StackOverflow Importer – Import code from Stack Overflow as Python modules
github.com
github.com
"StackSort connects to StackOverflow, searches for 'sort a list', and downloads and runs code snippets until the list is sorted."
"StackSort connects to StackOverflow, searches for 'sort a
list', and downloads and runs code snippets until the list is
sorted."
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/visualstudio/2014/02/17/int...
The tool is available here:
https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/a1166718-a2d9...
I've been programming professionally for much longer than there's been a stack overflow. I have never, ever, cut and pasted code from stack overflow.
I quit not longer after that.
Besides that, most snippets are small and trivial enough that using them would easily fall under fair use.
Obviously, your case showed a lack of care on their part, but you can use SO code.
My point is that trying to copyright basic snippets of code is just ridiculous, it's something lawyers have tried to force on programmers but it makes no sense. We would be completely unable to program at all if we listened to lawyers all the time.
Clean room usage~
>>Is it safe?
>>Uh… it evals both user input and random code, unchecked, from an external site. This is what security-minded folks would refer to as Very Bad™.
I.e. maybe you type: "repeat a function over a list python" in a special format and your editor pastes in the accepted answer from stackoverflow for you to choose whether that's acceptable / whether you want to use it as a template. Then maybe you could get into a better flow without ever having to stop what you're doing to Google something ... It would all just show up magically in your editor.
You could even have libraries of common answers written in such a way that you could write expected input and output formats and then get a code fragment that would fit that description. Something like a more organized test driven development. Though that would really only work for very specific things. Improve these ideas enough and make them more general - and maybe you could improve programmer productivity by quite a large margin.
Disclaimer: I know the OP was a joke but I see no problem with reusing code if you understand what its doing and the costs / trade-offs for doing so.
(Emphasis mine.)
--
Now Stack Overflow should be even more concerned about the availability of their service.
Compare that to NPM or PyPI, which is full of crap. Some of the modules in PyPI were merely ads for putlocker, without even a single line of Python.
Seriously? Are they still there?
And then you better hope that the processor dies are as advertised.
I don't really feel like anyone is taking this very seriously.
This isn't a joke.
* Where "your" can mean you, your employer, your customer, another company, etc.
What if it can't harm anything.
> We believe in the power of community editing. That means once you've generated enough reputation, we trust you to edit anything in the system without it going through peer review. Not just your posts—anyone's posts!
I wonder if there'd be a way to maintain consistency, something like a requirements.txt file that got spit out to describe what the results of the search terms mapped to when the code was run.
It could just contain the search term and link to the chosen question. Although you'd still run the risk of the answer itself being edited. The code itself would have to be cached in whatever this file was.
I think if you do this, you'd want external tests, or some way to pull the code in and "freeze" it so that you wouldn't be at risk of external compromises. (For example, a high ranked SO user might be able to change a highly ranked answer . They might not do it, but someone suborning their account might.)
But really, this is an optimization of a lot of code that is currently written.
Something like the equivalent of `pip freeze`
[1] https://kite.com