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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?

#231

Post by lucb1e »

corobo wrote: post #135
lucb1e wrote: post #129

I 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 b…

For what it's worth, if you click it but don't have enough karma, it is recorded and high-rep users can see how often people tried to up/downvote something and compare it to the actual votes. But the screen (I have enough rep to see it) seems to be more of a gimmick than actually used by anyone.

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

#232

Post by lucb1e »

metalforever wrote: post #147
lucb1e wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

> Veteran isn’t really the same thing as “age”.

Of course not, but at the same time there are not that many 15-year-old gurus. It's not really the same thing, but on average people will gain more experience as they do a job for longer, and to do a job longer you need to age. It's not causal, but definitely correlated.

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

#233

Post by lucb1e »

o-__-o wrote: post #140
lucb1e wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

On first glance I think you're wrong, but if you think I am then please tell me more!

The stackoverflow license requires attribution and share-alike, so: (1) there is a comment for the attribution, and (2) anyone who sees the code knows they can re-use it because I mention the license for that part of the code. Some licenses also require the binary or derivative works (e.g. rendered webpages) to reproduce a notice to any users, is that a thing with creative commons? I thought CC was for non-code licenses and, as far as I know, the binary showing a notice is not a thing CC specifies. Looking up the summary page[1] on their website, it says I must provide "appropriate attribution" which is a pop-over that specifies it as:

> you must provide the name of the creator and attribution parties, a copyright notice, a license notice, a disclaimer notice, and a link to the material

I wasn't aware of the required disclaimer notice so it's good that I double-checked, but I do meet the other requirements. Though it's also quite rare that I really copy something as substantial as a whole function, it's not like this is a weekly occurrence.

But I'd love to know if I'm doing it wrong, in case you still read this!

[1] http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

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

#234

Post by spaetzleesser »

neatze wrote: post #146
spaetzleesser wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is not about conspiracy. It’s just a comfy Insiders club like many others.

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

#235

Post by tpoacher »

kstenerud wrote: post #195
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 do: Yesterday when I was looking up how to declare and use arrays in bash for the 1000th time. Bash is probably the #1 reason I end up there through a search. After 25 years professional experience (plus 12 years before that), there are a number of reasons why I search for "how to do X in Y" online at least once a week: - The language is poorly designed and has a lot of unintuitive, unorthogonal, difficult-to-remem…

man bash

woefully underused, but has everything and is extremely well written with no fluff.

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

#236

Post by anaerobicover »

methodin wrote: post #43
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.)

Search is the only correct answer. SO may be the first click often but limiting your problem solving to that is not something an experienced dev will do.

Not to mention that Stack Overflow's own search is absolutely horrible.

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

#237

Post by jodrellblank »

quesera wrote: post #95
benpopper1 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is a bit misleading; "onclick" and "oncopy" are part of the HTML standard that "must be supported by all HTML elements [...] and that must be supported by all Document objects"

[1] https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/webappapis.html#handl...

[2] https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/webappapis.html#handl...

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

#238

Post by fnord77 »

svnpenn wrote: post #206
fnord77 wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are weird people on SO who are both trolls and knowledgeable. There is one person who edits EVERY SINGLE question regarding a certain programming language. Then attempts to close every question as "already asked", even where it is somewhat questionable whether it had been asked already or not. He knows his stuff really well though so he ends up not getting banned. I do not get it.

If you're talking about Flimzy, yeah, he's a tool.

ha, no somebody else. maybe this um, personality quirk is not uncommon.

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

#239

Post by o-__-o »

lucb1e wrote: post #233
o-__-o wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

On first glance I think you're wrong, but if you think I am then please tell me more! The stackoverflow license requires attribution and share-alike, so: (1) there is a comment for the attribution, and (2) anyone who sees the code knows they can re-use it because I mention the license for that part of the code. Some licenses also require the binary or derivative works (e.g. rendered webpages) to reproduce a notice to…

If you put this in your software as John Doe committer/employee then your employer is now in violation of the CC license since it is not properly attributed. Just being in your source code is not enough, especially if you redistribute binaries or other obfuscated manners of packaged code. A lot of shops I have worked for in the past have compiled license attributions for all included works. Imagine if this CC license was excluded! Thus you copy and pasting code from stack overflow in your day to day coding as an employee opens your employer up to liability. This is just like looking at GPLv3 code saying “yep that makes sense” and then copy and pasting that. You are copying the license with the text and tainting your future code base if you do not have the right to alter the existing license.

now with that said

It’s highly unlikely this would ever be pursued at all or if it is, then swiftly settled out of court. But never underestimate legal trolls with nothing better to do

Ps this was in the context of employee/employer for-hire development. If you have the ability to attribute code as required either because this is a personal project or you are founder of said business then please disregard. My example was for jr Suzy F DevMcFace working for BigSoullessEvilCorp(TM)

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

#240

Post by baud147258 »

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…

> SO had a great strategy initially with relying on search engines to index everything, but it never seems to have solved the recency/relevance problem.

I think the SO leadership is currently searching for a solution with this issue. Whether they deploy it and it works is another matter.

Regarding the moderation and unwelcoming culture, I don't really see it, but maybe it's because I follow different tags?

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