Don't ask to ask, just ask.
See also <https://netsplit.de/channels/?chat=don%27t+ask+to+ask>.
edit: some wider-range searching suggests it might be Spanish for “kicked”.
It's considered bad etiquette because IRC channels are often quiet but still active - you're supposed to stick around and just ask your question directly rather than bailing when you don't see instant chatter.
which redirects(?) to
I hope this message finds you well.
I have a question.
-------
It’s simply not a game I want to play. My mind recommends answering »state your business«, but my polite-mind tells me not to.
Pretty overwhelming to me personally, but I could tell other coworkers were taken aback by it too.
the only working option is to ignore such people, you cannot teach people with reasoning, it never works
But do you see how that is your choice? You can just type "hello", or a longer form of the same, and then go back to work. You can then check back in about an hour to see if they managed to describe what they are looking for.
You can always change yourself, while it is so much harder to change others that it is almost futile. The true source of your distress is not them saying hello, but your understanding of that social expectation of realtime responses.
This is a defeatist attitude.
Sure, there are some people who will refuse to change no matter what. But many—probably even most—people, if you explain that this is your preferred method of communication when they have a question for you to answer, will at least try to operate that way.
It is not a defeatist attitude. It is a winning attitude.
You told people how you operate and you simply stick to it.
The thing you change about yourself is that you stop caring about the supposed “social expectation” that by writing “hello” they “opened a a synchronous channel“ with “expectations for somewhat realtime responses”.
Now imagine that someone heard that you use messaging asyncronously and yet they still send you a simple “hello” with nothing else. You have two choices here. You can play their game, write a “hello” back and patiently wait as they type out what they need from you. OR you can type to them “hello. long time no see, how can I help you today?” And then immediately forget about them and return back to your work. In due time when you check again your messages (maybe in an hour, maybe in half an hour) you will see if they messaged you. Maybe they will say what they want by then, maybe not.
My point is that while you can tell politely to people the benefits of getting to the point you can’t force them to do so. On the other hand you have full control over your reaction to them not following your prefered communication style.
You can get angry, and waste your time waiting for them. Or you can stay cool, keep on working, and answer them on your schedule and on your terms politely and to the best of your abilities.
If you think what i say is defeatist attitude then probably you are misunderstanding my point. It is not about changing how you communicate, but changing about how much you care about the “expectation of realtime responses”.
although these days I sometimes respond "how was your weekend" to continue the pleasantries :D
1. Respond with, "Hello. How can I help?", or
2. Wait until 5:30pm then respond, "Hello" and close my laptop for the dayA more mature way would be for "first offenders" to politely reply hi and help them with whatever they need and then when everything is done politely point out that asking directly would be better next time, perhaps with a link to some version of nohello.net. With "repeat offenders" sure, go ahead with what you are doing.
In my experience, even the comically over the top people-persons will be curt to chatty people if they're swamped with a task that doesn't revolve around verbal ability.
They'll also bounce back to "they won't put down <tool> and talk to me" gossip about the nerds once their deadline pressure is released. But whateves, that's life.
Intentionally ignoring people or otherwise being difficult out of spite is immature and disrespectful. That said, I see no reason to sit and wait for a response. Wait until I'm free (if it was urgent he should have specified that), reply "hi", tab out, and the thread goes back on the stack with all the others. No special treatment one way or the other.
Is tab-h-i-CR-tab really so onerous? Personally it doesn't even interrupt my line of thought.
The annoyance in TFA is that you have to do the handshake at all.
I suddenly no longer agree with TFA. This makes way more sense to me in this light.
when they could have just included `${QUERY}` in the initial send, or at least `framing(${QUERY})`.
In TCP, it's useful because it happens in a different layer of abstraction. Even then, QUIC was developed (partly) because it was realised there's no point waiting for the full SYN / SYN ACK / ACK before starting some of the higher-level exchange (although the early data transfer in QUIC is used for TLS initiation rather than application-level data).
In addition, seeing the chat bubbles appear moments after you finish your round is a good sign the other person isn't multitasking and letting their own attention get fractured.
I never found it rude to begin with, just not using the medium to its strengths. But this has me realizing maybe it's a deliberate way to eschew those strengths, for some purpose or another.
Instead you can pipeline both messages: `[hello][are you coming to lunch with us?]`, and that's more convenient and efficient for the receiver and sender.
The problem that TFA is referring to is that context switching is very expensive for the receiver, so without pipelining, the receiver pays a huge cost just to send back the ack and then again to finally reply to the payload once it is sent. The receiver is asking that you send all messages; it prefers to buffer them.
