CS 70

Getting Help with Homework 0

Ask your Homework 0 questions here. Use the box at the bottom of this page. Your question is posted to this page for the class to see, under an animal name rather than your own—and if you would rather only the course staff saw it, there is a box to tick for that.

Course staff read this page. So do your classmates, and a classmate answering first is a good outcome rather than a failure of the system.

  • Hedgehog speaking

    Is it silly to ask something that turns out to be obvious?

  • LHS Cow speaking

    No. If it were obvious you would not be stuck, and in a class this size, several other people are stuck on the same thing right now and have not said so yet.

  • Cat speaking

    And if somebody has already asked it, I can press “Me too” instead of asking again.

  • LHS Cow speaking

    Exactly—and then you get notified when it is answered.

Before you ask

Two minutes here will usually get you a better answer, and sometimes no question at all.

  • Re-read the step you are on. Homework 0 is a sequence, and the commonest problem is a step that was skipped rather than a step that failed.
  • Check whether the answer is on a help page. The ones that matter for this assignment are Finding Your Way Around the Terminal, Using Lab Machines, Surviving Helix and Using Git and GitHub.
  • If your question is about a lesson rather than the assignment, ask on that lesson's Key Points page instead—the answer will be next to the material it belongs to.

Asking a question we can actually answer

The difference between a question that gets answered in one reply and one that takes four is almost always the same thing: what you typed and what came back.

  • The exact command you ran. Copy and paste it; don't summarise it.
  • The exact output or error message, in full, in a ``` code block.
  • What you expected to happen instead.
  • Anything you have already tried, so nobody suggests it again.

If your question is about code, push it first. We can rarely help from a snippet. Commit and push, and then say so in your question—that way whoever picks it up can look at the real thing rather than at a description of it.

Things that go wrong on Homework 0 specifically

  • You can't log in to the server. Check the username and the one-time password you were sent, and remember the password does not echo as you type — a blank line is what it is supposed to look like.
  • gh auth login seems to hang or wants a browser. It is waiting for you to visit the URL it printed and enter the code. Read the whole message.
  • git clone says the repository does not exist. Almost always it is either the wrong directory or an account that is not yet linked—say which repository you were cloning and paste the whole error.
  • A command "does nothing". A Unix command with nothing to say says nothing. That is often success, not failure.

When a conversation would be faster

Some things are much easier said out loud than typed, especially anything where you are not yet sure how to phrase the question.

  • Ask in lab. Course staff are in the room; this is the fastest route there is.
  • Come to grutoring or office hours. Best for conceptual questions, and for the ones where you would have to write four paragraphs to explain the problem.
  • For anything personal, or about the course rather than the code, contact a professor directly.

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