
How to Ask Questions the Smart Way (2001-2014) - cameronbrown
http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
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onion2k
Cunningham's Law - "The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is
not to ask a question, it's to post the wrong answer."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Cunningham#Cunningham's_L...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Cunningham#Cunningham's_Law)

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HNLurker2
Obviously not true. Not everyone gets upset over seeing wrong answers on the
internet

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senthil_rajasek
This seems dated. Especially the RTFM and STFW parts. Learning should be a fun
experience. There are people who love explaining things without having to use
RTFM and STFW.

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afarrell
I find that when asking questions to strangers, its best to think of it as
building something for someone else to build something on top of—-that
question has to have a certain amount of polish.

If you are struggling with the thing in general, its better to find a way to
get someone to agree to give you their focused attention. That probably means
hiring someone on [https://codementor.io](https://codementor.io)

Within a company however, you can often just say “I’m working on X and would
like a walkthrough about Y. Can I put some time on you calendar?” However, you
still delegating a task to your answerer and so you still want to put thought
into how you can set your answerer up for success. There is a post by Julia
Evans on asking questions of coworkers which is really helpful for thinking
about how to do this: [https://jvns.ca/blog/good-
questions/](https://jvns.ca/blog/good-questions/)

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kthejoker2
Another good resource

[https://ideas.redpepper.land/asking-great-
questions-15eb31e6...](https://ideas.redpepper.land/asking-great-
questions-15eb31e6eeaa)

Which includes a link to Humble Inquiry, the best book on the topic.

Required reading for consultants.

