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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?

#141
post #26

I have spent multiple hours digging into something, found my own Stack Overflow answer and pasted it back in.

What's worse is when you find your own answer and don't even remember writing it!

Happens to me with my own code. "What the hell was I thinking?" Isn't uncommon when I find I got a bit too clever on something. Over the years I've learned to be less clever and more literate in my coding style.

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

#143
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Good for you! Nobody is saying that it’s impossible for an outsider to get access to NYSE or to DARPA. I just said that there are arp ton of insiders who like to hand contracts and grants to each other.

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

#145
It's weird, nowadays I think the only times I use SO as a reference are when I'm hitting something that is very product-specific (i.e. a weird error message in Typescript that doesn't quite make sense). In those situations, there's usually some SO thread that explains the quirky behavior and workarounds in depth. Otherwise, I'm never there anymore, which certainly wasn't the case years ago.

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

#146
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Good for you! Nobody is saying that it’s impossible for an outsider to get access to NYSE or to DARPA. I just said that there are arp ton of insiders who like to hand contracts and grants to each other.

For example, trust plays factor too from PM perspective at DARPA, it is not all conspiracy.

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

#147
post #127

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…

> This is an unpopular opinion [citation needed] These kinds of comments just make those who agree be sure to upvote, they're part of this perceived in-crowd after all, and most of the time (here too) it's fairly obviously true so a lot of people will upvote. Of course a newb will copy more code than a veteran. They also have very different functions in organisations on average. It's neither an opinion nor unpopular.

That’s not exactly what I’m saying. Veteran isn’t really the same thing as “age”.

Also, I think it is pretty controversial for one to claim that some people don’t really use Stack Overflow

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

#148
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yep. There's nothing quite like the experience of going on Stack Overflow for a particular problem, and the "best answer" is almost what you need... but you scroll down, and there's a different version that's exactly what you need! except it's for an older version of the library... but there's a comment on that answer, from two years later, with a quick note on "if you're at version 7+, just do Y instead of X." Absol…

I use Reddit for this

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

#149
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it just me or is this also a symptom of Python's documentation being really strange to navigate and generally having a massive impedance mismatch with Google? When I search on Google for "python reverse list", not a single link is to the official Python documentation. Not even if I search for "python reverse" does the documentation page show up. Searching for "python reverse documentation" leads to the second link…

It’s not just you. Python seems to suffer from Python-specific ”tutorial sites” being SEO’d above Python’s official docs. I don’t know what it is about the Python documentation that lowers its rank on Google search results. In general, not a big fan of Python docs.

JS has / had the same problem, which is why a common tip is to add "MDN" to the keywords to get a higher quality reference style result from MDN: https://developer.mozilla.org/

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

#150

Interestingly, 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'm trying to think what's changed Among other possibilities: SO suffers from hostile moderation and a generally unwelcoming culture, perhaps even worse than Wikipedia. This has a profound chilling effect on positive, substantial contributions, particularly from new contributors. SO had a great strategy initially with relying on search engines to index everything, but it never seems to have solved the recency/relevan…

> SO suffers from hostile moderation and a generally unwelcoming culture, perhaps even worse than Wikipedia. This has a profound chilling effect on positive, substantial contributions, particularly from new contributors.

This rings very true to me. The GP's comment made me consider that I very rarely go to Stackoverflow anymore, no longer contribute and what stuff I do find there useful is from well before the cultural shift in moderation, back when questions could be a little more open and answers a little more freewheeling.

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