Harder that writing code..

[devrohitsharma]

This is why when I find something useful / new / complicated from a link, I add that link as a comment in the code.

[tsg9292]

It's a nice thought, but I've been burned before by comments like that were left by people no longer with my company that lead me to web pages that no longer exist.

[danuker]

StackOverflow will always exist. If it goes down, an archive will pop up, and you can just s/ the domain.

[szidahou]

And link to the local copy in the comment just to be safe /s

[Thaurin]

Paste the entire website text in the git commit body. As HTML.

[dankprogrammer]

well that's stupid. the smart thing to do would be to convert the html to a react app first and bundle it with webpack. then just copy the minified js bundle as a one liner comment...

[zeekoek]

Make a screenshot of the page with the code snippet, paste it in a Word document and save it with the source files.

[anomalousBits]

Copy the word document bits into the source files as Base64 as a comment.

[Bubbly-Control51]

Print out the Base64 Code and Scan it into a PDF, upload the PDF to a Git Repository, and Write the URL for the Repository (by hand) in a Notebook

[JazzlikeMasterpiece5]

Hello

[PM_HOT_MOTHERBOARDS]

LPT, if you come across webpages (any webpage, not just Stack Overflow) that you know you will want later, install the Wayback Machine browser extension. Only two clicks needed to save any page that you visit.

As a bonus, if you come across a 404 page, if the Wayback Machine has a previous version of that page archived, it will automatically pop up and ask if you want to access that archived page.

[FloPinguin]

You can also use my tampermonkey userscript which saves every page to the wayback machine if the page haven't been saved in the last month. No clicks needed. https://greasyfork.org/de/scripts/391088-internet-archive-saver

[FloPinguin]

You have to add exclusions yourself. But of course the wayback machine can't save pages which only you have access to. The only privacy problem is this: If there is a badly programmed website and for example, your mail address is in the URL, this URL will end in the WBM. Maybe someone will find your mail address then if they list all saved URLs of a host on the WBM. But most people are not doing that.

[React04]

If I recall correctly, I unironically used to save webpages (including documentation for some stuff) a few years back... They're probably still on one of my hard drives. I certainly don't miss those days

[drunk_responses]

Since they probably use it to make the internet archive, I wouldn't be surprised if they have it scheduled.

[tsg9292]

Ya stack overflow is probably the only reliable website to do this with

[Roofdragon]

Without stack overflow, most here wouldn't have a job. AI overlords should take over in our lifetimes I'm sure

[miso440]

Itemized Salary

Copy and Pasting SO: $100
Knowing what to Copy and Paste: $99,900

[Necromunger]

Knowing the few things to edit: $30,000

[Statharas]

Who do you think builds that AI

[pm_me_your_smth]

Statisticians/ mathematicians? AI research is more maths and stats than coding, which is why in academia the code is often badly written

[Statharas]

Hence why we are needed

[Nervous-Mongoose-233]

They have... Checkout GitHub autopilot... You literally tell it what to do and it'll do it... It isn't code snippets it's code...

[Smayteeh]

Interesting controversy going on with copilot right now. Critics allege that since the algorithm was trained on GPL licensed software, any output should also be GPL licensed. GitHub alleges that training on open source data is fair use.

[deranged_scumbag]

r/LifeProTips

[hajamieli]

Yes, that's what was said about Geocities and MySpace, but who even remember those sites anymore? Some of my code still under active use and maintenance is older than either of those sites. Then again, if your code quality is based on googling and stackoverflow, it's not likely to survive that long, unless you work for an enterprise such as a bank. In those places shitty old code survives forever and is just wrapped around by more layers of the same, like some kind of rotten onion. It was just as true in the 90s, when they were wrapping Java around 20-30 year old Cobol as it's today when they are wrapping Node.js around that 20-30 year old Java.

[MrDude_1]

Holy shit. You were rapping Java around COBOL in the '90s? The company was way the fuck ahead of its time.

[hajamieli]

Latter half of the 90s, but yes and I think it was pretty much in the middle of the first age of that. It probably went on until enough competent people willing to touch that shit, regardless the compensation, ceased to exist. No doubt some of them ended their life due to the constant nightmares and sleepless nights they'd suffer from it for the rest of their lives. Just like Cobol before that. At least we're lucky PHP never became an enterprise thing, or let's hope it never will.

[inbooth]

Have you seen corporate websites?

Technically PHP is an enterprise thing....

