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How often people copy and paste from Stack Overflow
- redman25 5y agoThis makes me curious, how are stackoverflow questions licensed? Is there any harm in copy/pasting?
- gs17 5y agoIt depends on when it was posted: ttps://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing >Content contributed before 2011-04-08 (UTC) is distributed under the terms of CC BY-SA 2.5. >Content contributed from 2011-04-08 up to but not including 2018-05-02 (UTC) is distributed under the terms of CC BY-SA 3.0. >Content contributed on or after 2018-05-02 (UTC) is distributed under the terms of CC BY-SA 4.0.
- hobs 5y agoAnd if you want an easy way to download it https://archive.org/details/stackexchange https://archive.org/details/stackexchange
- ffhhj 5y ago> Visually display or otherwise clearly indicate the author names And there lays the intention to comply with the license dead in the water... SO displays the user name only, not the real name.
- CorrectHorseBat 5y agohttps://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/License_Versions#Attribution_required https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/License_Versions#Attri... As I understand it this means that if the user does not disclose his real name you don't have to show his real name either.
- ffhhj 5y agoWhat if some weird looking username is actually the real name and we don't show it, or the username seems real but actually fake? (yeah, I'm a pest for lawyers) Why didn't they just asked for "whatever string the author identified as".
- joombaga 5y agoFrom my reading they did > If You Share the Licensed Material (including in modified form), You must: > A. retain the following if it is supplied by the Licensor with the Licensed Material: > i. identification of the creator(s) of the Licensed Material and any others designated to receive attribution, in any reasonable manner requested by the Licensor (including by pseudonym if designated); https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode
- Gigachad 5y agoThe average snipit from stack overflow isn’t sufficiently unique to be covered by copyright anyway.
- yesenadam 5y agoWhat am I missing? The picture "Copy Events by Post Score"[0] on that page plots, for posts with various point scores, how many times they were copied. But for 0 - 100 on the x-axis, this is a virtually clean, thin, solid curve, as if all posts with 45 points, say, were copied exactly 13 times, all posts with 46 points, 14 times etc. I don't get why the data points are all on a single curve. That's odd, right?! [0] https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/hkdnDDP4Vx0XOMt_VWX09qKURy2k6Mr6EK2eL1JIZm0HCCe0GDPJocagTcAK5jtl7AtQbIlf_f4wE_A2-JC73X6b1s1ULifQ-9GL2JpiL1k67W3VAjKhwqcDFtHqGkVLQk-L-Tpf https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/hkdnDDP4Vx0XOMt_VWX09qKURy...
- ddulaney 5y agoThey don’t say, but presumably it’s an average at each X coordinate, and those scores have enough posts that the average converges nicely. As scores go up, each score doesn’t have as many posts and we don’t see the averages converging.
- austinjp 5y agoIt does look a bit odd, but not that odd. (Caveat: I'm on mobile and lazy so I've not read the post, just looked at the linked graph.) The plot "points" are blobs rather than actual points, so there's likely some grouping of data going on, e.g. 0-9 votes, 10-19 votes, etc, per blob. Then it just seems that low scores are more tightly correlated with low copying, and the correlation dissipates as the score increases. That doesn't seem too surprising, I guess?
- account-5 5y ago>... we set up a system to react every time someone typed Command+C ... So only people using Mac's then.
- paulpauper 5y agoStack overflow has contributed probably billions of dollars of uncredited economic value just by people doing this
- xwolfi 5y agoYeah but it's not StackOverlow answering questions. I'd say people at work helped other people at work and they got out the same as they put in: win-win. Let's not pretend this interested exchange is slavery. I credit all my colleagues who ask and answer questions.
- Gigachad 5y agoThis is a wonderful thing and one of the examples where the internet brought real value to the world. Sharing of well curated knowledge is the best use for the internet.
- shostack 5y agoHere comes gating copy and paste behind a subscription. /s
- TheRealNGenius 5y agoNot copy paste but I definitely read all the solutions and incorporate the best one.
- politelemon 5y agoI wonder if they adjusted for, or should have adjusted for, the "triple copy just to be sure" action that some people perform. Maybe the triple copy also has a correlation with user age and reputation.
- silisili 5y agoThat's funny because I didn't even think about it, but I'm definitely a triple copier, just out of habit anymore. Interesting to know how many other people are now that you mention it.
