Good coders borrow, great coders steal • Hacker News Board

Re: Good coders borrow, great coders steal

#51

Post by dTal » Fri, May 22, 2020, 9:36 PM UTC

bsder wrote: post #47

shadowgovt wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not everyone is interested in open sourcing their work - but somehow that's looked down upon. Why!? It is their work and respect it, there are so many people with pitch fork entitlement. The pitchfork entitlement, to my observation, is reactionary to the force of law backing something that should be an individual's responsibility if they want to keep it secret but not supported by the threat of government-sanctione…

> But what's the ramification if somebody figures a trick out and publishes it? It certainly isn't a crime. Um, actually it can be. Many magic tricks can be both copyrighted and patented. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/teller-wins-lawsui...

As the article points out, magic tricks per se are not copyrightable. What are copyrightable are performative works, that may include magic tricks.

The distinction is subtle - it means you're perfectly free to "steal" an (unpatented) method, provided you use it in a different act.

Re: Good coders borrow, great coders steal

#52

Post by nostrademons » Fri, May 22, 2020, 10:33 PM UTC

pavlov wrote: post #19

simonw wrote: post #15

Something I realized working on a large internal codebase at a company: any line of code you write is liable to be copied-and-pasted at some point in the future. And that's good! Consistency is a very valuable quality of large codebases worked on by many engineers. If I want to figure out how to write a unit test for a service call, find an existing example of that pattern and copy that. Resist the temptation to inve…

I work at a FAANG with a monorepo (or nearly so). For anything that’s not blue-sky R&D, stalking around the codebase for working examples and patterns is a big part of the job. I’ve felt that there is a potentially a role missing here: a kind of free-floating code librarian who is not attached to any particular team and could be called upon to perform basic research of existing patterns. Part of this role could be to…

This is usually called an "area tech lead" in FAANGs and "software architect" in more old-line software companies.

Re: Good coders borrow, great coders steal

#53

Post by fermienrico » Fri, May 22, 2020, 11:12 PM UTC

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #48

fermienrico wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can get behind CYA license use. I think all of them have some kind of a clause - “You have no rights to sue me and no implied warranty” sounds logical.

I use MIT for everything. I don't like coercive licenses, but that CYA is important. America is the Land of the [Lawyers'] Fee. I can't remember the site, but someone has a site, dedicated to all the stupid, ridiculous, double-facepalm lawsuits the US "enjoys." It is quite common for people to be [successfully] sued for trying to help someone else. I remember taking a CPR class, where we were told that, if we gave CP…

+1 We gotta get this lawyer gig economy shutdown. What a waste of human talent.

Re: Good coders borrow, great coders steal

#54

Post by bryanrasmussen » Fri, May 22, 2020, 11:45 PM UTC

fermienrico wrote: post #28

I like how the west is worried about copying/pasting some code and whether that would lead to some obscure licensing issue in the future where lawyers battle it out for 4 years, costing $3M in attorney fees; while some engineer in Shenzhen going off and copying stuff without any worries and infact openly teaching others in his team to learn how to cook some copy pasta. IMO software licensing and patent litigations, a…

How do you completely public domain without a license, seeing as things are considered copyrighted by default?

Re: Good coders borrow, great coders steal

#55

Post by bryanrasmussen » Fri, May 22, 2020, 11:51 PM UTC

thebean11 wrote: post #31

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing

Wow..that seems much more restrictive than it should be. They're seriously saying closed source software companies can't use content on Stackoverflow? What if I write a piece of closed source software while consulting SO, is that my own work or a transformed version of the work on SO?

I don't know if that license would really stand up in court, I think a good attorney would have some interesting attack possibilities given the origin of some code you see on Stackoverflow anyway. Not to mention that license is not readily apparent to people, on a social site where you are sharing answers between people does every person in the conversation know what license they are entering in to? How is stackoverflow marketed to people, is that marketing at odds with the assumed license?

Re: Good coders borrow, great coders steal

#56

Post by karmakaze » Fri, May 22, 2020, 11:55 PM UTC

neonate wrote: post #29

What is this article actually saying? Sometimes programmers copy-paste things, and that's ok except when it isn't, and something something Van Gogh? Is there more to it that I missed?

There is a really good point that I found where it talks about the difference between "borrowing" (bad) and "stealing" (good).

> A borrowed object still belongs to someone else; you copy a style and it still belongs to someone else. To steal, however, is to make that idea your own. Taking credit for someone else’s idea is borrowing; understanding an idea and weaving it into your own work, that’s what he meant by theft.

So the point is when you 'lift' some code from somewhere and use it, use it fully, own it, have mastery of it. Only then have you 'stolen' it and become yours.

Re: Good coders borrow, great coders steal

#57

Post by pavlov » Sat, May 23, 2020, 4:25 AM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #52

pavlov wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work at a FAANG with a monorepo (or nearly so). For anything that’s not blue-sky R&D, stalking around the codebase for working examples and patterns is a big part of the job. I’ve felt that there is a potentially a role missing here: a kind of free-floating code librarian who is not attached to any particular team and could be called upon to perform basic research of existing patterns. Part of this role could be to…

This is usually called an "area tech lead" in FAANGs and "software architect" in more old-line software companies.

I’m thinking of a more junior supporting role, separate from development and architectural design. The librarian doesn’t write the books.

Re: Good coders borrow, great coders steal

#58

Post by geoffbp » Sat, May 23, 2020, 8:15 PM UTC

This applies to ops as well. Most problems we look at have been solved before so it's a case of identifying and integrating (aka opinioinating) the solution not necessarily creating something from scratch.