131–140 of 191 posts
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You can report the errors in comments, and develop a habit of looking in the comments for reports of dangerous code.
...if you have 50 reputation.
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...if you have 50 reputation.
You mean literally everyone who's been coding for more than 3 months. You need 5 upvotes on your questions to get that much.
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I agree: Recently I found an interesting snippet of C code which was using an sprintf to write a string into a char array. Unfortunately, it contained an off-by-one error where the null terminator would be written outside the char. I proposed to fix the answer, but for incomprehensible reasons the edit was rejected (!)
SO is the worst example of "poop must be delicious - after all, billions of flies can't be wrong!" mentality. As long as the answer is upvoted by enough people, it's accepted as the right one and it takes a titanic effort to correct it, no matter how wrong it is.
That's not correct; the questioner can accept any answer, the criteria is that the questioner chooses which answer helped them. There is no connection between votes and acceptance, no claim that "accepted" is endorsement by StackOverflow the company, by subject matter experts, or by "the community".
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You mean literally everyone who's been coding for more than 3 months. You need 5 upvotes on your questions to get that much.
Unless you've never made any particular use of StackOverflow, stumble on an incorrect answer, realize you have no way to fix it, and then just leave because you don't feel like jumping through hoops just to make somebody else's day better.
It would probably take you as much effort to get 50 rep as it's taken you to post multiple sour grapes comments about how dare they have a threshold which excludes you, don't they know who you are??
- The asker can misunderstand the response.
- The asker can accept a response that for the general public's interpretation of the question is incorrect. It doesn't matter what the asker thought the question means to them if beyond their control their answer becomes the first result on Google years later for a problem that might not be exactly the same.
- Technologies change and new libraries or language features can be added since the question was asked. I've counted several times where people bunch up below the accepted answer to say this is true, and 90% of the time it's the better answer for my use case.
- The question is similar to another that is far more popular and happens to share the same SEO keywords but is completely unrelated, so another answer with 1,000 upvotes in comparison to the original answer's 100 is added. People have no choice but to put comments saying "this is the wrong answer if you're doing X, use the other one," because the comment section of the accepted answer is the highest up they can be seen. But the average user might not listen or see the smaller comment text and use the wrong answer, just because it was the accepted one.
This is because a single person's decision on what "correct" means is valued more highly than the correctness of the more important answer which thousands more people actually support, and is more critical to support because of unintended search indexing.
Sometimes SO questions become used for a purpose completely unrelated to the original questions and answers because of search engines. There should be some kind of acknowledgement of this instead of being unable to protect clueless people from themselves.
This isn't to support editorialization of old answers in general, it's a problem of unintended consequences out of anyone's control because of what gets indexed as the first search result on Google. Nobody can change what's there if nobody but the original authors can edit the answer and they happen to not do so for whatever reason, so we'd be stuck being misled forever. And as we've seen people will copy and paste anything in the code box and not even read the description and caveats if there's a fat green checkmark next to it like a Pavlonian reflex. I'm guilty of this myself.
I think it would be a great addition for StackOverflow to have a sort of report button for dangerous code. Take for example libcurl (thus, implementation in PHP, Ruby, Go, etc). There are sooo many posts with cURL example code where CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER is disabled. These are often answers with thousands of upvotes, that have been there for years. Inexperienced developers copy/paste this code into production withou…
Say the answer was there without that option. Next comment "It didn't work, I get 'certificate verification failed' error", next comment "I had to use this option to get around that", next comment "thanks it worked".
So with tools like Sonarqube we get static code analysis on our code base which shows code duplication within itself. I wonder if there is some way to look for duplication from stack overflow? Not sure that is feasible, since no one is going to want to post all of their proprietary code to some API, but wonder if there is some system for local indexing SO that would also for local duplication detection.
[1] not sure what happens since they "illegally" retrospectively relicensed all the content a few months ago.
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I'm talking about how that's completely not feasible anymore because of how every project has dependencies upon dependencies upon dependencies because the general development attitude has shifted towards "import a single library that tells you if a number is odd, and another library to tell you if one is even"
Ultimately, if a bug in a library causes issue with your program, and your company loses $X, your superiors will not give a shit. You have the burden of responsibility for the program. For common major libraries used worldwide in enterprise products, you are right in that there is an element of trust. They are made by people much faster/better/stronger than most of us. If all else fails, the sheer magnitude of people…
What does that mean when the developer who committed it might have left long ago? I'm assuming you mean more than "blame" which is a pretty unhelpful response for a company to have, but then what exactly is "burden of responsibility" which should have this bus-factor-of-1 attitude around it, and why?