[na85]

>Chat room helpers often will try and lead you to discover the right answer yourself. It may feel frustrating, but play their game and you will learn. This is the discussion level of the pyramid.

I fucking hate this so much. You spend hours trawling through Google search results and finally decide the answer isn't out there. Stack overflow is caustic so you don't want to ask there. Hop on IRC and ask "how do I do X?" and now you have to deal with a bunch of "well what happens if you do <tangentially-related-thing>?"

Fucking answer the question or don't offer yourself as a helper.

[CGamesPlay]

Absolutely not. If you've actually done the research that leads the knowledge gatekeeper to ask these, these questions are easy for you to answer. If you haven't then you're wasting their time.

[na85]

>Absolutely not. If you've actually done the research that leads the knowledge gatekeeper to ask these, these questions are easy for you to answer.

Depending on the specifics of the question being asked, sure, I agree.

But speaking only for myself, I abhor playing silly coy games of cat and mouse. I only come to chat rooms as a third/last resort exactly because so often you can't get a direct answer without satisfying somebody's ego first. It's basically hazing.

I've got a thousand things to do and it would be more expedient for both asker and giver if the response to "How do I do X?" was a simple "via Y".

[Groxx]

The people in the chatroom interact more with people who do not do this. They're trying to prevent wasting their own time, and leaving askers with precise answers to questions they didn't need answered, or sending them down the wrong path and fielding tons of opaque questions rather than finding out what's actually going on.

I get that you don't want to waste your time, that's entirely reasonable... but by asking for help you are asking others to donate their time. Refusing to acknowledge that their strategy helps them preserve their time just makes you the asshole, not them.

[BrandoElFollito]

I agree with you completely.

I am in IT/dev for 35 years and love to discover new stuff, and to help others to start. I am a HUGE fan of what I call "bootstrapping" knowledge.

Say I know Python and want to code in Go. I craft a question that shows that I understand the problem but could not find the documentation that would explain this in Go. This is obviously not "how to assign a variable" but rather "how to asses the kind of error returned by the function" (in Python you would do that with an exception, in Go this is borderline voodoo to understand that the error is because there is no network, rather than a DNS issue for instance).

I then get either downvoted because my question is not elitist enough, or someone plays kindergarten teacher by saying "you have toooo ... u... un... unwraaaa...?"

These people are fucking annoying and the site become s shitshow (yes - I am looking at you Stack Overflow questions tagged with golang)

Just say "you need to unwrap the error by doing this and that, the documentation is here). I do not want them to explain me what an error is, or why there can be many, or the philosophical religion of the one who coded it that way. I. Just. Want. To. Start. Somewhere.

[MarcelOlsz]

If it wasn't for #startups people spending hours holding my stupid hand through mundane problems for hours I would be nowhere and likely homeless. Imagine being able to frequent a pub with super smart people ready to help at any given time. IRC is/was that.

[defanor]

After hours of searching, it is annoying when the reply is something like "does this chat look like Google to you?" (though fortunately those are pretty rare), but the answers trying to teach you how to discover answers to your original question are closer to "teaching a man to fish", or the Socratic method: you'll probably discover the answer soon (possibly with additional help), and will be able to discover similar ones in the future.

That approach is both more educational and may be easier on helpers themselves; answering the same (or very similar) questions, often from the same people, isn't particularly fun or productive.

[goto11]

> Stack overflow is caustic so you don't want to ask there.

I have only positive experiences with asking on Stack Overflow. Nine times out of ten I have gotten a useful answer. In one case, an answer provided a 20-line code snippet, which would have taken me days to figure out on my own.

The key is to ask clear and focused questions, and explain what you have already tried and why it didn't work.

Sure, there are always some answers or comments which are unhelpful or which completely miss the point of the question. But the value of a QA forum is given by the value of the best answers, not the worst.

[osullip]

I am self taught at most things I know.

What I would have given for someone to explain objects to me when I was trying be an object oriented programmer.

>objects are the things you think about first in designing a program and they are also the units of code that are eventually derived from the process.

Huh? Classes would confuse me. Methods would confuse me. I could get things to work but not understand why or how to extend and abstract properly.

At some point of learning you just need to be told the answer so you can move on.

[craz8]

I’m new to Clojure, coming from Ruby and C and Pascal - there is no way I’m am leading myself to use ‘juxt’ and possibly combining it with ‘into {}’ (ruby’s each_with_object gets you close, but it’s not as powerful)

There are a bunch of paradigms that are really useful, but you can’t get to from here without specific help or examples

[edflsafoiewq]

Bonus points for playing the game only to discover when you reach the end that they were wrong all along.

[878654Tom]

The question you ask is quite broad so the answer you'll receive will be broad as well.

[na85]

Right, as if my "How do I do X?" wasn't merely illustrative.

Standard HN pedantry pls go.