It's the type of response a younger me would have said before I found out how wrong I can be even on subjects I think I know a lot about. My response now to such a question would be "That's weird, mySQL should work on all laptops. Let me take a look." From that point on I'm expecting it to be an error the person didn't understand, but I'm open to the idea that it might be a failure of their install script due to an odd configuration of the laptop, or even a symptom of another problem somewhere else, such as limited disk space, incorrectly installed drivers, or even a hardware issue.

People who know too little about a topic know they are often wrong.

People who know too much about a topic also know they are often wrong.

It's the people in the middle who have unlimited confidence and arrogance.

There's a far more charitable interpretation (and explanation) of this: broadness.

People who know too little don't know how to get to the happy path, let alone stay in there.

People who know too much know extensively where the happy path lies, it's neighborhood, how to go off-road out of the happy path and the dangers that lie therein.

People in the middle know how to get to the happy path and remain there, and know that steering away from the happy path leads to trouble and ambiguity. As they mastered the happy path then they feel unlimited confidence and arrogance.

Exactly.

It's entirely possible that it's correct depending on the specifics. Say for example one is trying to install MySQL 8.0 on a laptop with Catalina, which is still supported by Apple and getting security updates. This is actually unsupported and won't work. A somewhat unlikely situation but definitely not impossible.

https://www.mysql.com/support/supportedplatforms/database.ht...

> Let me take a look

Exactly what the crafty older person wanted. Get you to do the work. "It doesn't work on my computer" or some other claim of trouble or ignorance is an easy way to trick a smart energetic young person to do something for you.

Young smart people don't like to say "I don't know how" or "I can't get it to work." An older person will say that without hesitation if it will prompt someone else to do something that he doesn't want to do himself.

This is an uncharitably suspicious inferring of the other person's motives. Is it required that the "older person" self-identify their technical limitations every time, before you will read their verbalization of the situation as a basic statement of frustration and/or admission of technical defeat?

For many people, the notion of debugging a MySQL installation on Windows so that it works seems about as plausible as summitting K2 - they don't expect others nearby can simply do it, either. (Also, the suggestion of inter-generational manipulation is not attractive.)

> This is an uncharitably suspicious inferring of the other person's motives.

Agreed.

The charitable interpretation is a lot more reasonable: a parent/elder wants to spend time with their child/younger, and is even taking an interest in their career/hobbies.

I don’t think it’s uncharitable. It just recognizes that there are always energetic problem solvers out there who will jump at the chance to prove someone wrong.

It’s kind of like the well known technique: “If you want the right answer to your question, confidently post the wrong answer and wait for the replies.”

I'd say the implied request for help or at least ideas for troubleshooting or alternatives is so obvious and natural that it doesn't merit this level of suspicion about ulterior motives. It's completely normal to say "I can't reach the top shelf" and mean "can you help me get something off the top shelf?"

As an aside, commonplace implicatures like these are a kind of what's called "pragmatics" in linguistics.

My help comes at a price; they are going to sit there with me and listen to me blather on about what I'm looking at and what I find and what the solution was :)

>he doesn't want to do himself.

"want"?

The problem in those examples is not rejecting the premise, it's doing so in a dismissive, arrogant way.

I've had customers, friends, and family members tell me time and time again that they can't do some common, everyday thing on their computers because it's "not compatible", or it "won't let them", or it "doesn't work". If they're wrong, I show them where they're wrong, what they need to do to fix the problem and avoid similar ones in the future. No need to be dismissive, or berate them for not knowing something. It ends up being a nice "today I learned" situation for them, and we all win.

Honestly, the world would be a much more amazing place if it would be taught in schools that just "it doesn't work" does not convey any meaningful information. I don't mean this as complaint, just saying that it's so extremely common and so simple it can be a part of curriculum or a social campaign that has potential to save a lot of human-hours (and lots of frustration) just by spreading a simple meme/idea.

Also, I can't say I perceive the dismissal from the quote alone. Those two short sentences feel like a very brief excerpt from beginning of a conversation so it's hard to gauge, but I feel that it's an exclamation of surprise that's non-committal and lacking an explicit offer to proceed with details, rather than dismissive (or worse). Circumstances, tone, body language, relationship and other things may make it vary, of course. Can't say it's arrogant either, "no way, it must work" is a legit exclamation that doesn't imply incompetence (unless, again, tone etc).

I'd say it's just passive, not taking any initiative to troubleshoot and communicating just the assurance that the problem must be solvable, then bouncing back to the inquirer. In my understanding, it's more of a lazy/not being in the mood, not dismissive (and I'd have a really hard time trying to call it "toxic").

> Honestly, the world would be a much more amazing place if it would be taught in schools that just "it doesn't work" does not convey any meaningful information.

