[carapace]

> Who gets to draw that line? Thank Zeus it's not you...

I'm not the Spanish Inquisition. The worst I can do is downvote stupid or ignorant questions that could be easily answered by a web search and ten minutes of reading.

> I fundamentally disagree with feeling people should be silenced because they are not asking the right questions.

That's not how I feel. In fact, I would say that "feeling people should be silenced because they are not asking the right questions" is a symptom of mental or emotional illness.

What I feel is that it's disrespectful at best to lean on other people for basic knowledge rather than doing one's own homework. Even if you don't agree that "lazyweb" is disrespectful, I would still argue that it wastes a lot of time and energy. If someone asks a question that could be answered by ten minutes of googling, they are just using the forum as a interface to google, eh?

There are plenty of other places on the Internet where people can go to get basic information, Wikipedia, Stackoverflow, Google, etc... Places where it's perfectly appropriate to be one of the "lucky 10,000" ( https://xkcd.com/1053/ ).

I don't think being "uninformed and asking questions should be appreciated" here. FWIW I do think it should be tolerated, because A) that's how some people learn (however disrespectfully and lazily) and B) occasionally ignorant questions lead to very interesting and informative discussions (which is the whole point of HN as far as I'm concerned) and we cannot reliably predict which ignorant questions will lead to such discussions.

[darkerside]

> The worst I can do is downvote stupid or ignorant questions that could be easily answered by a web search and ten minutes of reading.

You can also state your point eloquently, as you did. All I'm doing is expressing my counterpoint to yours in this public forum.

I think where we really disagree is that I don't think there is a clearly defined baseline for "common knowledge". You say it's something like "10 minutes of googling", but I think there are other valid definitions, like the information you have on hand at the moment. i.e. is this a research library or a cocktail party (or something in between)?

There's certainly a point where it turns to trolling, but questions asked in good intent are fair game as far as I'm concerned.

[carapace]

> I think where we really disagree is that I don't think there is a clearly defined baseline for "common knowledge". You say it's something like "10 minutes of googling", but I think there are other valid definitions, like the information you have on hand at the moment. i.e. is this a research library or a cocktail party (or something in between)?

Well, part of my crankiness on this point comes from the fact that if you're on HN you're on the Internet, so the "information you have on hand at the moment" is more-or-less the information you can find in "10 minutes of googling", eh?

(I'm old enough to remember the day I realized that the 'net was as fast as my hard drive. It was like an expanding horizon, a kind of vision of cyberspace, all that information only milliseconds away... It still blows my mind if I think about it for more than a few moments. Effectively infinite information in a hyper-fractal sea.)

FWIW I do agree with you that condescending to people in re: ignorant questions is unproductive (not to same lame. It's emotional junk food.)

[buescher]

It's a subject you probably heard about at least three times in secondary school. If you forgot, look it up. It's like these people who were in the same state-required economics class I had to take in high school who pass around memes about how kids should have to learn about interest and credit cards and checking accounts and taxes and saving for retirement in high school, because they had to learn on their own.

[darkerside]

There are 50 states in USA alone, and not everyone here is American

[buescher]

And your point is? Most people will learn about Alexander at some point in their education; you might notice he wasn’t American either. Same for the Roman Empire.

[darkerside]

My point is, I didn't have to take an economics class, and probably same for a lot of people.

[buescher]

So what? Do you pass on memes about how there ought to be a required class, as if there weren't one, that you actually were required to take in school?