If the person on the other end then decides to draw out the small talk with “how are you” etc, it might take a few days for them to get an answer to their actual question, but that’s on them, it doesn’t bother me. I get to messages when I get to them. If they aren’t of substance I don’t care.
I reply in kind with "hello".
There can then be many hours to sometimes days.
Either they then reply AGAIN with "hello" (arghhh), or even worse, there is no reply, and I break asking what they want, and _maybe_ get a reply of "never mind, got it sorted" so I NEVER KNOW.
wat. No, it isn't. I see it almost 100% from young people who live in India. And that probably isn't the right criteria either - it is probably different people within each organization. This is a cultural thing, not generational.
Boomers never talk like that.
So while I do find it annoying, I also try to be polite back and I certainly won't be putting some "No Hello" link.
If it is a cultural thing and coming from a place of politeness, then I'll engage in a quick round of pleasantries. Once people are familiar, I've noticed this stops.
For me personally, whilst I understand all the reasoning and logic behind it, it does ultimately come across as fake and unnecessary - everyone knows it's fake and unnecessary, but we ritualistically do it anyway, because the alternative is too jarring "we're here for work, lets do the work, and we're done"
Wad that up and smoke it kiddo
I wish there was a good source of this information from a less polarizing figure.
That being said I do find the tone of this guide somewhat annoying and condescending at times. It could use some editing to make it more impersonal and to the point. Justifications and explanations could be attached separately and most people won't read them anyway. When people ask poor questions, it's often precisely because they don't read longform text for some reason.
The one thing that's really objectionable in that section is the last part about people who attack or flame without apparent reason. Such people should be called out by other community members in the same way ESR describes for newcomers in the first part of the section.
* https://jdebp.uk/FGA/problem-report-standard-litany.html
* https://jdebp.uk/FGA/questions-with-yes-or-no-answers.html
* https://pyropus.ca./personal/writings/12-steps-to-qmail-list...
* https://jdebp.uk/FGA/put-down-the-chocolate-covered-banana.h...
* https://perl.plover.com/Questions4.html
None of us really cover the case where someone is employing a human version of the Nagle slow start algorithm. (-:
“Hey, I’m having some trouble figuring this thing out, here’s where I’m confused: … <details about problem and questions>.
It’s absurd to expect someone to play 20 questions with you to figure out what your problem is.
I don't tend to see this "hello" issue with people who are competent in programming or troubleshooting things themselves.
I expect that from students and children, sure. But professionals?
> Especially nontechnical and nonprogrammer people have problems around structuring and breaking down an issue into explicit parts, with a clearly formulated goal and required inputs and expected outputs etc.
Ah, they were failed by their school system. I remember being taught to think this way in my math and writing classes as a child.
But anyway, my main point was, simply sending them a link like this will be perceived as baffling and rude, and I doubt that it can have a positive causal effect because it's not merely that they don't know about this rule of how to write messages, but that they require handholding. You can ask why they got hired then, but sometimes people can be confident and charming and that's often enough especially in non-programming interviews, or there might be also other reasons.
They send their "Hi", and go do other stuff. You eventually respond with "hi", and they immediately reply with the request. At this point, they know you're around and saw their message - you just replied to their "hi". And you know they know, and also they know you know they know, which was the entire point.
They got to ask you the thing directly, so ignoring it now feel like walking away, which is rude.
It could be a symptom that on-boarding is broken and nobody does any one on one mentoring and the person feels lost.
Of course it can also be that they just want you to do their job instead of them because they don't want to think or work.
"The Initech account is totally on fire, can you look at it?"
Yes let us save the day in jolly cooperation.
"Did you see that ludicrous display last night?"
You can wait until im done with my current thing.
"hey."
If I respond, they will wrongly believe I am available and willing. It is morally correct to ghost them.
I agree with the website. It's even worse when you have to do the "how are you?" back and forth before getting to the actual request.
Phatic communication is about establishing social connection rather than conveying explicit information.
Both "Hi" and "How are you?" serve in these cases* to eatablish "this is a friendly, casual interaction" by way of social ritual. If you fail to signal non-aggression in this way then, at least neurotypical people, will be more likely to consider you an aggressor.
I don't struggle or feel bothered by "Hi" or "How are you?". But I do struggle with threading enough phatic praise and appreciation into conversation to maintain the "friendly, casual" status and can get easily start being treated as an aggressor.
* America in particular has "How are you?" as one of these phatic rituals. Different parts of the world have different rituals in different areas of interaction. This can be a cause of friction when moving to a new country and you interpret an unfamiliar ritual literally instead of phatically or misunderstand another's intent because a ritual you expect was missing.
