Comment by w-m | Hacker News Reader

Comment by w-m | Hacker News Reader

I'm answering questions about Pandas (the Python data analysis framework) on StackOverflow from time to time. It's an exercise in patience, because many people will post screenshots of their data instead of a reproducible code example. You'll have to point about every other newcomer to the documentation on how write a proper question that one can actually answer.

I'd imagine other areas around StackOverflow (SQL, R?) are fighting similar issues. I've just tried it with a question (sure enough the second newest Pandas tagged question had a table as an image), and your tool produced a nice .csv.

It would be a godsend to have a button on StackOverflow that would replace a user-uploaded image of a table with some Pandas code that constructs the same DataFrame. Currently I would have to download the image, upload it to extract-table.com, download the .csv, load it into Python, run some code to create the code-based DataFrame.

I'd consider sending people on StackOverflow to your tool if you cut down some of the steps: (1) allowing to paste in an URL of an image, and (2) producing Pandas code output that can be directly copy/pasted from the site (not having to download a csv).

For illustration: here's what the Pandas code would look like for the first example of extract-table.com:

  df = pd.DataFrame( {'Name': {0: 'David', 1: 'Jessica', 2: 'Warren'}, 'Gender': {0: 'Male', 1: 'Female', 2: 'Male'}, 'Age': {0: 23, 1: 47, 2: 12}} )

Off topic funny story: My highest voted answer on SO is a very basic one about Pandas, from 7 years ago. It's funny that I've only used Pands for a few weeks, years ago (I would need to relearn it from scratch now), but 90% of my SO score comes from that answer and I still get more points almost daily. In fact I'm in the top 6% of SO mostly thanks to that answer.

I'm in the same boat, 95% of my SO points come from an answer that was basically a copy pasted script to fix an obscure VMWare error with Ubuntu. Turns out a lot of people had the same issue that day.

Since all votes have the same weight I guess it makes sense that the answers to most basic questions or highly common problems will get the most points. Maybe SO should have a button to donate points to an answer that really saved your bacon, a super-upvote if you will. (I know you can attach bounties to questions, but that's not really feasibly when you come across something that has already been answered).

But yeah, crowd behavior is fun. I have the feeling I can time when some computer vision courses (or the semester) starts, as suddenly there's many upvotes on my basic answer explaining BGR/RGB color space confusion with OpenCV, the computer vision library :)

Funny that this is brought up. As an undergraduate in a Data Scientist class we did analysis on the SO dataset (we processed the whole thing using RStudio running on a big EC2 instance). I found that about ~1,000 users that have made less than fifty posts have moderator privileges. In that report, I suggested that they should give users quality points (Upvotes / # Page Views) rather than straight reputation points.

Yes it is, IIRC I've given bounties to answers from long ago just to donate points to an answer that was really good. In fact it's in part exactly for this reason, since you can pick as one of the official reasons:

"Reward existing answer. One or more of the answers is exemplary and worthy of an additional bounty." - https://stackoverflow.blog/2011/09/23/bounty-reasons-and-pos...

Ok it's feasible, let me reword: it's awkward. You have to hunt for the "start a bounty" link in the question, not the answer, and then presumably still have the minimum bounty period of 24 hours, after which you have to come back to award it to the answer you wanted to reward?

People post images of C code too. Best are the ones that post a link to the image on some external image host. Gaaah.

Could do it with a Chrome extension. Add a button to the right click context menu and get the tabular data in the popup.

Thanks for the feedback! That is a good suggestion, I'll definitely add support for using the image URL.

I've added support for urls now! Please try it.

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