Web Excursions 2021-06-18

Jun 19

Key Takeaways

Stack Overflow snippets can be buggy, even if they have thousands of upvotes.
Test all edge cases, especially for code copied from Stack Overflow.
Floating-point arithmetic is hard.
Do include proper attribution when copying code. Someone might just call you out on it.
[In 2018, a] PhD student by the name Sebastian Baltes publishes a paper in the journal of Empirical Software Engineering.
- The title is Usage and Attribution of Stack Overflow Code Snippets in GitHub Projects and
- it basically tries to answer one question: Is Stack Overflow’s CC BY-SA 3.0 license respected?
As part of their analysis
- they extracted code snippets from the Stack Overflow data dump and
- matched them against code from public GitHub repos.
No, most people do not include proper attribution.
That answer at the top with id 3758880 happens to be the answer [the author] had posted eight years earlier.
- At this point the answer had over a hundreds of thousands of views and over a thousand upvotes.

ddlatham [the author of #6 on the said list]: Having a person's name attached to their answer, along with a visible score really gives a sense of ownership.
- As a result, other people don't feel enabled to come along and tweak the answer to improve it.
- Once an answer is listed at the top, it is given more opportunity for upvotes, so other improved answers don't seem to bubble up.
- To measure the quality of an item, we should look at the number of votes, divided by the number of views.
jsmeaton: "The community" [should be able to] vote to override an accepted answer. It'd incentivise writing newer answers to older questions.
saganus: I can't sort answers [on SO] by newest first.
- apnorton: There are three buttons that act as sorting directions at the top of the answers section: "Votes," "Oldest," and "Active." The "Active" option sorts by most recently modified, which is usually what you'd want instead of strictly newest.

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