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gosub100today at 6:43 PM1 replyview on HN

You were rude but I understand what you mean. People can obviously Google "reverse engineering tutorial" or something similar. And certainly "what are good resources for X" can be a way to signal interest in something, get people to respond, and not necessarily do anything about it. But I think the most charitable interpretation of that question is they want a group consensus for the best place to start, since Google might return a heavily promoted site that had deprecated info. I remember years ago people hated "cplusplus.com" because out of a volume that is the size of a textbook, it had a few bad examples. So instead they promoted cppreference. (For learning C++).

I think we should conclude people want to maximize learning while minimizing wasted time, hence they ask for the "best resources". Even though the question seems tiring at times (when I was on reddit I heard this constantly, and cynically projected that very few people actually used the resources they requested. But I solved this problem by quitting/getting banned from Reddit and never looked back).


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palatatoday at 8:04 PM

> can be a way to signal interest in something, get people to respond, and not necessarily do anything about it.

I can explain my intent, since I asked the question :-).

"Signal interest in something in the hope of starting a discussion with people who share that interest and may have interesting stories to share".

I loved IRC for that. I could join a channel, ask a question and sometimes someone knowledgeable would engage in a discussion with me. Often nobody answered, but because IRC was "ephemeral", I could ask again another time, and another one, hoping to eventually find someone interested.

> I think we should conclude people want to maximize learning while minimizing wasted time

In my case (and I want to believe that in many other cases), it's really just that people (me, here) would like to have some human interaction about a topic.

I know how to learn, I was not asking about that. I was trying to start a conversation with humans, that's all.

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