- k__ 5y agoI always do cut-paste at the source and then paste at the target. If the source is editable, I see that it worked because it briefly vanished, lol
- GuB-42 5y agoI do that too, but because I often use the shift+del / shift+insert shortcuts with my right hand. I find the proper "copy" shortcut: crtl+insert to be more awkward.
- Bjartr 5y agoWhat is triple copy? Literally hitting ctrl-c three times? No idea that was a thing people did.
- blowfish721 5y agoI picked up that habit back in the day when I was working with Citrix since back then the first Ctrl-c normally wouldn’t take. Still doing it to this day out of muscle memory.
- johnisgood 5y agoQuestion to the employers or managers: do you think that this is bad thing?
- axiosgunnar 5y agoNo, because good coders copy, great coders steal
- johnisgood 5y agoCan I work for you?
- analog31 5y agoI copy and paste from SO, but it's pretty rare that I can use the code as-is. Sometimes it's not even in the same language. My usual habit is to leave a link to the web page in a comment. Sometimes the link is more valuable than the code itself because a SO thread will include differing opinions and good explanations.
- callamdelaney 5y agoI do this too, also to insightful comments occasionally. I like how you can grab a short link to a specific answer.
- davchana 5y agoI too, after coming back to a code snippet or logic, and struggling to understand why or how I used it, now everytime I get help from stack overflow, i put that answer's link in a comment just before the code or concept starts.
- curiousgal 5y agoMost copied snippet is a basic operation when dealing with data. That's a testemant to how unintuitive Pandas is.
- bluedino 5y agoI'm waiting for the day where some snippet from StackOverflow makes in into a big project or multiple projects and is exploited by some huge bug...
- 8organicbits 5y agoI wouldn't be surprised if that happens regularly. There's lots of insecure code on SO, either because it was written in an insecure way or best practices changed (like md5 hashing passwords). https://grahamcluley.com/take-care-copy-pasting-code-stack-overflow/ https://grahamcluley.com/take-care-copy-pasting-code-stack-o...
- neatze 5y agoI don't remember copy pasting, have no idea how it will work, even for python, my use case for stack overflow is examples that help me understand potential "solution" conceptually, for example, I might be missing understanding how to call specific function/method from library or something specific to api and error(s), that's about it.
- snarkypixel 5y agoTL&DR: 40,623,987 copies across 7,305,042 posts and comments between March 26th and April 9th
- retrocryptid 5y agohonest to god we have an internal app that's nothing more than a collection of cargo cult programming snippets from stack overflow and various AWS examples. it's clear the author knew neither AWS or JavaScript and kept adding code snippets until the errors went away.
- elliotec 5y agoSo it works? And there are no errors?
- retrocryptid 5y agothere are plenty of errors. it works only intermittently, produces megabytes of randomly generated files as a side effect and spurious messages to various internal pub/sub topics. users know to send a request and wait 30 seconds. if it doesn't respond, just resubmit the request. it also has no build system or tests, just a script that copies the source to a build directory, zips it up and uses an example SAM template that creates quite a few unused resources, but as a side effect creating a useful lambda. the lambda is behind an api gateway resource/method so a payload is sent to the lambda if the request path matches what's in the resource path part of the api. the lambda itself is an express app with a single route defined (which is the same as the api gateway resource path) - so the api gateway routes to the lambda if the path in matches the resource. then the express app looks at the path and dispatches based on the path (even though the only way you could have called this lambda was for the path to already match the path specified in the express app.) because there's no build system, they didn't think to scrape dev dependencies out of the build directory, so we wind up uploading babel and a few other packages to the deploy environment. we're inconsistant in whether we use SNS vs. SQS. and we frequently drop requests if we get a sudden spike in traffic because SNS is not a queue and sometimes it takes so long to scale up messages time out of the SNS topic. but it "works" for some definition of the word.
- walrus01 5y agoI don't think that javascript should be permitted to know what text you've selected as displayed in your browser or that you've copied it to clipboard. Fundamental mismatch in the rights of the end user client device and person operating the browser vs. the httpd. At least not without going through the same level of explicit permission popup that you would need for microphone or camera access in a modern browser. What people copy to clipboard on their own client workstation device should be exclusively up to their local control. Mostly I see this in websites that deploy some mostly-futile "special sauce" code to prevent things like right-click/save-as of images. And similar.
- Waterluvian 5y agoI’m not sure this changes a thing unless you also want a permission popup for tracking when text is even selected. And at that point you’re getting permission to be aware of basic DOM events.
