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

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.