Don’t waste a hacker’s time!
After reading an article titled, “How to ask questions the smart way,” I became interested in seeing how others in the community asked questions. Being a CS student, I find myself often looking up questions on google and the top hit usually is stack overflow. I never really thought about asking questions because I usually find what I am looking for but this article has made me aware of proper etiquite that I would not have normally have thought about when asking a question. After searching through stack overflows, recent questions that I found that were marked answered followed the “object - deviation” form. I never really thought about how you want to make the people reading your post feel as if they are guiding you to the answer and not just straight up asking for a solution. Explaining what you are doing and what you tried makes your question more intuitive for your users and allows them to engage in the solution solving process rather than just giving redundant answers.
Smart Question link This question was the top trending question on stack overflow with over 300k views at the time. It is titled “Can (a ==1 && a== 2 && a==3) ever evaluate to true?”. This title drew me in because the obvious answer would seem to be no but the way the author presented it as an interview question made the reader want to solve the problem for a sense of accomplishment.
Bad Question link I had originally found another bad question that was taken down by the user due to a person complaining that it was off topic, which led me to another bad question by the same author. In his question he asks a yes or no question which if answered literally would not solve his problem. In his sample code he added the following comment “//Is it possible? Give me a solution for this situation:”. In his comment he asks yet another question simply demanding a solution. One of the comments read, “You should have just tried to compile it and read the errors…” which was kind of rude. A correct solution was posted explaining what the author did wrong and giving the correct code. The author did not mark the commenter’s post as an answer. Overall, I feel the author was lazy and did not give the person who answered his question any respect. If I was a person going through stack overflow, I would not want to help this person.
Sources: Inspiration(http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/smart-questions.html) Smart Question(https://stackoverflow.com/questions/48270127/can-a-1-a-2-a-3-ever-evaluate-to-true) Bad Question(https://stackoverflow.com/questions/39144526/how-to-declare-a-multidimensional-array-variable-with-two-or-more-single-array-i)