- tshaddox 5y agoThe practical problem with this idea is that you would essentially need to remove the ability of JavaScript to track all human input (mouse movement, clicks, etc.) since that could already be used to figure out what they’re selecting. Sure, browsers could try to hide this info with clever rules like not reporting mouse movements while the mouse button is being held and text is being selected, but it would be pretty hard to get right (and would probably break a lot of sites that aren’t doing anything nefarious, like any rich text editor).
- VWWHFSfQ 5y agoYour web browser is your operating system. It needs to have access to your peripherals and lower-level things like your clipboard and filesystem.
- walrus01 5y agoSure it does, doesn't mean it needs to report back to a website what it's doing with it.
- aussieguy1234 5y agoBack when I was a beginner, I'll admit I did this alot. 11 years later it's rare. I'm more interested in sites like stack overflow for much higher level information like what framework should I choose for project X.
- faizshah 5y agoI don’t copy and paste code from stackoverflow anymore. When I was a beginner I used to but now because of the complexity of things I work on the snippets don’t work as is and I just look at stackoverflow to find an approach and then look at the documentation to apply it to my problem. The one I am guilty for copying and pasting is command line stuff. I know its dangerous and I try not to paste it directly into the terminal but some of the commands are so complicated and backspacing in the shell is annoying its just easier to copy and paste.
- mrelectric 5y agoUse address bar as temporary editor / buffer. Ctrl-C, Ctrl-L, Ctrl-V, ctrl-left or ctrl-right to edit/confirm correctness, then ctrl a and ctl c
- lhuser123 5y agoCool
- Cyphase 5y agoI'm glad I'm not the only person who uses the address bar as a temporary editor.
- YPPH 5y agoI use it to clear formatting before pasting into rich text editors like Word or Outlook. Wonder if I'm the only one.
- addandsubtract 5y agoI do the same, unless it contains sensitive data that I don't want to leak to Google. Then I just use Sublime. I wish ctrl+shift+v was more common to paste without formatting.
- mrelectric 5y agoSame hehe
- newsbinator 5y ago> and surprisingly, we see more copies being made on questions without accepted answers than we do on questions which are accepted.
- galaxyLogic 5y agoWhat are the copyright implications? Do the terms of service allow copying? Is all code on Stack Overflow in public domain, or is it under some specific license?
- balls187 5y agoYes the terms use allows copying and remixing. As of now, it's Creative Commons Attribution - Share Alike. https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing
- unnah 5y agoThat "Share Alike" part in the license name means that your project needs to be using the same CC-BY-SA license as stackoverflow. That is unlikely to be the case, so copying code from stackoverflow is a license violation. On the other hand, you are unlikely to be sued for it, so few people care. Considering how long stackoverflow has been using these terms, fully aware that everyone and their dog is copying code from stackoverflow all over, one might suspect that the stackoverflow people are intentionally trolling corporate lawyers here, in the best anarchist tradition...
- balls187 5y agoI am on the upper rep band, and I typically copy from the question and paste into my answer. It appears as though Stack Exchange accounted for that use case when showing User rep. I assume the 0-rep users doing the copy and pasting are the same quality as programmers who post low quality "I'm in tech look at me" videos on social media.
- ubukhary 5y agoIt appears data scientists copy the most, which implies the one who automates others' work will get automated out sooner than we all think. What data scientists should learn to stay relevant in the next 3-5 years?
- antupis 5y agoData Engineering or ML ops, it has same kind thing going on that data science had 5 years ago. Nowadays it feels that most DS is just glorified Data analysts.
- ubukhary 5y agoWith AWS sagemaker like services MLops is also getting easier. Yes data engineering still requires significant work. I personally think people with business and technical sense will remain relevant. business sense -> understand or identify right problems. Technical sense -> can find quick solutions, most of the time just with co-code or autoML tools
- 5350-uiop-1130 5y agoOff topic, but honestly believe this is one of the most damaging "developer memes". And it's not even funny. We forget how many non technical people, managers, HR people etc read these things and take them at face value.
- MichaelBurge 5y agoMassive increases in developer compensation in the last 10 years is evidence that - on net - developers aren't damaged.
- JadoJodo 5y agoI initially thought this would utilize some sort of GitHub/GitLab/Bitbucket/etc-wide scan to compare code in public repos against that of those provided in answers on StackOverflow. I would still be curious to see that, but this is obviously more direct.