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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?

#151

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

henrikeh wrote: post #58
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.

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…

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.

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

#152

Post by nerdponx »

troutwine wrote: post #150
Silhouette wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cultur…

It's a wasteland now. Legitimate, perfectly answerable questions get hostile comments and close votes.

The other sites in the Stackexchange network aren't nearly as bad, fortunately. English Language Learners and Math/MathOverflow are very positive places. Software Engineering is pretty good, too.

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

#153

Post by bluedino »

ralusek wrote: post #80
ASalazarMX wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a shame that most manuals have evolved to web pages that you can't download as PDFs or eBooks. Now you usually have to go online to find that keyword, and as you're online already, might as well google for the whole answer. One of the most productive times in my career was programming for the IBM i in the 90s. There were manuals online, but you could also download indexed PDFs versions. IBM did a superb job with…

That's interesting that you say that because I actually have the opposite reaction. When I go to look for documentation and find that it's a PDF, I want to die.

The first PDF I had was a 'bonus' book that came on a CD included with a programming book. There was a compiler along with sample code from the book, and then something like SAMS Teach Yourself Visual C++ in 21 Days.

I absolutely hated it. My screen was only 640x480, so I could barely see a whole page, much less see my IDE at the same time. These were the days of single 14 or 15 inch monitors, not dual or triple 24" widescreens.

It was also a little on the slow side. Early Pentium, 8MB RAM, 4X CD-ROM...

These days I'm delighted to see a PDF. There's a table of contents and index, they're searchable...copy and paste usually stinks, though.

PDF's are forever. They print nicely. They don't get lost when the project upgrades a major version, you can still use them when there's a DNS issue with your ISP, you can use them when you don't have internet...

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

#154

Post by jollybean »

henrikeh wrote: post #58
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.

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 you - Python docs are very comprehensive but organized in a very odd way and miss a lot of marks. If you have time to 'read everything' you're fine but it's somewhat less suited as a raw reference.

Although I don't mind the informal voice of the docs - there's clearly not much in the way of editorial oversight and pro technical writing. It makes one reconsider how much actual effort goes into putting together docs from corporate backed efforts.

That said, I don't think anyone does it perfectly well, and that we could do a lot better in terms of providing information - to the point wherein I would consider it a little bit of a failure that SE has to be consulted for smaller problems. One would hope that 'good docs' would provide clear and concise answers to such things, rather than have the crowd cobble it together and vote on it.

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

#155

Post by gregmac »

fredley wrote: post #26

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

I have got the "you can't upvote your own answer" warning several times over the past decade. It's a wierd mix of delight and embarrassment.

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

#157

Post by pottertheotter »

fredley wrote: post #26

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

I had a similar thing happen after watching a YouTube video a couple weeks ago. I was going to leave a comment and looked through the comments first to see if anyone felt the same as I did. I read a comment that was nearly word for word what I was thinking only to realize it was mine.

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

#158

Post by ziml77 »

It's a great way to get individual functions for odd tasks instead of needing to pull in a whole library. Just last week I needed to implement POPCNT in C# since we're not using .NET 5 so BitOperations.PopCount is unavailable. The naive implementation is easy but this was needed in our core networking code so easy performance wins are good to go look for.

A quick Google search brought me to a question on Stack Overflow from someone looking for the exact same thing: a good implementation of POPCNT that works for a single byte[1]. I checked out the answers, found the one that looked the best, pasted it into LINQPad to test all the combinations, and then pasted it into our code with a comment that had the Stack Overflow answer's permalink. I don't see anything wrong with copy-pasting from SO that way. It's quite handy.

[1]: Yes, if I'm looking for maximum performance, working with just a byte at a time is not great. But for the data I'm working with, you need to know the population of a byte to find the next byte that needs to be counted.

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

#159

Post by anitil »

number6 wrote: post #93
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()

Or is it reversed(list)? checks Stack Overflow

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

#160

Post by [deleted] »

spaetzleesser wrote: post #143
neatze wrote: 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.

[deleted]
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