Hacker News Reader

Comment by takeda | Hacker News Reader

I see comments like this and makes me wonder if it's a hyperbole or am I the weird one?

I admit, there few times I copied but I can count on fingers the number of times I used something from stackoverflow in my entire career (I'm not counting situations when I read somebody's explanation, but didn't use their code, which is just an example of how it works). From posts that I see people write as if they do that daily.

View on HN

I've used plenty of knowledge found on SO but I've never done a direct copy/paste. I also find it kind of weird how "normal" copy/pasting from SO seems to be. It's always paid off better in my experience to take the extra minute to understand the code I would have otherwise copy/pasted, and then implement what I need from it myself. The time savings from copy/pasting seem to average back out later as technical debt when something inevitably has to be fixed or changed.

I mean sometimes you need the exact code described in a SO post, even if it's one line. So you either look at the screen and manually retype it, or copy and paste.

copy/paste doesn't imply avoiding to read, understand and modify the code. What with all those false dichotomies?

Also SO is only an example. There are many sites, and I call BS anybody who doesn't Ctrl + C once in a while, be it from the docs.

Copy/pasting does not lead to understanding. The understanding I gain from not copy/pasting allows me to pursue more difficult projects where there isn't a ready-made answer online. If you want to grow, you have to do the work yourself.

And if you want others to grow, make sure your answers give knowledge without giving solutions.

I find it very weird too. I copy and paste a lot from documentation, or GitHub issues, but generally SO questions are very idiosyncratic.

Maybe it's the language you work with?

If I copy and paste React code from SO it'll 100% break my app due to incompatible abstractions, so it doesn't make any sense to do it. However if I need a complex generic Typescript utility type, copying things verbatim is usually fine.

I wish it was hyperbole, but looking at some people I know I know it to be true.

I've never had the luxury, I mostly work on low level stuff and at best, SO is usually only helpful in pointing me in the right direction.

Perhaps you learned to program before StackOverflow existed.

So did I. In fact, I own one of the first SO accounts and have a top 100 all time reputation score.

And still I copy paste.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com