Hacker News Reader

Comment by wayne-li2 | Hacker News Reader

Can someone help me understand this copy-paste issue?

I heavily rely on StackOverflow like most devs but I’ve never been able to straight rip something from SO that didn’t fall under the following categories:

- Extremely simple, but I missed something causing me to have to Google the error

- One-liners to short functions that do some common tasks for me, and is faster for me to copy rather than write.

- Language specific syntax for when I’m switching to a language I’m not as familiar with.

I’ve never been able to copy paste any meaningful code off of the internet. As in, code that could reasonably be significant in the project I’m working on. How would you even find code that complex anywhere? Are people genuinely upset that someone would copy simple stuff off SO instead of writing it on their own?

View on HN

I'm a bit older so ymmv, but I rarely end up on SO. If I'm trying to figure something out most of my time is spent in the reference/documentation/source. If the docs lack examples and I'm having trouble visualizing a particular feature I might look to another project that consumes the same lib for examples.

I encourage my younger colleagues to do the same. SO can be a great starting point, but it's in your best interest to take what you've found and then consult the docs/source (depending on what you're working on). Many times you'll find a better fit for your particular solution than what was presented on SO, and at the very least you come away with a more complete understanding.

If you have a solid grasp on something trivial you've copied, I might jest a bit, but have no real problem that it was yanked. If you don't understand it and it 'just worked', that's gonna set off some alarms.

I tend to agree but note that there can be as much variability in the quality, accuracy and precision of reference documentation as in many answers on SO.

I find myself over 50 now and I'll use Google, SO and the Docs all pretty equally, and often for the most trivial stuff. My head is too full of different programming languages, and my memory was never any good, so I'm very good at using search and then weighing all the information that I get back. I sometimes use search for pretty trivial things that I just don't bother memorizing.

But at a higher level there's principles that you need to understand in order to write robust code where you can't google the answer. And most SO/wikipedia answers to anything non-trivial will not be robust. And then there's the "ungoogleable" problems where you just need to roll up your sleeves and fix it. That can sometimes be broken down into tasks which are google-able by asking what kind of tool you need in order to investigate the problem -- and then using google to go find a tool that does that and learn about it.

When I'm still learning something, like a new language, I tend to end up on SO. The more obscure my problems get, the more I instead rely on docs, github issues or the source.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com