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what I see on SO a lot is people assuming your question is an instance of the "XY problem" when it's not.
by 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 agoAlso 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 agoGot a link? I can't find the page in Google, DDG or Stack Exchange search using that search text.
- PascLeRasc 8y agoI 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 agoThe 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.