5 ms·

There's nuance here. There are plenty of cases where individuals ask XY questions, meaning they've gone down a strange route to solve X and now need help solvin

by warty 8y ago

There's nuance here. There are plenty of cases where individuals ask XY questions, meaning they've gone down a strange route to solve X and now need help solving Y, and it's always been debated within the community on whether you should solve X or oftentimes go to great lengths to solve Y. I've seen many questions where a solution to X is answered and heavily downvoted. I'm not sure how you resolve that. Question: How do I #include a 500MB text file in my C++ code as a string? My compiler explodes when I do this! Me: Don't do this, your compiler isn't designed for this! Consider loading the text from a file instead! Comment: -1 Dude this isn't helpful. What if it's code golf and you need to include a 500MB text file!? You never know. Get over yourself. Stuff like this has happened to me so many times.

wolco 8y ago
Bad questions bad accepted answers go hand in hand.
- hackits 8y ago
  Oh look a question, oh look bellow the accepted answer is the real answer to the question!
  - wwweston 8y ago
    Yeah, this actually gets handled reasonable well by the combination of the accepted answer and voting dynamics. You can see which answer(s) everyone found most useful, and you can see the answer that the asker thought met their threshold.
dingo_bat 8y ago
> Me: Don't do this, your compiler isn't designed for this! Consider loading the text from a file instead! A better answer would be: This is wrong because <reasons>. Consider loading the text from the file. If you want to #include it anyway here's what you can try. This will ensure that the code golf people can do what they want and normal people try the recommended thing.
- warty 8y ago
  I understand that sentiment, but for the overwhelming majority of poor questions the "if you really want to do that anyway" isn't useful to OP - they're clearly confused and looking for something else. In those cases, it's not worth your or the question asker's time to write an extended answer (especially if that goes from trivial to complex, overengineered, and esoteric). The StackOverflow community refers to these as XY questions. Of course there are cases in favor of both sides here or there. If you have reasons to go the esoteric route, then you should simply explain why. If you're browsing from the internet, you have to understand you're reading a conversation between two individuals, catered to the question-asker and not the rest of the universe.
  - dingo_bat 8y ago
    If only every moderator/admin was as reasonable as you!
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
bad_user 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    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 8y ago
perl4ever 8y ago
When you are doing something at work, often you have to do something that seems absurd to a random person on the internet, simply because the easy, sensible way would rely on things and people that are not under your control. A lot of people come from a perspective where you should be able to administer everything in an organization yourself, and that doesn't happen in any place I've ever worked. The vast majority of my experience with 'real world' programming is working around institutional barriers and silos. I find the attitude of "solve your problem by ignoring stated constraints" particularly irritating among database gurus, who should be more in tune with the business world than a lot of people. When someone simply refuses to accept the constraints of a problem, it doesn't demonstrate intelligence, even if the problem as stated is insoluble; better to just ignore it. All they are really saying is "sucks to be you, glad I don't have to work there" which is boorish and unproductive. None of that means that people don't sometimes go down a rabbit hole that they didn't need to. But know-it-alls generally need to step back and either disengage entirely or consider the constraints on a problem.
PurpleBoxDragon 8y ago
My experience is always been like this: Question: I'm trying to do Y so I can do X. I know Z is the right way to do X, but I'm not allowed to do it for $BUSINESS_REASON that I have absolutely no control over. Response 1: Don't use Y to do X. Use Z. Response 2: $BUSINESS_REASON is stupid, fix that. Then some time later I'll come back and post my work around, with fair warning it isn't the right way to solve problem X, but if you have to use Y this is the best I've found.
- Lionsion 8y ago
  Mine too. As a result I ask a question on SO as a last resort, and spend more time preemptively addressing those kinds of unhelpful responses. It always seems like I have to make at least 3 exasperated comments to try to keep the question on track.
- username223 8y ago
  That's what's called an "XY problem": you want to do X, and someone wants to write about Y, so he tells you that you actually want to do Y instead of X, and goes on to explain Y in excruciating detail.
wiseleo 8y ago
I am an active contributor to Quora, which employs similar mechanics but has much higher adherence to being nice. When I see a silly question, I write a direct answer to that silly question and then write an answer to the question that may have been implied by it. I've written answers on data destruction for drug dealers whose phones are due to be seized, for example.
slavik81 8y ago
StackOverflow tends to want to make questions valuable to more than just the asker, but it's really annoying to come to a question from Google and find that none of the answers actually address the question that was asked.
Can_Not 8y ago
> There are plenty of cases where individuals ask XY questions, meaning they've gone down a strange route to solve X and now need help solving Y In my experience I see more of the opposite: XY answers. I search for or ask X, and there's a bunch of "smart guys" trying to subvert a secret hidden context to the question resulting in a secret question Y. When I arrive from Google to see the Y answer on X question, the answer is useless because unmentioned condition Y doesn't apply to my scenario. Multiple answers are always great though, because sometimes there is a sane default answer, and one or more "well if Y applies, you might actually [...]". There's a lot of value in multiple answers with their nuances explained or why they're outdated or the new way explained, etc..

