Welcome to the programming community! People are generally kind and willing to help, but there is one caveat: there is frequently little patience for questions which you could have resolved yourself.
With time you'll both learn to identify these and to write your questions in a way that it reflects that you've "done your research."
> there is frequently little patience for questions which you could have resolved yourself.
I don't think that's realistic; it's the rationalization for bad behavior.
IMHO the truth often is that there are many people who want the chance to act out on their frustrations or other emotional problems, and they seek a target they can rationalize attacking - like a guy going to a bar looking for a fight.
Or like the angry mobs on social media who pile on someone they don't know over an issue that doesn't affect them and about which they know almost nothing. Consider why, if it doesn't affect them and they don't even want to learn about it, they attack the object of their vitriol? It's the same motive and behavior, just a different context.
There may be some like that, but they are not a majority. I love educating new programmers, but the concept of "Give a man a fish, teach a man to fish..." really does apply.
If you have a habit of giving up your search after 1 minute and expecting help you will not make it far as a programmer/problem solver.
Problem is when you are stumped with some small detail you have missed.
I must admit I have come to the point were I unconsciously just don't ask questions on SO and instead try another hour on my own instead of even trying to ask.
I have never asked a question on SO for this very reason. I will do hours of extra research and testing and searching because I do not want to be on the receiving end of some of the comments I've seen like "you should really get some training in that".
And yes, the extra work in forming a quality question does indeed often help me answer my own question.
However, I have often benefited from someone else's stupid question; so, I'm glad they asked even though I wouldn't have. I also benefit from the opinion questions even though they are always shut down as "not relevant" or "off topic".
It's getting to the point where it is difficult to even read some of the answers because you have to sift through all the hateful snarky comments. I have actually started deliberately avoiding SO and trying out the 2nd or 3rd search result sites.
It's easy to say RTFM but sometimes what people need is context. Unless you've programmed in C and used printf and scanf then format strings in whatever language are pretty opaque.
I find that in preparing a question that is specific and answerable, includes everything needed to resolve it and anticipates criticism about not having done enough research myself, I'm usually able to answer the question I had myself, and even find stupid typos or or other silly little details.
In the cases that this process doesn't lead me to an answer, oftentimes I discover that either my question is too broad to be answerable, or that I am missing general education in the area and my actual question is somewhere further down.
So really the impatience and hostility towards bad questions, is a tool I use to aid me in finding answers myself.
That all sounds a little smug, but when I am stuck even after this process and actually post my research on SO or IRC or to a mailing list, too many times I get one-line answers about the tiny thing I was missing... but at least then nobody thought I was just being lazy.
I find that half the time I start typing up a question for SO I answer it myself.
I'll imagine someone trying to answer it, but asking if I checked site Y on the topic first, so I'll make sure to add "Site Y only says <blah>" to my question. Only once I have added proof that it's not a trivial mistake on my part would I actually post the question, but sometimes I find out what was causing the problem in the first place.
Or maybe I'll be trying to reduce the problem to a minimal C file and the invocation of gcc that causes the error. And in doing so I'll realize what's wrong.
So I don't think it's a bad thing to get people to go over the question a few times before asking, and try and make it as easy as possible to answer the question.
It is undeniable that women in technology face greater challenges than men and it becomes hard for them go get through certain hoops that men get through effortlessly. Congrats YC! This seems like a good move.
Recommendation: stop being an idiot. With your skills you should be able to land a job in security, and you'll actually make money instead of going to jail like a dumbass.
It's frankly ridiculous how you guys criticize Mozilla for all these things, when they are practically the only organization in the whole internet which continues to value privacy.
Who is "you guys"? I personally applaud Mozilla for their stance on many things. Especially for allowing/enabling things like NoScript. However, I must admit that this has a practical limit, at least for me. Without per-process tabs (or similar) Firefox will start to lag more and more behind modern browsers and at some point the deficit will become insurmountable. (I realize the difficulty of achvieving this, but as a practical matter, it must happen, otherwise...)
EDIT: I should say that I usually keep Firefox open for days (with only ~30-40 tabs) and at some point it starts consuming unreasonable amounts of CPU just... idling (apparently).
> Without per-process tabs (or similar) Firefox will start to lag more and more behind modern browsers and at some point the deficit will become insurmountable. (I realize the difficulty of achvieving this, but as a practical matter, it must happen, otherwise...)
Why? Setting aside that, as the sibling comment points out, Electrolysis is on the roadmap, why? I use Firefox every day with dozens to hundreds of tabs in 1-2 windows and the fact it's not process-per-tab has never bothered me or even been something I noticed. Sure, it's nice to have theoretically; if the browser crashed all the time then sure, I'd like to have just one tab go away instead of session-restoring the whole thing, but that's a minor convenience, and according to about:crashes, it's only happen about two dozen times in two years anyway. On the other hand, it's nice that, despite having 32 tabs open right now, Firefox is only using 210MB of memory.
There are advantages (stability, sandboxing) and disadvantages (memory usage) to the process-per-tab model. I think there's a fair argument that Mozilla should implement it in Firefox, but I don't understand in what sense Firefox would be lagging behind other browsers if they didn't implement it. The Ideal Browser does not necessarily require process-per-tab nor is there some Ideal Browser all the browsers are converging to that Firefox is further behind on.
It's not the "process-per-tab" thing per se that's important. It's just that (as I believe I mentioned in my OP) Firefox starts to just constantly consume non-trivial amounts of CPU after some amount of time[1]. Not sure why it does this, but process-per-tab would at least mitigate the problem by offloading the whole "free resources" problem to the OS (which must be able to do these things reliably).
(I have oodles of memory and CPU, so it's not just a lack-of-resources problem.)
[1] EDIT: I'm talking about something like 30-50% of a single CPU. In extreme cases it would use 100% of one CPU, but those are admittedly outliers.
While it would be nice for Firefox to have something in-place like per-process tabs that could mitigate the problem, I think what really needs to happen in this case is that they fix the underlying issue - which, true enough, might be a while; it doesn't happen for me, even though I leave Firefox open for about a month at a time (rebooting on patch Tuesday), so I assume it isn't easily reproducible and therefore might go some time without being fixed. Even if you had per-process tabs, I'd expect that one tab would still be using 30-50% of the CPU and thus be a major nuisance, even though it might make the rest of the browser more usable.
It's completely trivial to write a "consumes-100%-CPU" JS script. I'm sure people usually don't do it intentionally, but I happened to encounter two such scripts on two separate domains today[1]. The surprising thing is Firefox managed to kill the first one, but not the second one -- after being completely unresponsive for 30s, mind you. It just hung when I pressed the "Stop script" (or whatever the button was labeled). Had to kill the whole FF process and restart it, being quick to close the two tabs that were causing trouble.
This is absurd. Apart from anything else FF needs to be better at protecting its users, and that includes separate-process-per-tab. (Ideally, it should be sandboxes, but honestly I'd settle for "separate processes" at this point in time.)
Mozilla's per process project is called 'Electrolysis'. It's been in the works for years, but Mozilla is saying that it's going to be released (in not beta form) later this year. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis
Huh? I didn't say that at all. This person CAN afford their medicine. Instead they spend that money on a trip to the UK to see family but also gets their medicine. Medicine they didn't contribute taxes to pay for.
I think people whine because they can't legally use these awesome open source software without releasing the software they are making as open source, but that is exactly why GPL exists.
Sure, you could update the library you use and release those changes as open source while you make closed source software. But people pay you for your software, why shouldn't you pay for the libraries you use?
With time you'll both learn to identify these and to write your questions in a way that it reflects that you've "done your research."