I know it's been around awhile, but this is the first time I've seen it: How to ask hackers smart questions. I wish I could tatoo this on the ass of 75% of the people that work around here:

The first thing to understand is that hackers actually like hard problems and good, thought-provoking questions about them. If we didn't, we wouldn't be here. If you give us an interesting question to chew on we'll be grateful to you; good questions are a stimulus and a gift. Good questions help us develop our understanding, and often reveal problems we might not have noticed or thought about otherwise. Among hackers, "Good question!" is a strong and sincere compliment.

Despite this, hackers have a reputation for meeting simple questions with what looks like hostility or arrogance. It sometimes looks like we're reflexively rude to newbies and the ignorant. But this isn't really true.

What we are, unapologetically, is hostile to people who seem to be unwilling to think or to do their own homework before asking questions. People like that are time sinks — they take without giving back, they waste time we could have spent on another question more interesting and another person more worthy of an answer. We call people like this "losers" (and for historical reasons we sometimes spell it "lusers"). (emphasis added)

Arrogant? Absolutely. In the hacker world, I'm at best on the top of the lower 3rd of the ladder (I only know three programming languages, two of those are "toys", and I can't do discreet math in my head). I've been on the short end of the hacker stick at least as many times as I've been able to whack a newbie on the butt with it.

Especially in the open source world (OS), everyone expects you to learn (and be interested in!) how their pet project works before they'll help you in actually getting it to work. The dark secret of the OS community is if you don't make them feel appreciated, stroke their egos, you're usually not going to get much help. The bigger the community, the worse this tendency gets.

The ultimate lesson of the FAQ is probably one of the ultimate lessons in life: if you follow all the steps exactly, do all the research you can, and read all the instructions available, you usually won't even need to ask a question.

What's not often understood in the hacker community is that if they actually wrote good software instead of interesting software, extensive documentation instead of minimal comments, and worked from the assumption that people are only interested in what it does and could care little to nothing about how it works, they wouldn't need to deal with most of these stupid questions. They simply would never be asked.

I wonder if there's a FAQ out there called "How to write software that doesn't require a hacker to use." I'm sure the reflex answer from the community would be "it's called college", but judging by the very existence of this FAQ, that's the wrong answer.