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How often do people copy and paste from Stack Overflow?

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201–210 of 243 posts

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

#201

Post by supermatt »

Im honestly surprised that people use stack overflow any more. In the early days, I gained a large amount of reputation both answering and asking questions. It felt like participation.

Now it is almost impossible to ask a valid question without it getting flagged for some reason. Questions are closed as duplicate, when they clearly aren't. If you follow the "new" feed, you can see valid questions getting closed before your eyes. Now I just stumble on it from google searches - and most of the time the answers are of poor quality, or to do with an outdated language or product feature.

It is sad, because it was an awesome Q&A site.

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

#202

Post by dkersten »

jollybean wrote: post #154
henrikeh wrote: post #58

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 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 togethe…

I actually don’t mind the python docs, but then, I learned python from them back in 2001 when I had infrequent internet access, so I had to rely on my offline copy!

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

#203

Post by fomine3 »

smitop wrote: post #175
hootbootscoot wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's great that they officially releases data dump to IA.

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

#204

Post by open0 »

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.

It gives the impression that they don't trust their other more standard testing and analysis tools, and also that they don't trust their developers to use discretion when selecting online resources.

And it seems the software itself reflects a misunderstanding about how programming code is actually manifested. It's very possible to read the official docs or use an IDE and end up writing the same lines of code in some Stack Overflow answer, as many here have said already.

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

#205

Post by gtm1260 »

sergiomattei wrote: post #134
erinan wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I agree, Django docs put Flask to shame! Flask in general is more intuitive I guess, but the docs are not as good as they could be.

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

#206

Post by svnpenn »

fnord77 wrote: post #188
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…

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.

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

#207

Post by hnick »

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…

Most frequently I do it for PHP. I help a friend with a Wordpress site, PHP is easy to read but I'm hardly fluent in the ins-and-outs, and a simple Wordpress hook added to functions.php can fix so many issues. I always leave a comment with the full link for context.

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

#208

Post by shannifin »

> "One out of every four users who visits a Stack Overflow question copies something within five minutes of hitting the page."

Ha. Before reading the article I thought to myself "I probably copy about 1/4th of the time..." Usually just syntax I can't keep straight.

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