't actually get their question answered, which is of course less work.)

It seems that every detail gives people another reason not to answer. If I say I'm trying to search for a word somewhere in a directory of files on OpenBSD, people who only know Linux will think that "well, grep must not work the same way on OpenBSD" and not respond.

Partially this is because of prior experience with assholes. If someone says "well, on Linux you use grep -lr" then an asshole will shout back at them "HE WAS ASKING ABOUT OPENBSD NOT LINUX YOU MORON LEARN TO READ."

(Spoiler: the answer is the same on both Linux and OpenBSD.)

People get the Internet they deserve.

doesn't actually get their question answered, which is of course less work.

Heh.

Just realized ESR's advice is rubber ducking. Aha, seems Atwood agrees.

http://blog.codinghorror.com/rubber-duck-problem-solving/

It works on focused technical forums. The less focused and the less technical, the less well it works... though I'd consider that a criticism of the forum rather than the technique. I've been on plenty of focused technical forums, and it is dead accurate for those.

If it doesn't work for you, I'd consider that evidence the forum in question is less technical than it may initially appear; there's a surprising number of forums that have the appearance of being technical, but aren't populated by very technically-skilled people. I've seen that on Ubuntu forums, for instance; someone asks a perfectly sensible question, and 5 people chime in with very convincing-sounding but ultimately completely wrong suggestions. OSes seem to attract that.

If someone posts a brief description to a simple problem without sufficient detail, they're more likely to get engagement because the initial question will be easier to process and read, and people will follow-up asking for additional detail. When the original poster replies with the additional detail, the participants in the thread will feel a stronger sense of social obligation to answer. This iterative approach that requires mutual investment and the establishment of a social expectation before the whole question is posted may be beneficial even in highly focused, highly technical forums.

This is the problem with most of my questions on Stack Overflow and similar sites, I provide pretty much all relevant information on a rather obscure problem(since I already did the Google dance beforehand)

As a result, I seldom get any usable answers.

If I had asked a more general question, I might have been served better.

This reminds me of an old WOW comic.

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/media/comics/?view=comic-2006-07...

is <dm> talking to him(?)self?

[edit: i know what bash.org is. but that appears to be a conversation between multiple people all with the same nick.]

Nah, this is just a partial copy-pasta from an IRC log.

Good ol' bash.org. :)

He seems to be quoting another text, with running commentary by himself. Language use is too different for him to be the likely author of both parts of the dialog.

I've accidentally found answers to some problems in Linux I had by ranting about them.

So yeah, makes sense.

Funny. This works on StackOverflow as well to a certain degree, but the phrasing must be more careful.

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