Couldn't agree more. My first step when troubleshooting anything for someone else is to extract as much information as possible to understand what I'm dealing with. Having that information from the start would save me a lot of time.

>I can't say I perceive the dismissal from the quote alone.

True, the quote alone is not necessarily dismissive or arrogant, and your interpretation could very well be correct. I'm assuming it was dismissive because the author seems troubled by his own response, which he interprets as "I just told him that he's wrong and he doesn't know what he's doing". That's where my interpretation comes from.

Haha, agreed on both points :)

A bit off-topic but I've actually got an inverse problem... Before contacting support I'm trying to collect as much diagnostics as possible, so my first message tends to be a long detailed list of what's the problem, what I did, and what possibly useful (to best of my awareness) supplementary diagnostics I've already performed. This frequently confuses first-tier support folks who're used to people reaching out with mere "nothing works pls help!!1one" and going through checklists.

I try to avoid doing that now. It's like going to the doctor and spending 1/2 hour explaining anything that could possibly be related to the issue for which you came. I've found that it is much more helpful to give a concise summary, and be ready to answer very specific questions as they go through their logical process to figure out what actually is the problem. In some cases they need clues but don't know which ones, and then you need to tell everything (e.g. rare diseases, or bugs that happen once in a blue moon at 10:53 when the wind comes from the North). But then, they ask for it explicitly.

I've also had humbling experiences, particularly one with me going through what I thought was relevant and a very nice tech support lady telling me the equivalent of "but did you make sure you turned it on?", and she was right.

Overloading tier-1 techs with too much information rarely does any good, from my experience.

Very true

Yup, I do the same thing. I guess I'm lucky because I rarely have issues with my own gear and the services I use, so contacting support is not something I've needed to do frequently. But when I do, I spend a good amount of time doing research and making sure the issue actually merits bothering someone else and isn't something I can eventually fix on my own. Tier-1 support people are invariably caught by surprise :p

> Honestly, the world would be a much more amazing place if it would be taught in schools that just "it doesn't work" does not convey any meaningful information.

One problem is that most people are socialized heavily against going into these kinds of details in almost every situation they will experience. Only engineers are frequently around other people who want to know specifically what "it doesn't work" means. And even in those cases, you've got to tailor your level of detail with care. It's no wonder people learned to just say "it doesn't work", in the same way that they learned to reply to "how are you" with something vague rather than something extremely specific.

I agree it's the right thing to do, but what did you win in that situation?

I enjoy teaching people new things in general, but what I win specifically depends on the situation. With friends and family, it's the personal satisfaction of helping someone I care about.

With customers there's the added benefit of improving business relationships and building trust. If someone contacts me with a question, and I withhold the answer until they pay me, they're gonna feel cheated when they realise the answer was pretty straightforward. It doesn't matter if, technically, I'm providing a service and I'm within my rights to ask for compensation. That customer is going to hesitate to return in the future, because they now feel I just care about their money.

Being open, transparent, and helpful has the opposite effect, in my experience. The customer feels at ease with me, they trust my judgment, know that I'm looking out for them, and so are happy to return to me when they need something, and pay for the job.

A better assessment of the situation.

Case 1: the person learned and became more autonomous. Fewer questions like this will be asked in the future. You have developed good will.

Case 2: the person expects someone else to do their work. That won't fly for long with me. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, and I will react. Friends and family members can land on the no-contact list. Employees can get fired.

Assume the best, but always prepare for the worst.

Or they're like my father and can't remember things long term anymore because he's too old. I have to walk him through how to join a Discord server every single time I want to use it with him. He used to be good at this stuff, but I guess IQ studies are right that crystallized intelligence (which includes long term memory) goes down after 60.

The memories made along the way, obviously.

Never helping anyone with technical stuff unless you're getting paid (or whatever similar thing you can think of) is over-correcting for the doormats that can't say no

I stopped helping people, in general, when there were several instances of people telling me that whatever I did the last time I touched their computer caused some random problem 6 month later. That, and it seemed that people were getting upset when I would show them how to do things, within a couple of minutes (from just knowing where to navigate), that they had been struggling with for hours, or that they were, in fact, typing their password wrong. Maybe they weren't upset with me, but it was usually a negative experience for me, and it slowly chipped away at the glee I used to have for helping people.

One of the best pieces of advice I ever got was to maintain the capacity to be surprised. And they didn't mean maintaining the capacity to be surprised by someone exceeding expectations, but rather being surprised that the facts are not at all what I currently think they are.

I've noticed myself doing this in the last year or so. I've done it all my life, I'm sure, but it's the first time I really recognized the behavior. I wish I had caught it sooner because it definitely comes across as rude and a bit condescending.