Saying Hello or good morning and then spending multiple minutes composing your actual message while I'm attending you is extremely annoying.
Quite frankly though I don't think it makes sense to do any of that outside a group chat. Just say what you want to say and get out.
Hi [Name],
[Message content]
If someone I don't know "hello"s me, my LLM should detect that, suppress the notification, and reply automatically - and then resume notifications and defer to me once non-greeting conversation has started.
What's next - "press 1 for a question about FOO, press 2 for.." and level 1 AI support bots?
Dropbox comment vibes. Please provide the regex you use in your daily communication.
/^[Hh](ello|i|ey)( ${MY_NAME})?[.!]?$/My work computer is a mac though so as I said, it's insane and I get to just suffer.
Also I'd say this depends on your existing work culture - I've been in places where the expectation is that everyone has Slack messages muted. If anything was really that time sensitive it's still possible to pick up the phone.
Her: "Alexa, add to shopping list". "OK, what should I add for you". "Peanut butter". "OK, peanut butter added, what else?". <long pause while the house has to be quiet until alexa times out>.
Me: "Alexa add peanut butter to shopping list". "Peanut butter added".
Some people are TCP. Some are UDP.
Nailed it! This is going up on the wall in my office.
:P
----
Other person: Hi, what time was that thing?
Me: Hey, 14:00.
...
...
Me: Hey, 14:00!
...
...
Me: walks in their face Hey you, the thing you asked, it's at 14:00.
Other person: Yes yes, I heard you first time!
Me: boils internally, muttering to themselves so why the fsck didn't you say so?
----
Please don't hang on "Hello", but for $deity's sake, confirm reception of messages, especially in analog communication.
"Since we are on the topic of communication, written communication also does not constitute communication unless they confirm they read it."
https://simonwillison.net/2024/Sep/15/how-to-succeed-in-mrbe...
And no “read receipt” as it is usually implemented would not cut it, because it only means “this message showed up on the recipient’s screen once” not that they have actually read it.
"Alexa add peanut butter to shopping list" "OK, what should list should I add to?" "shopping list" "Ok, what should I add for you" "Peanut butter" "Ok, playing Peanut Butter by the Royal Guardsmen on a HomePod you forgot you had"
Siri occasionally misunderstands the name of the item, or needs to ask who's speaking (when on the HomePod), or has trouble because the phone of the person asking has briefly dropped off the Wifi, but in the ~5 years we've had it, I can count on one hand the number of times adding has just failed with any pattern remotely like what you describe.
“Alexa add peanut butter to shopping list" <silence>
“Alexa add peanut butter to shopping list". “Peanut butter added. Peanut butter added. Peanut butter added.”
"It's currently raining would you like to see the forecast for tomorrow also I found this routine you might like would you like me to enable it"
writes peanut butter on a piece of paper
if you don't have the power to tell people to f- off, the only option left is to accept it and either play their game or ignore a type of behavior you don't want to reward
Don't feel bad for not answering, just put your phone away for a couple hours.
- im?
I get it. It’s the same on IRC when people ask if they can ask a question. Just ask the bloody question!
The first one says I know it won't take you long, but that assumes you know the time it'll take me to handle whatever you are going to say, but the reality is that you likely don't know, and even if the conversation itself lasts less than a minute, the person will likely been cut of what they were doing for more than this.
The second one is even worse as you imply that you know are bothering me, so don't bother me! (even if it is a polite phrase, it's not nice)
In other words, just ask. It's more efficient and doesn't make any assumption: we'll figure out how long it takes and if that bothers me.
Then I became a manager, I had to start dealing with more people, to navigate the enterprise environment and I understood that one of my strengths is to be understand people and to accommodate their ways of working. In this context, being hard with people that just say hello just doesn't make much sense to me anymore. People have busy schedules, they start conversations and are interrupted, they receive hundreds of notifications and have other meetings going on.
If the worst they do to me is to say hello and never talk to me again, I'm ok with accommodating this in my daily workflow.
It's not about interruption really, it's about a style of using chat apps that wastes peoples' attention and is easily avoided.
> they receive hundreds of notifications
okay, so this nohello thing is good advice to help reduce the noise.
they need to work on their time management.
"... anyone trying to contact the band for collaboration would be told the studio telephone did not have a ringer since, while recording, the band did not like to hear any kind of noise pollution. Instead, callers were instructed to phone the studio precisely at a certain time, whereupon the phone would be answered by Ralf Hütter, despite never hearing the phone ring."
