The XY Problem (2014) • Hacker News Board

Re: The XY Problem (2014)

#71

Post by anigbrowl » Sat, May 08, 2021, 12:55 AM UTC

moralestapia wrote: post #20

coldtea wrote: post #2

The worst XY problem is knowing you want to do Y, even if its strange or whatever, asking how to do it, and people asking you "why do Y? Do X instead". Happens all the time in Stack Overflow. Just answer the fucking question, and then give the lecture on why you think it should be done that way, or why it shouldn't be done at all...

Regarding SO, it suffers from a strange form of cognitive dissonance: A. You can't ask "what's the best way to do X" because, for whatever reason, these kind of questions are not aligned with "the site's scope". but B. When you ask something specific, you get a lot of "it's better if you do X" answers. I even have had some really nice questions closed because some mods thought I was "asking the wrong thing". Both beh…

I have also been perplexed by that. I think it's a kind of gatekeeping similar to notability policing on Wikipedia.

Re: The XY Problem (2014)

#72

Post by jameshart » Sat, May 08, 2021, 12:59 AM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #65

pwdisswordfish8 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> known-quantity HTML where regex will work just fine (say, extract all href out of all a elements), Regex doesn’t work fine even on that. You still need to tell apart actual tags from contents of attributes, comments, uninterpreted contents of , and so on. A regex alone doesn’t give you the ability to do that. If you want to parse HTML, you need a parser. Simple as that.

> Regex doesn’t work fine even on that. Most of the time it works just fine for my purposes. And it's not like I don't know alternatives. And I've written a toy compiler in the past (C with classes subset), done heavy XSLT work, know how to write a parser (manually, with flex/yacc, with PEG), have parsed XML with SAX, DOM, XOM, have used xpath expressions, css and jquery selectors, and used libs like BeautifulSoup. M…

If you're in a situation where you know enough about both HTML and regex to know that you can definitely solve your HTML parsing problem safely using a regex...

What possible question could you have for an online forum?

Re: The XY Problem (2014)

#73

Post by chris_wot » Sat, May 08, 2021, 1:08 AM UTC

wayneftw wrote: post #25

My wife does this all the time. I didn't know there was a name for it! By now I know to ask her what the actual problem is right up front.

Be careful, she might answer that you are the actual problem. I’m pretty certain that’s what my wife would tell me!

Re: The XY Problem (2014)

#74

Post by bhk » Sat, May 08, 2021, 1:33 AM UTC

The mentality of this author is problematic.

From the perspective of someone asking for Y, I've often been a victim of this because I'm met with a slew of imagined X's -- X0, X1, X2, ... an unending list of problems, often more complicated than Y -- due to their narrow preconceptions, making the whole exercise of asking someone not worth the time.

From the perspective of someone being asked for Y, yes, often I can suspect that there might be some mis-matched X there, but in order to be helpful, I try to answer Y directly and honestly, and then point out my concerns, describing my presumptions. If, indeed, the one posing the question has jumped to some invalid conclusion Y from X, then I've given them all I can. Trying to pre-empt it by telling them "don't do that!" is pointless -- if they knew where they had made an unwarranted conclusion, they wouldn't be asking the wrong question to begin with.

Re: The XY Problem (2014)

#75

Post by PurpleFoxy » Sat, May 08, 2021, 1:52 AM UTC

joe_the_user wrote: post #39

The XY approach can be perfectly legitimate. You're a domain expert. You have a problem X. It's a standard problem in your domain but only you can really understand it. However, you can see that a general purpose approach, Y, could solve it. Y might even sound complicated but is at least fully explainable whereas X isn't easily explainable at all. Of course, the "XY problem" usually presumes a naive person ("user")wh…

Sure, but it’s still worth explaining what X is to give people context. Also the majority of question askers tend to be the ones who came up with the incorrect solution or are trying to use something dangerous to solve their problem.

Re: The XY Problem (2014)

#76

Post by smrq » Sat, May 08, 2021, 1:58 AM UTC

bhk wrote: post #74

The mentality of this author is problematic. From the perspective of someone asking for Y, I've often been a victim of this because I'm met with a slew of imagined X's -- X0, X1, X2, ... an unending list of problems, often more complicated than Y -- due to their narrow preconceptions, making the whole exercise of asking someone not worth the time. From the perspective of someone being asked for Y, yes, often I can su…

Not sure why you are complaining about this author in particular when both of the examples in the link show exactly what you asked for: they answer Y and then ask for clarification on X.

