Why Won't You Answer My Question?
1–10 of 112 posts
Re: Why Won't You Answer My Question?
#2This problem of people asking bad questions has been around a long time. A really long time.
Here's a resource to deal with it:
https://www.mikeash.com/getting_answers.html
Here's another, somewhat harsher version that preceded that:
http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
These were discussed on the C2 wiki a long time ago:
http://wiki.c2.com/?HowToAskQuestionsTheSmartWay
But the issues remain - people are sometimes lazy, sometimes asses, sometimes jerks, and often suffer from learned helplessness.[0] In each case, answering their question is not always the right thing to do.
Re: Why Won't You Answer My Question?
#3Makes me wonder if there's an opportunity here. Some service where you can actually pay money up front to guarantee an answer to your question, regardless of how it's worded and expect it done within a short time frame. Kind of like the Stack Exchange sites, except for people with more money than patience.
Practically speaking though, my advice for people stuck on something like this is (in addition to doing some actual research and wording your question correctly) to not ask on question and answer sites at all. Stack Overflow is nice and all (especially when looking up answers to already answered questions), but I tend to get a lot more useful responses from forums and subreddits. Perhaps because people there tend not to get so high strung over idiocy.
Re: Why Won't You Answer My Question?
#4Makes me wonder if there's an opportunity here. Some service where you can actually pay money up front to guarantee an answer to your question, regardless of how it's worded and expect it done within a short time frame. Kind of like the Stack Exchange sites, except for people with more money than patience. Practically speaking though, my advice for people stuck on something like this is (in addition to doing some act…
That would be quite an interesting site. I put up some cash in my account and then ask a question. It would be an interesting dynamic if other people needing the same answer added money to the bounty for the answer, or even the original person upping the offer. Easy revenue stream as a tax on the bounty. That would be a fun one.
Re: Why Won't You Answer My Question?
#5Makes me wonder if there's an opportunity here. Some service where you can actually pay money up front to guarantee an answer to your question, regardless of how it's worded and expect it done within a short time frame. Kind of like the Stack Exchange sites, except for people with more money than patience. Practically speaking though, my advice for people stuck on something like this is (in addition to doing some act…
I think that's called a support contract.
Re: Why Won't You Answer My Question?
#6This problem of people asking bad questions has been around a long time. A really long time. Here's a resource to deal with it: https://www.mikeash.com/getting_answers.html Here's another, somewhat harsher version that preceded that: http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/smart-questions.html These were discussed on the C2 wiki a long time ago: http://wiki.c2.com/?HowToAskQuestionsTheSmartWay But the issues remain - people are…
I admire anyone who has the patience to answer questions on places like Stack Overflow or mailing lists. I don't have that particular helping gene. I'll help you move, though.
Re: Why Won't You Answer My Question?
#7Makes me wonder if there's an opportunity here. Some service where you can actually pay money up front to guarantee an answer to your question, regardless of how it's worded and expect it done within a short time frame. Kind of like the Stack Exchange sites, except for people with more money than patience. Practically speaking though, my advice for people stuck on something like this is (in addition to doing some act…
You are going to get in situations where the "answer" brings up a topic like the "halting problem". The asker might not be satisfied with that.
Or what if the asker has a misunderstanding of computer architecture? "Help, my multithreaded program is crashing!"
Re: Why Won't You Answer My Question?
#8Doing open source in my free time, I've found solace in realizing what is worse than getting barrage of unresearched, silly, or perhaps bad questions:
Getting no questions at all.
This means that nobody is using your project, and that makes me feel defeated far more than having person ask me why he uploaded my project's python files to public_html on his $2 shared hosting, and no app is showing up in his browser.
Re: Why Won't You Answer My Question?
#9Haha, yeah go ahead and try to fight this battle. You'll lose.
I'm constantly baffled by bug reports I receive. From other people who work at my company. A tech company. A large one. You've heard of it.
We log every operation in our API. I cache errors, and the API returns a JSON formatted error with a GUID that correlates to the operation that failed, so if I have a GUID I can look at exactly what happened every step of the way, and what went wrong, in the logs.
Most of the time, all I need to fix a bug or tell you why you're having a problem is the GUID from the error message. You don't even need to ASK a question. I log stack traces of any exceptions that occur so our logs are almost as good as running the software through a debugger.
The bug reports I'd expect and want?
"Hey, I got this error message that I copy/pasted below...can you tell me what's going on?"
"Hey I think your system is down."
"Is something wrong with your system?"
"I tried to do something and got an error. Is something wrong? No, I don't know what the error was."
"We're getting this weird error when we try X. I dunno, it was just weird. It works now though."
"I think the data you're returning is wrong."
"Hey, we've been discussing this issue we've had with that depends on your system. We assumed your system has been down for the last couple of days and have been blaming your team in email threads you're not on because isn't working. Nobody told you or your team. When is your system going to be fixed? No we don't have any examples or any record of error messages from your system."
(Resolution: problem is bug in )
Re: Why Won't You Answer My Question?
#10... and if you do heed the advice of the OP, and post a well-considered question on stackoverflow, researched to the best of your ability, you will often get back a withering dismissal from some asshole who has taken it upon himself to police against "bad questions".