To whoever hacked into my Database

[Chris Angelico]

On Sat, Nov 9, 2013 at 4:11 AM,  <rurpy at yahoo.com> wrote:
> On 11/08/2013 03:05 AM, Νίκος Αλεξόπουλος wrote:
>> I never ignore advices.
>> I read all answers as carefully as i can.
>> But nevertheless sometimes i feel things should have been better
>> implemented using my way.
>>
>> Not of course that i know better, but thats better suited for me in the
>> level iam.
>
> Most of the "advice" I've seen posted here has, as far
> as I can tell, not intended to be useful but to serve
> as a way to telling you are incompetent are in other ways
> insulting or useless.  I think you are quite right to
> ignore it (or tell the poster to get lost.)

Actually no; most of the advice has been genuine.

> Long before you showed up here, I noticed the tendency
> to not answer questions directly but to jerk people off
> by giving hints or telling them to do something other
> than they want to do.
>
> Often that is good because the original request was
> for something that the OP really didn't want to do.
> But sometimes the OP knows they want to do (but doesn't
> want or is unable to clearly explain why) and when
> they clearly state that, yes, they do want to do it
> their way, their question should be answered in good
> faith or, for those who just can't tell how to do
> something "wrong", ignored.

I disagree. If you go to a doctor and ask for a prescription for
<insert name of medication>, the doctor is quite right in refusing if
s/he believes that that won't help you. If the OP asks for a way to
stuff more into a single record in MySQL, then we're right to say "No,
don't do it that way".

Generally, people who ask for one thing and are advised another will
see that the advice is actually getting them to where they really
wanted to be. There's another thread now about calling from Python
into C, which I haven't been following closely, but I saw a comment
from its OP to the effect of "Oh right! Standard input/output would do
what I want!" - it may not have been specifically what was asked for,
but it was helpful. If it's not helpful, give a reason for that.

Do you (anyone) know better than all the people of this newsgroup? I
would think not, firstly because you're asking the question (why are
you asking if you already know better), and secondly because the
collective knowledge and skill is far greater than any individual's.
So why reject advice out of hand? If it's inapplicable for some
reason, _explain why_. Don't just go back and forth saying "But I want
it done like this" when all of us and conventional wisdom all say not
to do it.

ChrisA