[deleted]
How often do people copy and paste from Stack Overflow?
131–140 of 243 posts
Re: How often do people copy and paste from Stack Overflow?
#132Tangent:
Does anyone ever intentionally NOT copy and paste, even from their own code?
I usually copy/paste, but sometimes I'm inclined to type it out again because it's just... It's just really satisfying.
It's like a ballet move or a really graceful hockey play. I find the act of physically typing out some code to be graceful and elegant and just so darn satisfying.
Re: How often do people copy and paste from Stack Overflow?
#133I've found that the amount I use stackoverflow is inversely proportional to the quality of the documentation and the strength of the type-system of the language I'm using.
Definitely. Looking at my browser history for stackoverflow + PHP, it seems to be things to do with PHP, such as how to prevent a referrer from being sent when users click a link on my website. That's of course not actually part of the PHP language, so it would seem like I'm rarely looking up how to use PHP APIs on stackoverflow. I've always found PHP docs to be the best of any language that I've used.
Though even for PHP StackOverflow is still pretty useful e.g:
Re: How often do people copy and paste from Stack Overflow?
#134I've found that the amount I use stackoverflow is inversely proportional to the quality of the documentation and the strength of the type-system of the language I'm using.
That's me with Python... For some reason I find the documentation extremely cumbersome to navigate and parse. It's just so wordy and dense. And there are barely any examples - which is what I'm usually looking for instead of having to read a whole paragraph. The Elixir documentation on the other hand is succinct and always features basic examples for every function. It's a joy to work with.
As a slightly opposing take, Django has the highest-quality and most comprehensive documentation I've ever seen for a web framework... Or open source project, for that matter.
Not very related to the parent comment, but just an interesting note.
Re: How often do people copy and paste from Stack Overflow?
#135I wish they had shared with users how many of their answers/questions/comments were copied from. Views are aplenty but maybe one in a dozen, perhaps one in a hundred of the readers that found it useful actually upvote. I might even link an answer to friends, they express having found it interesting or useful, but no upvote comes in. Not enough karma is often a reason, but also most just don't habitually upvote useful…
Don't you have to be above a certain score or something to upvote?
I remember something about that when I tried once and haven't bothered logging back in since as I didn't have the clout to do anything of value
E: I am sorry, you mentioned that but I dived into a reply so fast I missed it. Aye the karma thing they have there really discourages (or at least it did for me) participation. I'm working on the thing that brought me to SO in the first place I'm not spending time building up karma on a dying website to upvote haha.
Re: How often do people copy and paste from Stack Overflow?
#136Interestingly, I don't remember when the last time I did so was. I seem to be relying on SO less and less. I do sometimes use it as a quick reference, usually because its one of the first results on search engines, but its typically just a quick "ah, that's the function for that" or "ah, that's how you do X" rather than actually copying code. I'm trying to think what's changed, I guess I've just been writing stuff th…
I also use stack overflow very little but I think it’s much more easily explained by my personal habits than changes on the site.
When I used stack overflow more, I was doing stuff with web technologies and Unix command line tools. These days I’m much more experienced with Unix tools; I use more specialised tools that aren’t mentioned on SO, use a programming language which isn’t often mentioned on SO, and a large array of libraries which are even less frequently mentioned there. I’m also generally better at finding my own way around—digging through code, jumping to definitions, looking up errors. I think the reason I don’t use it so much is that it is less useful because it doesn’t have the answers I care about and because I have fewer questions for it to answer.
Re: How often do people copy and paste from Stack Overflow?
#137Tangent: Does anyone ever intentionally NOT copy and paste, even from their own code? I usually copy/paste, but sometimes I'm inclined to type it out again because it's just... It's just really satisfying. It's like a ballet move or a really graceful hockey play. I find the act of physically typing out some code to be graceful and elegant and just so darn satisfying.
I try not to copy & paste if the pasted version needs slight variations. Too often I miss one and waste time debugging. So I try to retype in those situations.
Re: How often do people copy and paste from Stack Overflow?
#138I 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.
I was told long time ago that without being "insider" I will never get direct access to NYSE and will be able to make money by doing so, proved them wrong, while there is "insider club" in NYSE, to degree there same "insider club" for DARPA or any other enterprise/organizations.
I think interesting questions is; to what degree insider club introduces friction for new comers with justified novel proposals.
Re: How often do people copy and paste from Stack Overflow?
#139I've done it pretty often. Usually I paste the code into a Jupyter notebook (where I do all of my trial and error stuff), modify to suit my need, then add a comment with a link to the original page. I do this with anything that I glean from the Web.
Re: How often do people copy and paste from Stack Overflow?
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
Stack Overflow answers are licensed under a CC BY-SA license.[0] If you copy and paste a function without (at least) linking to the question, isn't that copyright infringement? [0] https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333089/
It depends. The short of it is that a few lines are often not copyrightable at all, but otherwise you're right. Hence, in my code I actually link to the answer when I think it might meet the bar for copyrightability. One example that comes to mind is a string->number hash function in javascript to assign random but consistent colors to items; I would use the resulting number as hue in CSS.
Problem is when “your code” isn’t yours but your employers. Don’t get me wrong this is not a new problem, but you should be aware that simply linking the answer to a comment (esp in a closed source code base) isn’t sufficient