I suspect that a lot of that context (or "buy-in") was missing, as it was when you explained it the first time here, which is why you got the response you did.
A lot of people show up in programming communities asking for help with their intro programming homework. Once you see a few dozen of those, it's understandable if your knee-jerk reaction is at least somewhat insulting.
Re:Hacker News is depressing
by sirclueless on Tuesday May 21, 2013 @09:16PM
(#5748185)
Agreed, context is everything. In the context of a poor guy with just this dead-simple programming question going to someone for help, being shut down hard is rude and unfair. In the context of a small community of programmers who are barraged constantly by novice questions, asking for evidence of significant amounts of effort on the part of the question-asker is the only way to avoid chaos.
I'm almost certain that this anecdote arises purely due to the structure of the forum in which the question was asked, and has very little bearing on the vitriol and malice (or lack thereof) present in the denizens of #C.
I think I had told them that I narrowed it down to that line, as they specifically offered to help me debug it. I said I got the error pinned down to line X, but still... It might have been a fluke, though, as I think there was one person who instigated this whole bad treatment. Apparently he was well-known for it, because someone said something like "heh, hell will freeze over before X will just hand out a solution".
Sure, but they didn't have to be dicks about it. They could have said "we don't want to tell you if it won't teach you anything" and I'd have left. Berating me wasn't very productive.
> fact probably could not do so without sacrificing a great deal.
It was a "you're using sprintf("%d") when you need sprintf("%u")" sort of thing. Not exactly that, but very easy.
> it's rather like going to a math tutor with your homework
Not really, given that I don't ever work with C. It's more like asking for help with a flat tire and having the person say "I will ask you questions until you figure out how to do it". Thanks, but I just want to get to my job interview on time.
> the folks answering questions still require a certain amount of buy-in
I had done all the debugging I could and narrowed it down to that specific line, but doing anything more would require reading a large amount of material (which I didn't know where to find) on the intricacies of the C standard/compiler/etc, so it wasn't like I just went in saying "help me I don't remember the for loop syntax".
> a refusal to help when someone just wants a quick answer doesn't sound unreasonable, and in fact may be all that holds their community together.
I doubt that's what holds a community together, and I agree that it's not unreasonable. However, the way they treated me was.