Related: a guide for asking effective questions about programming on StackOverflow.

There are more and less effective ways to ask for help. Asking effective questions is a hugely important practical skill to develop. Especially when learning new programming languages, software, or frameworks, often the fastest source of help is an online forum such as StackExchange or reddit, but there is no incentive for anyone to answer other than altruism. Even within a company, it costs your co-workers time to help you, and you should demonstrate that you value their time. You need to make people want to help you by making it easy for them to help.

Update Fall 2025: This advice looks somewhat dated in the age of AI. Indeed, StackExchange, which in the early 21st century was THE main source of information for people trying to learn new CS/math skills, has declined rapidly in usage as large language models replaced generous human volunteers on StackExchange. LLMs need no incentive to answer your questions other than possibly paying for a subscription to avoid hitting usage limits. Nevertheless, for any of you who plan to continue interacting with people for some substantial portion of your lives, I continue to recommend this advice. And much of the advice also applies to asking effective questions of LLMs.

Effective questions follow these two principles:

1. Give enough detail that it's possible to answer.

2. Make it easy to answer. Don't make the reader do work that you can do for them.

In this course, the instructor and TAs are paid to help you. But with almost 200 students we have to triage our time; there isn't enough time for hours of 1-on-1 tutoring for every student. If you make it easier for someone to help you, this increases the odds that another student can help before the course staff gets to it, or that the course staff can quickly fire out a helpful response, rather than mentally classifying your question as "looks involved/not sure what they're asking... eh, I'll answer this later today or tomorrow when I have more time".

But here's the most important reason to think about this: you don't want to keep paying tuition for the rest of your life. Now is the time to practice the social skills you will need once it's no longer someone else's paid job to help you.

For example, "I tried the DFA simulator but it gave an error. What's wrong?" does not contain enough details for anyone to help. What was the DFA you typed? What input did you give? What was the error message? Without these details it is not merely difficult, but impossible for anyone to answer the question. (But note that for non-randomized homework problems it may be necessary to restrict some detail so you aren't simply telling everyone your homework solution; see below.)

Make your question self-contained, so that the reader does not have to look up information in order to know what you are asking about. For homework, this means summarize the homework problem you are trying to solve. Don't just say "written problem 2 on Homework 1". You might be looking at written problem 2 on Homework 1 right now, so you see clearly what it is, but the reader will probably not recall that information and will have to go searching for it before they can answer. Re-state a brief summary of what written problem 2 asks for, so that your question is self-contained. For example, "On HW1 written problem 2, the one asking us to count how many DFAs have at most 9 states and how many languages have strings of length at most 5, I have a question..." Then the reader doesn't have to take the extra time to look up Problem 2, and they are much more likely to answer.

Say what you've tried so far. If you haven't tried anything so far, say what you've read in the course material to learn what to try. If you haven't done that yet, do it!

Part of the reason to practice asking effective questions is that, by taking the time to give enough detail to answer the question, and looking up important details that you can't remember, many times you end up answering your own question! In other words, it teaches you how to learn on your own.

Of course, you should not give so much detail that you are giving away the answer to a homework problem. But, the beauty of the randomized homework problems is that you can give as much detail as you like. Everyone has a different problem so there's no risk that someone will copy your solution. So for the randomized questions only, feel free to post your problem and solution attempt(s) when asking a question.

Questions such as "Can I get a hint?" or "I'm confused, can someone help me?" or "I keep getting the wrong answer. Any idea on how to approach this problem?" are not effective. Every assigned homework problem deals with a specific concept documented in the lecture notes. The lecture notes are already a treasure trove of hints. It's no shame to read through that material and remain confused on how to apply it to solve the problem. But then the appropriate way to ask a question is to make reference to specific parts of the lecture notes and what you didn't understand.

Even if you are absolutely confident that you are so lost that reading the lecture notes will not help, do it anyway. Include enough detail in your question to convince the reader that you have already made a serious attempt to answer the question on your own. You may know yourself that you aren't lazy, but your reader doesn't. A reader will be more willing to put in time to help if you give them evidence that you've put in some time already (this doesn't mean merely claiming, "I tried for hours"; rather, it means discussing what you did).

This may all sound very cranky. I'm not saying these things to complain, but to teach a valuable social lesson: this is an insight into the minds of influential people you will encounter in the future: interviewers, supervisors, co-workers, clients/customers, investors, all people you want to impress. They all think in the way I've been describing above: willing to help where help is needed, but not to do work on your behalf that you are perfectly capable of doing yourself. The more reasonable among them will have no problem with you asking questions, and they will in fact be delighted and impressed at your curiosity and desire to learn so you can get things done. But their opinion of you will plummet if they sense that you ask many questions that you could easily have answered yourself. Whether it's true or not, they will believe the explanation to be that you know perfectly well you could have done the work to answer the question, but that instead you view it as their job to do the work for you. Consequently they'll conclude that you believe your time is worth more than theirs. That's a terrible impression to make.