[bad_user]

Your kind of answer is precisely why I find SO useless.

When a user asks a question on X, it would be better to first assume that he knows what he’s freaking doing.

E.g. yes there might be valid reasons for inserting 500 MB as a string, and myself as another user desperately searching for an answer to it, I get pretty annoyed when I see answers for a Y instead.

SO contributors should answer the freaking question first. Can it be done and how. Otherwise the answer is of no use to people having the same question but for a different problem. Not to mention that I’ve seen questions closed as duplicates.

This is why I rarely go to SO for answers. I don’t want an opinionated forum, I want a mailing list where people assume you’re a grownup that really wants a solution to the question and not something else.

[sosborn]

The people that really need to know how to insert a 500mb string will actually explain why they need to do so (beyond the typical “it doesn’t work”).

The ones that can’t explain why are almost always unaware of the actual problem they need to solve.

[bad_user]

That's a pretty big assumption on your part. Unless you're going to cite some SO stats or a study on it, I'm going to assume that you're wrong.

Also good questions shouldn't need explanations for the reason you're trying to do something. It's not like I'm going to explain my business requirements on a public forum to complete strangers.

And I'm going to mention this again — if the purpose of SO is to provide a searchable database of questions and answers, then the answer has to match the question, not a supposed use case that the user may or may not have, because that answer is then useless to others.

Of course you can include 500 MB in a separate file and read that. It's totally uninteresting and now that SO question, along with its non-answer is showing up in search results, having precedence over others. Which is a pity, because I thought SO is a place where you can ask questions on obscure features of the tools we're using.

[warty]

> Which is a pity, because I thought SO is a place where you can ask questions on obscure features of the tools we're using.

You can, as long as you're clear on why you need these obscure features. So there's nuance... if someone asks "hi, I want to call `add` like `add(10, 20, 30)` and it's not working" and the answer is "Use `10 + 20 + 30` instead!", they're answering the intent of the question. They've totally not answered the original question (I want to call add) but OP is probably misguided.

It'd totally be fair to say "Oh, declare a function with 3 params and return the sum, or even make a function with variable arguments, then enumerate over each of them, summing into an accumulator. You can also do this as a functional reduction. In fact, you can use the mapreduce framework to do this, and here's how to create an adder circuit" - Every tidbit of the above is just... overkill.

I totally empathize with you - it sucks to google "how to do X given good reasons Y Z" only to find a question "how to do X given terrible reasons A B" that's answered by "don't do X"! I think the way that's respectful of others' time is to ask another question and clarify why you truly need X.

If you've taught a multidisciplinary class, you'll have faced people who truly are confused - EE students who want to understand, for example, "how do I declare a 20 bit integer in C for this program that's running on Windows?"...

[galangalalgol]

This removes a great deal of utility from the site. The majority of value in the site is not answering one individuals question at a time. Every single time I ask the search engine a programming question SO pops up as the first result. Most of the time that link has the answer I need, but every single time the conversation has violated some inane rule and has been shut down. Every single time. The rules are wrong, it is that simple.

[mistermann]

> Most of the time that link has the answer I need, but every single time the conversation has violated some inane rule and has been shut down. Every single time. The rules are wrong, it is that simple.

Not 100% for me, but easily 30%. And you can almost taste the authoritarian arrogance dripping from the moderators words. I was disappointed this incredibly negative aspect of the site wasn't even mentioned in the post.

[scj]

95% of the time I want to do something in a clearly sub-optimal way is because I'm required to use an unmodifiable code base that forces a path.

But sometimes explaining how the situation arises:

* Violates NDA/secrecy/licensing agreements.

* It can be complicated to explain the conditions that created the situation to people that aren't working with a custom/proprietary tech stack.

* Is irrelevant. If the operation needed to solve my problem can be concisely stated, why type a distraction?

I remember one post where someone said something like: "It'd be better if you tried this, but if you really need to do X..." followed by an explanation that solved my problem. It made my day.

[bmpafa]

> When a user asks a question on X, it would be better to first assume that he knows what he’s freaking doing.

Yikes. SO is where I learned to program, and if this were the norm, I wouldn't have made it.

If I ask a question the premise of which suggests I'm _way_ off, I wanna know. I have to imagine this scenario is far more common than the one you outline, wherein the poster has arbitrary constraints on his/her problem that need to be respected.

Let the voting system decide which answers are useful for posterity & which aren't. But to the answerers who take the time to help askers tackle the spirit of a question--not just its text--I say: thanks.