How often do people copy and paste from Stack Overflow? • Hacker News Board

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

#241

Post by quesera » Wed, Apr 21, 2021, 2:52 PM UTC

jodrellblank wrote: post #237

quesera wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

That's right, but nothing mandates that the web page configures these event handlers, and sends these events to the tracking server operated by Stack Overflow.

My point is: "We can make this thing happen, and we do so and record the results" is more accurate than "this interesting thing just happens, and we observe" which is the tone of the original.

Most sites do not configure their pages to track copy events. SO does the unusual thing. They should be honest about that.

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

#242

Post by 7thaccount » Wed, Apr 21, 2021, 6:33 PM UTC

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…

Same. Sometimes I forget a function name or method call (especially when using a language I use rarely) and just use stack overflow for the example and as soon as I see it I'm like "ahhh". No need for copy/paste.

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

#243

Post by ianmcgowan » Sat, Apr 24, 2021, 7:59 PM UTC

shpx wrote: post #56

ianmcgowan wrote: post #47

I do it all the time for clever tricks (especially SQL things like tally tables), but like to leave the permalink to the answer that seems best (from the share link below the answers) as a comment in my code. If it's something I had to google for once, it's likely needed in the future and sometimes it's easier to search my own code for all SO links than follow the thread through the labyrinth again...

Stack Overflow answers are licensed under a CC BY-SA license.[0] If you copy and paste a function without (at least) linking to the question, isn't that copyright infringement? [0] https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333089/

There probably are programmers that paste entire functions, but for me it's mostly either concepts or minor snippets. In particular the DBA stackoverflow is great for all kinds of clever tricks in SQL to use a set-based rather than row-based approach (e.g. to things like string handling, and tricky aggregations). I'm not too worried about the copyright police for things like that.