5 ms·

What I see on SO is a lot of really annoying people refusing to answer simple questions because they believe, based on nothing, they know more about the questio

What I see on SO is a lot of really annoying people refusing to answer simple questions because they believe, based on nothing, they know more about the question than the person who asked it.

PascLeRasc 8y ago
Never ask them anything about Linux networking. They get so excited to gatekeep the information and tell you that you don't know enough to be safe doing whatever you're doing.
- drusepth 8y ago
  I've actually been super curious lately what happens if you route a PC's localhost to someone else's IP, but I have no clue how to ask on SO without baiting out the obvious "don't do this" and the generic "stuff won't work". Obviously, I could do it myself and explicitly see stuff not working, but I'd like to find out what actually happens under the hood and why things break; SO seems like an awful place for these kinds of "what if" questions and I don't know a better place to ask.
  - js2 8y ago
    You're curious what happens if you add a route for 127/8 to somewhere other than the loopback interface? Or do you mean making it so that the hostname "localhost" resolves to something other than 127.0.0.1? Give it a try.
blt 8y ago
what I see on SO a lot is people assuming your question is an instance of the "XY problem" when it's not.
- mjw1007 8y ago
  Also the case where for the original asker it really was was an XY instance, but now the top google result for "how do I fill a bathtub using a hosepipe?" goes to a Stack Overflow page full of people refusing to answer the question.
  - misnome 8y ago
    ...which was then closed for being a duplicate of another question, even though they are different questions that superficially look similar
  - dmurray 8y ago
    Got a link? I can't find the page in Google, DDG or Stack Exchange search using that search text.
    - PascLeRasc 8y ago
      I think it was just an example, but now there's this lively discussion about us: https://chat.meta.stackexchange.com/transcript/89/2018/7/15/3 https://chat.meta.stackexchange.com/transcript/89/2018/7/15/...
- mark-r 8y ago
  The thing is, 99 times out of 100 it really is an XY problem. If you're the 1 out of 100 then it sucks to be you; I guess the free advice is worth exactly what you paid for it. I don't often make that accusation, but the last time I did that's exactly what it turned out to be. They were trying to dive deep into the internals of C++ to find out why their debugger was hanging, and what they were asking for just didn't have an answer. They finally found that they were doing something that led to undefined behavior, and if they had asked about that instead the question would have been answered immediately.
  - blt 8y ago
    I have ~7k reputation there, that should be a pretty strong signal, but apparently it's not.
    - mark-r 8y ago
      The person asking the question above has a 5k reputation. Mine is over 100k so I've seen quite a bit.
setzer22 8y ago
When asking "unpopular" questions on SO I usually include a disclaimer along the lines that I want to know the answer for education purposes and any answer that is not specifically addressing the question at hand will get downvoted and never accepted. This works to some extent. In the end, I stopped asking questions on SO because dealing with this kind of behaviour was too tiresome. I'm glad to see I'm not the only one who thinks like that
- de_watcher 8y ago
  It heavily depends on the tag. Some tags have friendly communities that will give a dozen of pointers in the comments.

What I see on SO is a lot of really annoying people refusing to answer simple questions because they believe, based on nothing, they know more about the question than the person who asked it.

PascLeRasc 8y ago

Never ask them anything about Linux networking. They get so excited to gatekeep the information and tell you that you don't know enough to be safe doing whatever you're doing.

drusepth 8y ago
I've actually been super curious lately what happens if you route a PC's localhost to someone else's IP, but I have no clue how to ask on SO without baiting out the obvious "don't do this" and the generic "stuff won't work". Obviously, I could do it myself and explicitly see stuff not working, but I'd like to find out what actually happens under the hood and why things break; SO seems like an awful place for these kinds of "what if" questions and I don't know a better place to ask.
- js2 8y ago
  You're curious what happens if you add a route for 127/8 to somewhere other than the loopback interface? Or do you mean making it so that the hostname "localhost" resolves to something other than 127.0.0.1? Give it a try.

blt 8y ago

what I see on SO a lot is people assuming your question is an instance of the "XY problem" when it's not.

mjw1007 8y ago
Also the case where for the original asker it really was was an XY instance, but now the top google result for "how do I fill a bathtub using a hosepipe?" goes to a Stack Overflow page full of people refusing to answer the question.
- misnome 8y ago
  ...which was then closed for being a duplicate of another question, even though they are different questions that superficially look similar
- dmurray 8y ago
  Got a link? I can't find the page in Google, DDG or Stack Exchange search using that search text.
  - PascLeRasc 8y ago
    I think it was just an example, but now there's this lively discussion about us: https://chat.meta.stackexchange.com/transcript/89/2018/7/15/3 https://chat.meta.stackexchange.com/transcript/89/2018/7/15/...
mark-r 8y ago
The thing is, 99 times out of 100 it really is an XY problem. If you're the 1 out of 100 then it sucks to be you; I guess the free advice is worth exactly what you paid for it. I don't often make that accusation, but the last time I did that's exactly what it turned out to be. They were trying to dive deep into the internals of C++ to find out why their debugger was hanging, and what they were asking for just didn't have an answer. They finally found that they were doing something that led to undefined behavior, and if they had asked about that instead the question would have been answered immediately.
- blt 8y ago
  I have ~7k reputation there, that should be a pretty strong signal, but apparently it's not.
  - mark-r 8y ago
    The person asking the question above has a 5k reputation. Mine is over 100k so I've seen quite a bit.

setzer22 8y ago

When asking "unpopular" questions on SO I usually include a disclaimer along the lines that I want to know the answer for education purposes and any answer that is not specifically addressing the question at hand will get downvoted and never accepted. This works to some extent. In the end, I stopped asking questions on SO because dealing with this kind of behaviour was too tiresome. I'm glad to see I'm not the only one who thinks like that

de_watcher 8y ago
It heavily depends on the tag. Some tags have friendly communities that will give a dozen of pointers in the comments.