by warty 8y ago

wolco 8y ago

Bad questions bad accepted answers go hand in hand.

hackits 8y ago
Oh look a question, oh look bellow the accepted answer is the real answer to the question!
- wwweston 8y ago
  Yeah, this actually gets handled reasonable well by the combination of the accepted answer and voting dynamics. You can see which answer(s) everyone found most useful, and you can see the answer that the asker thought met their threshold.

dingo_bat 8y ago

> Me: Don't do this, your compiler isn't designed for this! Consider loading the text from a file instead! A better answer would be: This is wrong because <reasons>. Consider loading the text from the file. If you want to #include it anyway here's what you can try. This will ensure that the code golf people can do what they want and normal people try the recommended thing.

warty 8y ago
I understand that sentiment, but for the overwhelming majority of poor questions the "if you really want to do that anyway" isn't useful to OP - they're clearly confused and looking for something else. In those cases, it's not worth your or the question asker's time to write an extended answer (especially if that goes from trivial to complex, overengineered, and esoteric). The StackOverflow community refers to these as XY questions. Of course there are cases in favor of both sides here or there. If you have reasons to go the esoteric route, then you should simply explain why. If you're browsing from the internet, you have to understand you're reading a conversation between two individuals, catered to the question-asker and not the rest of the universe.
- dingo_bat 8y ago
  If only every moderator/admin was as reasonable as you!
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

bad_user 8y ago

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 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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 8y ago

perl4ever 8y ago

When you are doing something at work, often you have to do something that seems absurd to a random person on the internet, simply because the easy, sensible way would rely on things and people that are not under your control. A lot of people come from a perspective where you should be able to administer everything in an organization yourself, and that doesn't happen in any place I've ever worked. The vast majority of my experience with 'real world' programming is working around institutional barriers and silos. I find the attitude of "solve your problem by ignoring stated constraints" particularly irritating among database gurus, who should be more in tune with the business world than a lot of people. When someone simply refuses to accept the constraints of a problem, it doesn't demonstrate intelligence, even if the problem as stated is insoluble; better to just ignore it. All they are really saying is "sucks to be you, glad I don't have to work there" which is boorish and unproductive. None of that means that people don't sometimes go down a rabbit hole that they didn't need to. But know-it-alls generally need to step back and either disengage entirely or consider the constraints on a problem.

PurpleBoxDragon 8y ago

My experience is always been like this: Question: I'm trying to do Y so I can do X. I know Z is the right way to do X, but I'm not allowed to do it for $BUSINESS_REASON that I have absolutely no control over. Response 1: Don't use Y to do X. Use Z. Response 2: $BUSINESS_REASON is stupid, fix that. Then some time later I'll come back and post my work around, with fair warning it isn't the right way to solve problem X, but if you have to use Y this is the best I've found.

Lionsion 8y ago
Mine too. As a result I ask a question on SO as a last resort, and spend more time preemptively addressing those kinds of unhelpful responses. It always seems like I have to make at least 3 exasperated comments to try to keep the question on track.
username223 8y ago
That's what's called an "XY problem": you want to do X, and someone wants to write about Y, so he tells you that you actually want to do Y instead of X, and goes on to explain Y in excruciating detail.

wiseleo 8y ago

I am an active contributor to Quora, which employs similar mechanics but has much higher adherence to being nice. When I see a silly question, I write a direct answer to that silly question and then write an answer to the question that may have been implied by it. I've written answers on data destruction for drug dealers whose phones are due to be seized, for example.

slavik81 8y ago

StackOverflow tends to want to make questions valuable to more than just the asker, but it's really annoying to come to a question from Google and find that none of the answers actually address the question that was asked.

Can_Not 8y ago

> There are plenty of cases where individuals ask XY questions, meaning they've gone down a strange route to solve X and now need help solving Y In my experience I see more of the opposite: XY answers. I search for or ask X, and there's a bunch of "smart guys" trying to subvert a secret hidden context to the question resulting in a secret question Y. When I arrive from Google to see the Y answer on X question, the answer is useless because unmentioned condition Y doesn't apply to my scenario. Multiple answers are always great though, because sometimes there is a sane default answer, and one or more "well if Y applies, you might actually [...]". There's a lot of value in multiple answers with their nuances explained or why they're outdated or the new way explained, etc..