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How often do people copy and paste from Stack Overflow?

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

#91

Post by piokoch »

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…

Why "government founded grants", "medical software", "incompetence", "very profitable" and "data leaks" are always magically joined together...

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

#92

Post by busterarm »

piokoch wrote: post #91
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…

Why "government founded grants", "medical software", "incompetence", "very profitable" and "data leaks" are always magically joined together...

It gets much more interesting than that...

The field itself is a poorly understood area of medicine. By that I mean, it's only about 50 years old and no two doctors practice alike.

It's science, but nobody has consistent repeatable steps that seem to be conclusive beyond their own individual labs. The treatments are extraordinarily expensive.

I'll leave it at that because I'd prefer not to give identifying details (even though I basically have), but really the whole thing was eye-opening for me.

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

#93

Post by number6 »

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.

list.reverse()

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

#94

Post by QuesnayJr »

simonsarris wrote: post #85
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.

I do this for sometimes and get... myself in 2013 answering somebody

This happens to me too. It freaks me out, because it means that not only I forgot the answer, but that I forgot that I ever knew the answer.

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

#95

Post by quesera »

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…

> 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.

This is a bit misleading.

More accurate would be: Stack Overflow is able to configure our web pages to track certain of your activities on the page, including Copy and Click. We do that.

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

#97

Post by mixmastamyk »

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…

Sometimes you want a discussion of the pros and cons of the various ways to tackle a problem, in order to find the best approach for your application.

This kind of information is almost never in standard documentation.

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

#99

Post by Dragonai »

LinuxBender wrote: post #63

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

Thanks for sharing this!

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

#100

Post by PhillyG »

flimflamm wrote: post #36
tomrod wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like a terrible idea!

This seems like a terrific joke!

I'm enjoying the license it uses:

"This module is licensed under whatever license you want it to be as long as the license is compatible with the fact that I blatantly copied multiple lines of code from the Python standard library"

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