This is the problem I run into, I want to just reply to any "Hey" message with a link to this page, but then I'm the one being rude. We just need a better way to let other people know that this isn't a good way to do async chat. I've heard of other people making their status message this site, so then people see it when they go to message you and it doesn't have to be explicitly brought up
> If the worst they do to me is to say hello and never talk to me again, I'm ok with accommodating this in my daily workflow
This I can't really get behind, because if they just send a hello it's implied that I then need to follow-up and find out what they were asking about
So it bothered you when you had actual work to do, but once you moved to a position where everyone else was doing the actual work and you just sat around benefiting from their labor, you didn't mind minor interruptions and time wasters anymore? Shocking.
If that means that I don't get triggered when they leave me a "hi" and never come back, that's fine by me.
What really harms productivity is lack of leadership, vision and organization. I try to avoid micromanaging this sort of thing.
Where is the problem? Just do what you did until the question pops up?
It’s not a phone call, remember ?
This site is saying "don't poke people in the head and then wait for them to ask you why you did that before continuing. It's detrimental for this mode of communication."
I also like to inject civility and cordiality into messaging because I find it's treated with barbarism by some that send a message like a stone through a window.
My wife does not find this guidance helpful. But, when her mother started doing it to her she went off the rails, so there is some small consolation to be had there.
If people saying hello on a chat pisses you off, take it as a sign that you need a vacation. I bet when you're back from 2 weeks in the Bahamas, when someone pings you with an empty "hello", you'll reply with a nice "oh hey buddy, what's up?", rather than spending one week building a fancy website to post to HN people who already agree with you.
The discussions always split between the people who just want to get on with the conversation and the people who can't bring themselves to do that because they consider it unforgivably rude. The second group never seem to take the hint that the first interruption is an imposition in itself.
If it’s urgent enough that the actual message isn’t enough, “Hello” isn’t going to cut it either.
I've also had cases where I've immediately responded "hi" only to get the question about 1h later.
In the case where you want an immediate discussion, don't trust the status indicator, and there are multiple different people you could contact, a quick confirmation that the selected party is online and available is not unreasonable.
By the way, I also hate the "hello"-only message. I am, however, guilty of writing "Hey. Do you have a second to chat" - typically in cases where either through chat or video conference I want to go through something that is more involved, and I also want some confirmation of understanding and acknowledgement.
If you want my attention give me a reason to give it.
It would be rude to simply link this site (not blaming you) in response to a “hello” coming from a remote co-worker, or even a co-worker across the office who just didn’t want to walk over. They are just being friendly!
I am one who would prefer to just get on with the conversation but I also realize that’s not how everyone is and that’s okay; I should play nice with others if I want others to play nice with me and a simple “hey” in response is such an easy way to play nice.
That's why I set it as my status message.
I've seen arguments in the past that different nationalities may have different norms around this kind of thing, in particular over whether it's polite to launch straight into a request for help without confirming the other person is available and receptive first.
There may be a power dynamics thing here too - if somebody is seen as being more "senior" there may be additional perceived constraints on how a conversation should be conducted.
Since you've been involved in conversations about this for more than 15 years now have you seen any credible evidence of cultural differences that come into play here?
> The selfish point (there are other points too) of "hi" is to confirm you have their attention
No one is unsure of the selfish/self-serving motivation behind the lone "hello". The singleminded self-centeredness at the expense of others is the _entire_ basis of the criticism.
This response is like encountering in a thread about lunch theft in the workplace, "Some people take food that isn't theirs because they didn't bring anything for lunch, and they see food that someone else brought sitting there in the fridge." The power of this response to be able to explain something not already understood is nil—and so is its exculpatory power.
> to remove plausible deniability of "oops I missed your message."
I'll dispute this. The overwhelming purpose is so the sender can confirm they have the receiver's attention so the sender knows whether to bother themselves with typing out the rest of their inquiry. They're happy to trade the negative consequences on others for a minor convenience to themselves.
Someone doing something that you consider outdated or inefficient does not imply that he is malicious.
no u
> Someone doing something that you consider outdated or inefficient does not imply that he is malicious.
The absence of malice does not erase the harmful effects.
As to these supposed harmful effects. If you find the most basic of social pleasantries to be such an unmanageable burden then I'm likely better off not associating with you. Do you get angry at people who greet you as you walk by on the street? Navigating that interaction similarly demands some small part of your attention after all, however brief it might be.
O RLY? Wanna give that one another shot, scooter?
If they however ask a question no hello style, I can quickly gauge if I can answer it immediately, or I should wait until a better time for me.
So the no hello might get an immediate response, the hello will wait until I can handle whatever.
Email etiquette has always seemed natural to me, but a lot of people read chat as a synchronous medium, so.
It's just another place where I need to have multiple modes on hand for different people.
