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How often do people copy and paste from Stack Overflow?

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171–180 of 243 posts

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

#171

Post by Spooky23 »

Silhouette wrote: post #120
dkersten wrote: post #110

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…

Once SO killed expertsexchange and similar sites, it became less useful to me!

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

#172

Post by hootbootscoot »

gregmac wrote: post #166

I was working at a company that was acquired a few years ago, and part of the deal was them doing a source-level audit of code, mainly looking at licenses and open-source. They used some software which could detect copy-pasted source code, and had Stack Overflow indexed. The Stack Overflow stuff was a massive, massive pain, for several reasons. For one, it's not clear how CC-BY-SA applies to code[1]. This involved ma…

That tool sounds properly dodgy too. Wouldn't their indexing of S.O. answers be itself an IP issue?

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

#173

Post by smabie »

gregmac wrote: post #166

I was working at a company that was acquired a few years ago, and part of the deal was them doing a source-level audit of code, mainly looking at licenses and open-source. They used some software which could detect copy-pasted source code, and had Stack Overflow indexed. The Stack Overflow stuff was a massive, massive pain, for several reasons. For one, it's not clear how CC-BY-SA applies to code[1]. This involved ma…

I feel like the experience should make you extremely cautious of using stupid tools to analyze your codebase, not the introduction of external code.

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

#174

Post by sdan »

dkersten wrote: post #110

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 stopped relying SO and started relying heavily on https://grep.app and Github search. Most of the time the code actually works and there's good references on how to structure things.

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

#175

Post by smitop »

hootbootscoot wrote: post #172
gregmac wrote: post #166

I was working at a company that was acquired a few years ago, and part of the deal was them doing a source-level audit of code, mainly looking at licenses and open-source. They used some software which could detect copy-pasted source code, and had Stack Overflow indexed. The Stack Overflow stuff was a massive, massive pain, for several reasons. For one, it's not clear how CC-BY-SA applies to code[1]. This involved ma…

That tool sounds properly dodgy too. Wouldn't their indexing of S.O. answers be itself an IP issue?

Using SO data for purposes like that is allowed under the CC licence used. You don't even need to do any scraping, since you can download an offical data dump of all SO answers at https://archive.org/details/stackexchange

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

#177

Post by sjtindell »

sdan wrote: post #174
dkersten wrote: post #110

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 stopped relying SO and started relying heavily on https://grep.app and Github search. Most of the time the code actually works and there's good references on how to structure things.

I’m finding GitHub files and blog posts dedicated directly to my topic more and more, even relatively minor questions or function syntax.

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

#178

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

ziml77 wrote: post #162
kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Python documentation is a static Sphinx site with no need for JS to render content. That's the easiest possible design for search engines to index. It's Google's fault that their algorithm can be gamed by low quality seo sites.

The only way it wouldn't be able to be gamed is if they kept making large changes to it for no other reason than to be a moving target. Like you can say "oh it's stupid that they prioritize X and not Y when Y is a much better indicator of meaningful content" but as soon as they switch Y to be a priority, sites will shift to maximizing the amount of Y.

Google can fix the problem. They just don't want to. They were able to kill the Wikipedia clones by demoting their rankings. They don't want to surface non-profit ad-free sites on the first page results because that cuts into revenue.

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

#179

Post by wjertyj »

smabie wrote: post #173
gregmac wrote: post #166

I was working at a company that was acquired a few years ago, and part of the deal was them doing a source-level audit of code, mainly looking at licenses and open-source. They used some software which could detect copy-pasted source code, and had Stack Overflow indexed. The Stack Overflow stuff was a massive, massive pain, for several reasons. For one, it's not clear how CC-BY-SA applies to code[1]. This involved ma…

I feel like the experience should make you extremely cautious of using stupid tools to analyze your codebase, not the introduction of external code.

Yeah, they definitely should have bailed on the acquisition when the acquiring company asked for proof they weren't using code they didn't have a license to....

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

#180

Post by fctorial »

cardanome wrote: post #38

I think copy and pasting code is very useful for a junior developer and nothing to be ashamed of. You will learn by debugging and modifying it. As a more senior person, I rarely do copy whole snippets. I will look for general inspiration or to confirm my idea and check if there is a better solution. I wont blatantly copy as it rarely fits into my architecture and code style so it is faster to just directly write it h…

It depends on how complicated the codebase is. Junior programmers usually work on simple programs so they can get away by copy pasting snippets.
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