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Comment by segfaultbuserr | Hacker News Reader

> [...] We will thus hold back the banning of the url for now, awaiting for confirmation of the desired effect to reduce the potential harmful impact on the application users. Given how much "sample code" we found around the internet using that url, it might still be a good idea to merge the patch later just to prevent this from happening again.

Looks like a case that the developers carelessly copied and pasted some "sample code" into the app...

> [...] it seems that there is no good way to get in touch with them through email (I sent an email to all publicly available channels, only to get back an autoresponder that assumes I'm an user of the app and asking for my phone number). I eventually resorted to DM their CEO on twitter.

Resorting to Twitter for support is increasingly common. The importance of having an "abuse@" email (and possibly some social media bots to DM all sysops when a mail arrives)...

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> Resorting to Twitter for support is increasingly common.

Always maintain some out of band support system. If that's email, so be it.

If there's business owners watching this, please do not make Twitter (or any other social media) your primary point of contact for support or abuse. I stay far away from Twitter such that I don't have an account and can't even see a single tweet without jumping through some hoops. I've learned via posting here that I'm not alone in this and that this trend will likely grow as time goes on.

On one side, StackOverflow has been a blessing.

On the other, it made "Copy Paste Programming" go to eleven. (There was even a C# example the other day that famously broke in a big project but I can't find it)

Maybe it would be a case of Stack Overflow linting examples to remove stuff like builtin urls and such.

I've seen "developers" complaining that example code with a very explicit >replace this part for your use case< complaining that the example didn't work. I guess making some things harder would just be an overall gain.

You're probably thinking about some app not being able to start when some other specific app is running because both were using a GUID copied from SO for implementing single-instance apps.

Possibly the SO question in question: https://stackoverflow.com/a/522874/615306

It's a good example but I think it's not exactly that. Maybe it was a GUID generation code that would generate the same one for every instance?

> I know it has something to do with some mythical thing called a mutex, rarely can I find someone that bothers to stop and explain what one of these are.

Oh my

In this particular example, this is not an ignorant bad question. It's a self-QA by an experienced developer.

I cannot find the source, but the folklore says a Linux kernel developer wrote a USB tutorial with his USB VID/PID, years later, he found he became the manufacturer of all sorts of gadgets he never heard about.

Yeah, it was Docker for Windows and Razer Synapse 3 who couldn't work together because they both copied the same SO code: https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1229641258370355200 :)

I recall once, there's at least a prototype visual studio plugin which would copy code examples straight from the internet.

I would love a bet it list of common use case templates which can just pop up when I use visual studio.

Or maybe a sort of snippet box to drag and drop in my code. For example reading and writing a file in C sharp isn't something I exactly know off the top of my head.

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