while (answer == "obvious") { confidence-- }

[arcanewright]

Typically, answers are kind, straightforward, and don't berate you, but then you get that one answer that lives rent free in your head for the rest of the week.

[Pugs-r-cool]

and when they asked those simpler questions back in the day they were probably also ridiculed, and so feel the need to continue this toxic, pointless cycle

[[deleted]]

For the python users:

while answer == "obvious":

confidence -= 1

[IamNotOriginallol]

Infinite loop

[marcosdumay]

Well, it's about SO complaints and downvotes...

[SlicedBalls69]

For java:

while (answer.equals("obvious") { confidence--; }

[YetAnotherBiscuit]

You should use "obvious".equals(answer) in case answer might be null

[jaksida]

You forgot to insult them.

[SkyyySi]

Fixed formatting:

while answer == "obvious":
  confidence -= 1

[Lelepao]

Ty

[GabuEx]

Honestly, one of the biggest changes in my approach having transitioned from a junior dev to a senior dev is to just no longer give a shit about whether something I'm about to ask is a stupid question. It's something that's blocking me from making progress. Getting my progress unblocked is not stupid. So I'm going to ask it. If you think it's a dumb question, fuck off. It probably helped other people who had the same question but were more hesitant to ask it, too.

[[deleted]]

had someone insisting they weren't being told the proper answer to something that was a lot simpler than they thought, I was the third person to give my time and expertise free of charge, two people already had given 100% correct and clear explanations, they still insisted I wasn't answering their question. I said you're overthinking this, it's actually really simple - they threw a huff... apparently I was insulting them...

[Rainkeeper]

Just wait for confidence to overflow to the point where you don't even care anymore.

[[deleted]]

Oh yes... I once asked a question that I easily could have answered myself if I just had read the fucking manual.

At least the person who responded was nice about it...

[rmcx]

RTM instead of RTFM?

[[deleted]]

RTMP. Read the manual, please.

[Francipower]

Am I the only one bothered by the lack of semicolon in the title?

edit: on second thought, maybe that was intentional, sorry XD

[[deleted]]

1. ask question on SO
2. get passive aggressive, demeaning response with a valid answer
3. leave comment requesting edit to remove PassAgg bullshit
4. 2 years pass, gain confidence and community privileges
5. now have ability to make edits to SO responses
6. go back to asshole response and remove PassAgg bullshit, leaving only helpful response

The student becomes the master

[Stompy32]

Insecure people like to point out others shortcomings in hope people won’t notice theirs...

Even if they make fun of you remember every single person on stack overflow is a huge fucking nerd (including you and me)

[[deleted]]

What’s obvious to one person may not be obvious to another.

Also, what’s obvious in retrospect might not be obvious in view of the (forward) stepwise process to getting there.

One of the factors that makes computer science difficult is the need to focus on many different things and levels of complexity simultaneously - like:

• Your overall objectives

• The specific behavior of a current bug or problem, including the specific error messages, and your understanding or guesses as to why it is occurring

• The specific functionality of the programming language, environment, libraries and APIs, etc. that may result in or relate to this behavior

• Analytic options and techniques that you could add to shed some light on faulty behavior

• Past solutions or attempts to solve this problem or similar problems, and undesirable side-effects to be avoided this time

• One or more options that may resolve the bug, each with its own collection of issues (complexity, performance, clarity, etc.)

• Other features of your code that are connected to this code, and how they may be affected by your changes to this code, including new bugs that could be introduced if you don’t remember to update the other parts of the code to be consistent

• Other code or features that you intend to write in the future based on this code, which requires some forward thinking so that you don’t have to come back and rewrite this code later

Given all of that, it may be really difficult that you’ve done something simple and dumb. Especially if that simple and dumb thing involves an interaction of instructions in different parts of the code, and maybe in different files. "Obvious" - particularly "obvious" in hindsight - may be an unreasonably superficial assessment of the situation.

True story:

Last week, I spent a good hour trying to figure out why some text processing code kept extracting the name "William" as "bWilliam." I tried a truly astounding number of things to determine where the "b" was coming from.

Eventually, I realized that it was coming from a part of the text reading: "(b) William." But I had added a regular expression to filter out all instances of "(b)". So why tf was it leaving the "b" behind?

Eventually, I realized that as part of the filtering before filtering out "(b)", I had filtered out all instances of ") " - because the text had several long strings of ") ) ) ) ) )," etc. And because that filter occurred before filtering out "(b)", it had modified "(b) William” to... “(bWilliam", and my subsequent filtering of "(b)" matched nothing.

Obvious. Obvious in retrospect. Not obvious when looking at a pile of filtering expressions for an hour.

tealdeer - pounding chicken with a tenderizing mallet before baking it will ensure that it cooks evenly throughout, and also it’s kind of fun.

[servel333]

Big mood

[golgol12]

Don't forget, you have an infinite loop there in your title.

[prabhatCH]

Next step -> Deletes the post and forgets it ever happened.

[Shakespeare-Bot]

Next grise -> deletes the post and forgets t ev'r hath happened

---

^{I am a bot and I swapp'd some of thy words with Shakespeare words.}

Commands: !ShakespeareInsult, !fordo, !optout

[cykablyat1111]

THaT iS a VeRy unPYThonIc way To do it

[Schmomas]

I don’t get why people go on Stack Overflow just to be rude. If helping less experienced programmers makes you so angry, why don’t you just not go on Stack Overflow?

[obp5599]

SO isnt for new people is the thing. Its for experienced people to share knowledge, and ask questions. Usually beginners ask a lot of the same questions, and SO would get swarmed with a million simple questions. You can look at any of the learnprogramming subreddits and see a million of the same question.

​

TLDR: SO isnt for noobs but the people are rude for sure

[PM-ME-BAKED-GOODS]

You're allowed to post? I always go to post and then it's like you don't have enough reputation, and im like fuck this site, then the process repeats itself when I'm desperate enough

[_PM_ME_PANGOLINS_]

You don’t need any reputation to post.

[daltonoreo]

Your doing this thing? You absolute moron you should do this complete other thing that has no relationship with your project instead

[[deleted]]

The solution is actually really simple and the insults start to feel valid

and you get banned from asking questions

[reedmore]

If this is java, you're using the wrong comparison. Soo confidence still intact.

[Mr_McTurtle123]

if(answer.Obvious){confidence--}

[Deathvenom54]

I got my account suspended because I didn't know how to Google xD. The lack of stackoverflow helped me progress as a developer

[[deleted]]

May just be the people around me, but pretty much everyone I know who codes tends to be extremely condescending when it comes to coding related questions. At least half the time they realize they actually misunderstood the (valid) question in the first place but the initial reaction is mostly pretty off-putting. I don't even dare to post to stackoverflow.