Re: The XY Problem (2014)

#77

Post by Blikkentrekker » Sat, May 08, 2021, 2:01 AM UTC

bhk wrote: post #74

The mentality of this author is problematic. From the perspective of someone asking for Y, I've often been a victim of this because I'm met with a slew of imagined X's -- X0, X1, X2, ... an unending list of problems, often more complicated than Y -- due to their narrow preconceptions, making the whole exercise of asking someone not worth the time. From the perspective of someone being asked for Y, yes, often I can su…

I very much echo this experience.

I have ben asked countless times to explain the problem, and in practice problems are harder to explain than attempted solutions. I once spent a long time explain the architecture of a multiserver supervisor dæmon manager because they insisted when I was looking for a rather simple answer regarding unix domain sockets.

The actual problem often requires an explanation of the entire design strategy of the software at hand, which is often much.

Re: The XY Problem (2014)

#78

Post by Kranar » Sat, May 08, 2021, 2:09 AM UTC

chowells wrote: post #14

coldtea wrote: post #2

The worst XY problem is knowing you want to do Y, even if its strange or whatever, asking how to do it, and people asking you "why do Y? Do X instead". Happens all the time in Stack Overflow. Just answer the fucking question, and then give the lecture on why you think it should be done that way, or why it shouldn't be done at all...

There are a few people who frequently have this complaint, but I don't think it's a real problem. If you actually need to do Y in a situation where most people who think they need to do Y are wrong, it's not everyone else's responsibility to divine that you are the magical case. It's your responsibility to demonstrate that you actually do know what you're doing. This isn't something you do by discussing how unfair ot…

>it's not everyone else's responsibility to divine that you are the magical case.

The irony here is that the only divining happening is assuming that I should be doing Y when I specifically asked for a solution to X.

What you're proposing also requires me to divine all the ways that people will say "Don't do X, do Y." and explicitly state how I don't wish to do Y but really just want to accomplish X.

"I'd like to accomplish X. No I can't do Y1 since E1, no I can't do Y2 since E2, ..., Y_N since E_N. Please just stick to X."

It would be better if people just stuck to X in the first place, instead of doing all this divining. It also makes it really frustrating for others who share problem X and search for solutions to problem X, only to get people solving problem Y.

Re: The XY Problem (2014)

#79

Post by Blikkentrekker » Sat, May 08, 2021, 2:21 AM UTC

at_a_remove wrote: post #37

chowells wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a few people who frequently have this complaint, but I don't think it's a real problem. If you actually need to do Y in a situation where most people who think they need to do Y are wrong, it's not everyone else's responsibility to divine that you are the magical case. It's your responsibility to demonstrate that you actually do know what you're doing. This isn't something you do by discussing how unfair ot…

That sounds great in theory, but in practice you end up having this enormous, long list of "defenses" as to why it isn't an XY problem, and then ... people will ignore them anyway. This has happened to me on Hacker News. People hit that XY button more than needed, and I have seen this even in the earliest days of Linux. I remember, pre-Google, when asking some questions on IRC about recompiling the kernel for my dist…

I even have this issue in language learning.

I ask a quæstion about a specific, unusual grammatical form in a language I find hard to understand, and I am met with “You should instead phrase it in this more basic way that you already understand.”.

I am obviously not asking how to translate the specific example sentence I conjured up, I am asking about how to use the specific grammatical form I inquired about.

Re: The XY Problem (2014)

#80

Post by version_five » Sat, May 08, 2021, 2:28 AM UTC

joe_the_user wrote: post #39

The XY approach can be perfectly legitimate. You're a domain expert. You have a problem X. It's a standard problem in your domain but only you can really understand it. However, you can see that a general purpose approach, Y, could solve it. Y might even sound complicated but is at least fully explainable whereas X isn't easily explainable at all. Of course, the "XY problem" usually presumes a naive person ("user")wh…

Classic physical world example: I was making a wooden frame to go between a light fixture and the ceiling of the overhang on my porch. I made the frame in my workshop, was going to paint it and mount it outside.

So I went to home depot and asked for exterior paint. It was winter, and I instantly got a lecture about how you can't paint outside because it's too cold (before the guy showed me where the paint was).

It's minor obviously, but it stands out because it's just like all these internet discussions where someone would rather tell you you're doing it wrong then try and help you. To me it's a cultural problem along the lines of lots of "we better not give people information because they are not enlightened enough to use it the way we want them too" ways of thinking. Personally I think it's a bad approach everywhere.