BAD: Hey, you there?
GOOD: Hey, you there? I'm trying to do X but I'm running into some issues and I wanted to get your advice.
Once I've responded and you know you have my attention, then you commit to filling me in on the gory details.
E.g. If you’ve just say “hi”, two hours later I get to my DMs and say “hey what’s up?” and you end up not following up with the “actual” message straight away, let’s say another hour later, this all took way longer than necessary.
The no-hello approach just makes sense when dealing with asynchronous messaging platforms such as Slack. IMO, not following the no-hello approach is bad etiquette and there’s a ton of people out there who still don’t really get that.
Both ways. It can't be just one side always bending backwards while the other doesn't, without even any intention to meet in the middle.
It's a waste of interruptions. And for some types of work, like programming (we're in HN after all), interruptions can be more costly than just the "4 seconds" it takes to reply. Them saying "hello" and then without waiting for a reply explaining what they want in a short way, is more efficient and respectful of your time (and theirs, to be honest).
Just ask the mother flipping question ffs!
But, anyways, it's just life, don't know why people (even from my generation) are nervous these days.
Instead of "Hello, did you notice, that db is down? Can you check it please?"
Just terse "DB seems to be down. Please check it."
One employee thinks it should almost be "mandatory" to greet each other, where the other employee says she isn't in the headspace to be greeting people early in the morning and would rather get settled at her desk. Pretty obvious, but these two employees hate eachother and this is a sign of a bigger problem.
Uh-oh. Sounds like somebody's got a case of the Mondays.
The "" example should only consist of 3 operations: Dawn: REQUEST, Tim: RESPOND, Dawn: CLOSE. For example: "Hiya! What time was that thing?", "hey, 3:30", "Ta - seeya then!". Or even just 2, Dawn: REQUEST, Tim: RESPOND (auto close), this could imply that Dawn and Tim are really close, or really not close.
BTW: We are not designing reliable messaging protocols here folks. The chat software should tell if any message was lost.
Thanks/No problem is closing off the interruption so there's no future expectation.
That last "np" is a little nicety that lets the other person know their question was happily answered, no waiting created.
Even when the convo turns interactive, half the time either me or the other guy has to drop off, often without warning. So after some waiting around, I'll write down, in async mode, all I want.
It always then feels like basically a different GUI/ API onto email. With more emojis and reactions and stickers and scented candles or whatnot.
I don't think it's a failed attempt at politeness actually, partly but not only because it's so obvious how to be courteous ("Hi! Hope you had a great weekend, when you get a sec could you tell me XYZ?" or "Hey - hope your day going well. I'm stuck on ABC and it's quite urgent, please get in touch asap.") and it's even more obviously discourteous. I think it's more that we don't have the same understanding of the medium. Slack/Teams/Chat to me is a lot more like text messaging than email, and it's not at all like walking over to someone's desk or phoning them. Their mental model of it probably differs. (They're wrong of course.)
Most charitable explanation is, they want a realtime chat and don't want to be pushy about it.
But now I'll have to dig into it to find out for sure.
B) Á propos another comment[1] by you, too old to reply to now[2]: Betcha you meant Gustavsberg, not "Gustavsen". They're Swedish, BTW, not Norwegian.
___
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44012715
[2]: Yeah, I admit: That's why I came here. But, hey, I found a discussion about two of the Grand Old Three!
I have been remiss in searching for evidence about the Clarke vs Asimov question. Perhaps I'll try delegating it to ChatGPT.
I don't think that it was sexist in a pejorative anti-woman sense, in my (possibly faulty of course) memory it was said approvingly that women had solved a problem that men were struggling with.
Here's the ChatGPT question and answer:
Which SF author wrote a story in which communication speed over astronomical distances was made faster by sending messages continually instead of waiting for a reply? In the story it was pointed out that this is how women exchange news on the telephone.
ChatGPT said:
The story you're thinking of is “My Son, the Physicist” by Isaac Asimov (1962). In it, a communications engineer struggles with the long delays of radio messages to Pluto (about 12 hours one way). His mother suggests what women do on the telephone: “Just keep talking”—transmit continuously rather than wait for a reply—effectively creating a live conversation despite the latency en.wikipedia.org+1tvtropes.org+1 .
This clever idea highlights a real aspect of human communication—especially on the phone—where continuous exchange helps bridge delays, and adapts it to an interplanetary scale. So yes, Asimov used that domestic analogy to demonstrate a practical solution to astronomical message delays.
https://justinmayer.com/posts/any-updates/
I find these supremely annoying.
eamag•7mo ago
Thin_icE•7mo ago