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Comment by geographomics | Hacker News Reader

On the topic of work environment: in one job I worked at, we had the Internet machines completely separated from the work machines. If you needed to check something you had to physically walk over to the Internet desk. Great for focussing on the task at hand without distraction, and considering carefully what information you need.

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"Air gapping". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_gap_(networking)

It's common practice in classified environments, as a necessary security precaution. But it's a true productivity killer imho. Better to just install an extension that blocks twitter/facebook etc, than completely cripple your ability to search for technical information as you need it.

Also - good luck installing tools and plugins when you have to start copying things from the internet computer to the classified computer.

After the initial period of adaptation, I found it actually increased productivity. Perhaps it was just preventing already-established bad habits that arise from having the internet constantly available.

> Better to just install an extension that blocks twitter/facebook etc, than completely cripple your ability to search for technical information as you need it.

With godoc, man pages, info pages, a local copy of the Common Lisp Hyperspec and Usenet, what more does one need?

At the last place I did sysadmin work, this was basically how I functioned. Just about everything was done to prevent having to use google, stackoverflow, etc. It was absolutely amazing in terms of learning and gaining confidence in the tools and documentation, etc.... but nah. After about 3 months of that, I gave up. It's possible, but it led to so may "time wasting" rabbit holes in trying to figure things out. I thoroughly enjoyed it, but in hindsight, it probably wasn't the best use of time while at work (and should be frowned upon if management ever suggests it)!

But then how do you copy and paste from Stack Overflow?

On a serious note, this is a terrible habbit. SO code is questionably licenced.

Any questions about the license not answered by this? http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/271080/the-mit-licen...

I don't think that answers anything. Just because some anonymous poster put code online doesn't make it usable under the MIT license no matter what the ToS of the website says. The poster may have copied that code from a GPL code base...

That's true even if you find code on GitHub explicitly labeled as MIT, CC or Apache.

If you're worried about using code from stack-overflow, use it as inspiration only and write your own code. Or conduct a short search first to see if it WAS copied from another code repository.

There's a big difference between a git contributor explicitly saying their code is a subject to a certain license and SO magically declaring it to be so for all code on their website just because it happens to be in their ToS. I think a better system would be to ask people providing code snippets to specify what license it's subject to.

You can download the information to use locally, it's only about 35Gb last time I checked

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