I think for so many of us, we desire to be correct, or to correct people or the world, so much that we miss out on the true "signal" someone is sending us with their message. In this case, the author's dad wanting help in getting into programming.

I don't know if it's 100% true, but for me it feels like correcting people is partly wanting validation that I'm smart or know things. It's sort of performative, and can be very selfish.

This is typical programmer behavior. We end up in tech because we have more interest in thing than people. Empathy is not as developed as technical aptitude. I don't think it's a result of an online forum. Perhaps gathering with like minded people doesn't help but the problem goes deeper. Ultimately this sort of issue is about personal development. I say this as someone with plenty to work on myself.

Use whatever strategies you think will result in the personal growth you desire. One strategy might be to avoid HN. However HN is not the problem you are. Taking responsibility will help you grow. You're influenced by your environment but you're responsible for how you respond to your environment. You always have a choice.

Picking up feminine hobbies definitely balances out the need for constant mathematically rigorous accuracy. It softens the mind to enjoy the ride ;)

I don't even understand the premise. My answer would be "There's no chance it's not compatible with your laptop. Tell me what happened."

If I wasn't ready to argue, I wouldn't have said anything. Arguing in this case means to troubleshoot with him. Sometimes I think that other people think the purpose of argument is to hurt people. The purpose of argument (for me) is to make the people who are arguing smarter than they were before the argument. I don't get pleasure out of hurting my father or showing him up - I like my father. If anything, I want to make him feel smarter than he is, and I hope he feels the same about me.

edit: Also, it may turn out this is a weird corner-case and MySQL is somehow incompatible with his laptop. I'm not a MySQL scientist. After finding that out, though, I'm a tiny bit closer to being one.

I think this is the sentiment that they are fighting back on and calling toxic. I tend to agree. I don't want to argue and don't think it is a very good path to learning or improvement. A better alternative IMHO is conversation or joint exploration.

I think the biggest challenge is the format of internet dialog is conducive to argument that it leads people to forget or skip other modes of conversation.

If I asked for help with a problem and someone tried to argue with me, I would think they are toxic and look for help elsewhere. I didn't ask for help because I was looking for a fight.

The Socratic method and debate is good if you want to find the errors in your thinking. But I'm not trying to philosophically debug my thought processes and world view. I just want to fix a damn program.

This. I don't get it either. In my view, the "no way, it must work" is a non-optimal but perfectly valid conversation starter (please explain me why not if I'm wrong). As long as that's not the whole conversation (which would mean there are way worse problems than lack of explicit inquiry in that response) and there's at some sort of follow-up from either party, I don't really see the problem here.

(Disclaimer: I'm explicitly not thinking up circumstances, tone, gestures or anything else not included in that short snippet. Obviously. It's well possible same exact words spoken in different contexts or with different tone or body language may have quite opposite meanings.)

Yes, there are better responses. But it's definitely not a "well, that sucks and you're wrong, go try some more" either.

I think the issue is how people approach the purpose of conversation.

Many internet forum conversations take the form of arguing or debate. That is to say, the goal is getting to the bottom of a dispute showing someone that they are wrong (or learning that you are).

People who do this often fall into the habit of defaulting to this mindset and goal in conversations where this is not the purpose.

"no way, it must work" is a non-optimal but perfectly valid conversation starter. The problem is when there isnt follow up on the real point of the conversation (helping dad), because they treated the interaction as an argument to be won.

>My dad told me that he wants to dabble in programming, but MySQL isn’t compatible with his laptop. My response? "Yeah there’s no way that’s true. MySQL will work on anything." Instead of taking a look at this laptop and working on the problem with him, I just told him that he's wrong and he doesn't know what he's doing (basically).

The other example is even more telling:

>my ex-girlfriend once told me that hospitals can’t require their staff to wear N95 masks at all times -- only regular masks. I immediately said "I don’t believe that. They can probably do whatever they want." Instead of being empathetic toward a nurse after a 12-hour shift, I was more concerned over hospital policy.

The ex-girlfirend isnt looking for a spirited argument or debate after a long day. They dont care about who is right or wrong, or getting to the factual bottom of things. The author is dragging this mindset into a conversation where it is unwanted and doesn't belong.

> I don't get pleasure out of hurting my father or showing him up - I like my father.

Sure but there's way to say something that may hurt someone... even if you don't intend to.

I think it's something that happens more on the web as we forget there's someone on the other side.

> Also, it may turn out this is a weird corner-case and MySQL is somehow incompatible with his laptop.

You started with "There's no chance" though... You may be ready to change your stance, but your first sentence didn't have that possibility. What someone understands by your sentence is that "I am the problem" instead of "there may be a problem".

