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Comment by raverbashing | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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 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.

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 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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