How often do people copy and paste from Stack Overflow? • Hacker News Board

Re: How often do people copy and paste from Stack Overflow?

#61

Post by jbverschoor » Mon, Apr 19, 2021, 5:46 PM UTC

arduinomancer wrote: post #29

IMO its not even that we're copying people's logic, its just that stack overflow acts as a weird sort of crowd-sourced centralized documentation for programming languages. For example if I forget the name of a function for something in a particular language I don't even go to the docs, I just google something like "python reverse list" and click the first SO link.

“Back in the good old days”, you’d get detailed documentation with for example DirectX. The whole visual c++ experience was so good. I never needed to look up anything. Browsing for documentation is such a zone-exiter...

Rails, Some gens, and some Java projects are the few properly documented projects out there.

Re: How often do people copy and paste from Stack Overflow?

#62

Post by paxys » Mon, Apr 19, 2021, 5:46 PM UTC

metalforever wrote: post #11

This is an unpopular opinion but I think the answer to this may depend on the age of the engineer. For example, I learned programming before stack overflow. I have most of the standard library syntax in my head and mostly look at spec documents. Once in a great while I will go on stack overflow if I can’t debug a problem but I don’t post on there . In the same way, I suspect some engineers like using video to learn t…

It's less about age and more about the stack you work with. I know several experienced engineers who have the entire Java library memorized, but have them work on a slightly different stack (or even a newer SDK version) and they will be blindly Googling for answers like anyone else.

Re: How often do people copy and paste from Stack Overflow?

#63

Post by LinuxBender » Mon, Apr 19, 2021, 5:47 PM UTC

On a side note, use caution when doing a copy/paste from a website into a terminal. There are several things you can do to reduce the risk. Here [1] is a demo of one risk vector. The article links back to a discussion here on HN from 2013 on some things you can do to mitigate the risk.

[1] - https://thejh.net/misc/website-terminal-copy-paste

Re: How often do people copy and paste from Stack Overflow?

#64

Post by f154hfds » Mon, Apr 19, 2021, 5:47 PM UTC

So I have copied this answer into probably 100 separate bash scripts over the years:

https://stackoverflow.com/a/246128/9084915

I've thought about saving it somewhere (sometimes I copy from my other existing scripts) - but it's just too convenient to google/copy directly out of the webpage.

Re: How often do people copy and paste from Stack Overflow?

#65

Post by spaetzleesser » Mon, Apr 19, 2021, 5:47 PM UTC

busterarm wrote: post #25

I once had a brief contract helping out a two-person Rails consultancy where pretty much all they did was follow RailsCasts. They got very angry at me several times for not doing things "the Rails way". We were on Rails 4, which I already had loads of experience with. The RailsCasts they were following were written for Rails 2. They literally had no idea all of the ways Rails had moved on between those versions. Thei…

With the right connections you can have a very comfortable life with receiving grants from DARPA. I used to work for a startup founded by ex DARPA guys and it quickly showed that there was an insider club of current and former DARPA people that lived off grants.

Re: How often do people copy and paste from Stack Overflow?

#66

Post by bryanrasmussen » Mon, Apr 19, 2021, 5:49 PM UTC

exhilaration wrote: post #24

One of the interview questions I ask is, "if you run in a problem you can't solve, where do you go online to find answers?" Anyone that doesn't answer Stack Overflow is - in my opinion - either lying or very, very new to the industry. (This is for .Net/C# jobs so maybe it's different for other languages.)

it really depends on the severity/depth/weirdness of the problem. I often run into things I don't know the names of or need documentation for how to do with a particular library/framework, those almost end up being solved on Stack Overflow - if I actually have a problem that I cannot 'solve', Stack Overflow is almost never actually helpful (some times it helps to try to write out a question that is clear enough for Stack Overflow to accept, because then you might think of what you actually have to research)

Re: How often do people copy and paste from Stack Overflow?

#67

Post by spaetzleesser » Mon, Apr 19, 2021, 5:50 PM UTC

I never copy/paste directly but I try to understand what’s going on. It seems there are two kinds of devs: some that just want things get done and others what want to understand. The people who just want get things done will probably be happy copying some code verbatim.

Re: How often do people copy and paste from Stack Overflow?

#68

Post by bryanrasmussen » Mon, Apr 19, 2021, 5:51 PM UTC

MrOxiMoron wrote: post #30

exhilaration wrote: post #24

One of the interview questions I ask is, "if you run in a problem you can't solve, where do you go online to find answers?" Anyone that doesn't answer Stack Overflow is - in my opinion - either lying or very, very new to the industry. (This is for .Net/C# jobs so maybe it's different for other languages.)

to be honest, I use my search engine of choice, yes stack overflow often comes up in the results, but also GitHub issues of people having a similar issue, often for other projects that use the same tools/libraries I do. so I go to my search engine for answers, not stack overflow directly.

right, often if it is a particular error message Github issues for the library and version you're using is more useful.

Re: How often do people copy and paste from Stack Overflow?

#69

Post by podiki » Mon, Apr 19, 2021, 5:53 PM UTC

benpopper1 wrote: post #53

podiki wrote: post #2

....I have lots of questions about this "homegrown web tracking tool" (assuming this isn't still part of a joke?). What??? Was this opt-in? Did they track across everyone? What was collected? This is troubling, to say the least.

Hey there - I work at SO. Understand your concern and wanted to share some details. Browsers fire a copy event when you copy, just like a click event fires when you press on a button. We just added analytics to it like we would any other feature on the site. We didn't track the content of your copy (browsers don't let you see the text content) but we did track the following: Meta data about the post and it's parent p…

I appreciate the response and detail here, would have liked to see that in the original post.

Re: How often do people copy and paste from Stack Overflow?

#70

Post by podiki » Mon, Apr 19, 2021, 5:55 PM UTC

somehnguy wrote: post #14

cryptoz wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not OP, but, the troubling parts for me are 1) the tone of the post, and 2) the larger-than-SO issue of the gap in understanding copy+paste for the average user. 1) The post says "unfortunately" they cannot tie logged-out users to their logged-in account. In no moral way is this a reasonable perspective to me. It is extremely fortunate that SO does not build the tech to track you as a logged-in user when you are logg…

Thanks for the explanation. Honestly I still don't see the big deal though. It's just a little bit of fun with an interesting statistic, not everything needs to be so doom & gloom serious.

I wasn't trying to be all "doom and gloom," but as one concerned about tracking (yes, all the social media and stuff you mention, which I try to be very conscious about) the casual mention of adding in tracking to a particular event really could have used more context and explanation (especially given the technical audience). I love see the data analysis on SO, but there is a general need for transparency and opt-in on the internet. Not saying this was a huge deal, but the fact that it can be so casual speaks to the larger issues I'd say.