I don't think OP example was the best to illustrate the issue, but I don't have a better example either, still struggling with that myself too.

I recognize myself in this story, but I wouldn't say that I mean to be mean or dismissive or superior. Usually it's that I fall into the trap of being 'too literal'. We spend all day being very precise about the conditions and cases where we are making changes, amendments, or extending capabilities. It drives me crazy when people won't just get to the point of the story or ask that can be scoped-out if-and-as necessary. I'm not talking about interacting with inexperienced people either, they're otherwise very intelligent and articulate but have a way of speaking that seems all so inefficient or ineffective, often adding lots of emotional embellishments that don't change the problem statement.

Now, I'm not usually as unaware of insensitive as that description may sound, but you may be able to see some truth in the patterns.

[I kind-of feel like I'm on a rant, so I'll add this too. The worst is when engineers at a meeting debate the 'root cause' theorizing all the permutations and possibilities to identify the correct one, taking as long as that takes. Often a simple search through the source-code or log files would have narrowed it down to but a few to easily verify--but they'd rather be playing RCA golf out loud.]

I try to shoot for something like "what was the error message you got?" or something at least moderately helpful like that.

That's a really unhelpful response, because it just seeks to deny what that user has just experienced! A better approach is to say that MySQL just being incompatible with stuff is not something that's supposed to happen, but as part of asking for clarification on how the supposed incompatibility came about (or even simply as offering to look into it, if appropriate), so as to helpfully root-cause and troubleshoot the issue. The basic facts you're relying on are exactly the same, but the underlying attitude could not be more different!

I struggle with understanding this viewpoint. I don't think the son is being harsh or dismissive, in fact it strikes me as utterly guileless. He has a reaction . o O (That can't be right...) and voices it without artifice or manipulation.

On the other hand, the father presumably knows that the son is technically inclined, but dismisses his expertise out of hand. He's struggling, but he doesn't say "I'm struggling getting this to work." The author presumes that the father wants him to help, and I defer to him on that, but the father doesn't ask for help. Instead he stakes out an extreme position (it's incompatible!). In some cases, people do this in an intentionally manipulative way! (See comment in this thread about the timeless technique of confidently stating a wrong answer to goad people into jumping in.)

I don't know the author or his father, so I don't know what their actual intentions or interactions are. Please don't read my comment as impugning them or their motives in any way. But the hypothetical situation as presented does not lead me to the conclusions that I think the author intends readers to reach.

You know, I think that is not toxic, and I would argue it is not smart or dumb ( so to speak ) as the author tries to put it.

It is simply youth and inexperience, or age and wisdom depending on the situation and how you view it.

And that is a problem in online discussion because I dont know people's age. ( And that is going to get drawn into ageism discussions but let's ignore that for now ) If I know you are only 20ish. My first instinct wouldn't be try and correct you it "really" isn't working. It is to convince you to take a look. And give you directions. You cant give people answer to questions or problems they have. They have to figure it out the answer themselves. The experience of real learning.

And online discussions misses a lot of these context. Or at least very hard to do it correctly.

You should, in most cases grown out of it in your 30s, or about 10 years after you start working in the society. And laugh about the stupidity of it in your 40s or 50s.

My biggest concern is somehow there are increasingly number of people, especially in tech ( I have no idea why ) that dont grown out of it.

“Congrats, your first lesson in programming is troubleshooting a MySQL installation”. I would help him logically troubleshoot, and understand how to enjoy* the problem rather than be frustrated by it, but no way would I do it for him. He’ll have many harder problems soon enough. Make it a teachable moment.

* I’m not saying it will always be enjoyable - nothing sucks more than things that should work but don’t when you’re on a schedule, but if it’s your first foray into taking technical “ownership” of your system, ya better learn to be interested in the new problems, understanding the clockworks, and learning to think as the machine does.

Sometimes I wish I were a little more like that. Instead I agonize over wording so I don't sound impolite / stupid and often choose to say nothing, even where my input might be useful. I guess there are worse things.

the reaction I had was, don't speak to your Dad with the same tone you would use in a HN thread.

why speak to anyone that way at all?

Exactly.

But you’re right.

Getting it to work is a Google search.

If people want to collaborate, sure. I play 3 instruments, have stripped multiple cars to the frame, and rebuilt them, grown food, cooked everything. Lets collaborate on something worth connecting over.

Please don’t make me collaborate over copy-pasting a bash script or a one line Docker command.

I find those issues have nothing to do with the complexity of figuring it out but belief in division of labor. A sad, functionally fixed idea of what a person can do.

Same tbh, this article made me realize I do it lots. But also did it since way back before I started reading HN.