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Comment by boyter | Hacker News Reader

Same thing happened to me at a workplace once. They blocked StackOverflow, GitHub, Bitbucket, Sourceforge, CodePlex and Google Code.

I told them all estimates go up by 2 years since we would need to reimplement everything. It ended up being unblocked a week later.

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I don't know how you'd get anything done since there are answers on Stack Overflow that solve problems that otherwise would involve hours to days of fussing to come up with the same non-intuitive solution.

All roads lead to Stack Overflow these days for progrmaming problems.

For every answered question, there are probably 20 unanswered ones. Almost none of my embedded programming questions got answered.

Edit: my estimate is wildly off. It's basically the opposite of what I said.

12,095,709 questions have an answer, 7,506,004 of those have an accepted answer, and 1,813,270 aren't yet answered.

I'd say your 1:20 ratio is just a little bit off :)

Thanks for the correction! I am asking pretty niche questions.

I feel you. I've taught myself programming between 13 and, well, I'm now 23; so by the time stackoverflow came around I had figured out how to solve things myself. When I have a question, it's usually either opinion-based (bad fit for SO) or not a common question.

I'd say 1:20 is a good estimate if I ignore answers that didn't read my question (which is most of them), but indeed the facts disagree.

What? Stackoverflow has been around since ~2008 - You certainly didn't learn how to solve things yourself a year into programming :).

Back then I didn't speak proper English, and how many questions were actually covered on SO in the beginning? It took some years to get to where we are, both for SO and for my English ;)

Just out of curiosity, do those 7.5+ million accepted answers include those closed as duplicates? Because by far my biggest complaint is finding the exact question I have was closed as a duplicate and links to a question that is useless at answering my question.

In that case you can vote to re-open and perhaps even post a bounty. Although bounties tend to invite lots of low-quality, low-effort answers just on the off chance that they might be the top-voted one once the bounty runs out.

I have had the same experience with embedded programming questions. I suppose they depend too much on the hardware. I do quite a bit of programming with the beaglebone blacks (or at least the same processor). And it seems the best resource is the mailing list.

This sounds beyond absurd to me. Do they also block usb ports to prevent you from copying everything on a usb drive or external harddrive, or phone? Do they lock/solder you machines shut to prevent you from taking out a hard drive / plugging in a new one and then taking it out? Do they prevent you from .. printing the code? In what parallel world do they exist that they think this would make a difference

I've worked in financial software and they do block USB ports for any storage device. They block SD card slots too. All work was done on a VM that could only be accessed from the company network and was remotely hosted.

As someone who works at a finance related company: yes. No USB storage is allowed, all cloud hosting sites are blocked (not SO, thankfully, they're more worried about us stealing SSNs and other PII than code), and all printers are logged and have drivers that detect if you're printing PII and censor it by default (or so I've been told, I don't really feel the need to test that).

A friend works at an investment firm, and has similar restrictions as the above commenter mentioned (no SO, no USB, no printing, etc), as well as pulling his phone out while at his desk or around any other computer being an immediate fireable offense.

A few years ago, I interviewed at a company called 'G Research' and the security procedures I noticed included:

* A 'secure zone' where work took place.

* All desktops virtualised, using thin clients.

* All Windows, no admin access.

* Screens, filesystem snapshots, and web access recorded, all the time.

* All software installation subject to approval (e.g. Firefox not permitted, only Chrome).

* Desks fixed in place, all cables in locked cable trays.

* Separate internal-only e-mail system.

* No printers.

* Specially printed notepads & other stationary in the 'secure zone', no secure zone stationary to leave or non-secure-zone stationary to enter.

* No cell phones, cameras or laptops permitted (lockers were provided).

* Entry points with human guards and metal detectors.

* No late working outside guards' hours.

While it would have been possible to get around the security if you were inventive enough (e.g. camera with no metal parts) it would be difficult to do so then believably claim it was an accident.

I didn't take the job, because I didn't feel I could be productive with so much bureaucracy.

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