There Are No Stupid Questions

11 Dec 2016

The first thing to learn when looking for help on the internet is that the title of this writing is a blatant lie.

There are two ways to ask questions, and many of them are wrong. In order to get a helpful answer you must provide plenty of information to those you are asking:

  1. What have you tried?
  2. What are you trying to accomplish?
  3. What have your previous efforts yielded?

You must also provide as much of your code base as possible, because a lot of the time the bug will not be in the exact place you’re looking.

Example 1

Current Java Directory

This is an example of a bad question. The asker does not provide the correct output that they want to get. Instead they simply say that they’re getting incorrect output from a command which in and of itself is not incorrect.

As the comments prove, the folks who even bother to answer are asking for more detail. One person redirects to another (possibly more useful) answer elsewhere on SO.

Example 2

Lisp Warning

This question is much more productive. The entire code base is provided, since it’s small, and the exact warning is copied in. It turns out to be something simple and the responses provided a clear answer.