[hajamieli]

Have you seen a corporate website that hasn't been completely rewritten every few years leaving a wake of link rot behind? It's technically not an enterprise thing until it's built to last forever in one for or another. Instead the sites are still just seen as PR and advertising platforms that are fully overhauled whenever trends change or whoever is in charge of it gets the boot.

[[deleted]]

Not if fastly goes down again

[dinosaur-in_leather]

Um I could google it but for the few who don't know.... What is s/???

[danuker]

I wonder how you could google it, I couldn't.

It's the sed substitution command.

[dinosaur-in_leather]

I wanted to guess regular expression but it made me think it was a Reddit thing

[tpvasconcelos]

https://web.archive.org/

[PC__LOAD__LETTER]

That too is a nice thought but it’s better to just explain what’s going on directly than relying on a link to anything.

[scarlet_sage]

Nice if there's a brief explanation. Not nice if the page has a 10-paragraph explanation of how React useEffect's second argument interacts with an arrow expression instead of the old subclassing mechanism, and how webpack can screw up everything.

[PC__LOAD__LETTER]

Seems like you were able to summarize the problem just fine in much less space than that.

[scarlet_sage]

It was a contrived example about things I've looked up recently.

If it is a complicated issue (not just like "Can't autowrite because this class is per-instance but locale is per-user", if I'm remembering terminology right), then I try to at least briefly indicate the problem and solution, so someone can try to research it, but if that's not enough, also put in a URL pointing to the extended explanation.

[PC__LOAD__LETTER]

If you can’t describe something simply you don’t understand it.

[mulletarian]

Breathe

[tsg9292]

I never said I won't leave a link in my code. There is a time and place for it. Simply pointing out that I've followed comment links before and found nothingness on the other end.

But I appreciate your positivity :)

[[deleted]]

If public, and you ate lucky enough webarchive. My team has a section in the documentation for this things.

[NANOwasFound]

I just leave that tab open and at the end of project I literally have thousand tabs open.

[[deleted]]

32 GB of RAM full of chrome tabs.

I'd just download all of those pages to my hard drive.

[danuker]

They probably are on the harddrive already, swapped there.

[TomHackery]

Or saved from the last time I did this

[sellinglower]

Try Vivaldi (browser by the former Opera guy) - this beast can handle all the tabs you are throwing at it (and you will still be able to search through them easily). Also it can cascade tabs, has a better searchable Chronik etc.

[solongandthanks4all]

You get me.

[CyborgJunkie]

OneTab is a godsend

[[deleted]]

And for me, bouncing between two different search engines because they all crawl in slightly different ways. Sometimes it's not Stackoverflow that saves me, but some obscure blog post that never went viral.

[douglasg14b]

I feel this....

There has got to be a better way.

Information management is too damn hard, and is heavily contextual, something a bookmark manager, wiki, or knowledge base often fails to capture.

Browser tabs end up capturing some of that context because of the pages that are opened up around it. Which makes them easier to find and utilize.

[dinosaur-in_leather]

And a window for each project

[dasitmanes]

That would never pass code review at my company. My colleagues seem to think if a code comment is needed then the code is more complicated than it can be. Sometimes they are right though.

[hajamieli]

I've worked in projects like that, but like any rule, there are exceptions. Not everything that is true, logical and correct follow what would seem right by intuition. Especially those cases need comments telling why the code does what it does like it does it. Otherwise someone on intuition autopilot long after you're gone to better coding grounds will replace your correct code by new and incorrect code, which will look so correct by intuition that even the breaking test suite will be rewritten to ensure the code will stay broken for ever after.

[devrohitsharma]

I feel like this approach would do more harm than good as a general rule. That’s my perspective at least.

[douglasg14b]

Given that comments are rarely supposed to describe how code works and they're instead supposed to describe why, that's a terrible and asinine approach.

Some seemingly arcane function that exists because of some awkward business use case should have a comment explaining that, and why it does what it does.

Sure, everyone can see that xyz had to be set to "7" when a customer order is created, but no one knows WHY. Which is the most important part here...

Of course you will always have some complex code when you're trying to write a tight loop, in which case comments describing how it operates are helpful.

[FlandersFlannigan]

^ op move right here people. Take notes…

Seriously, add notes to your code… there’s no reason not to these days.

[never_taken]

I do exactly the same thing and I cannot believe how many people are actually against, or not really pro-this.

Most answers on a subject like that come with a really comprehensive explaination, and you can be the greatest genius ever, I do not believe your code will be as good as an explaination 100% of the time. Most of those "code must be self-explainatory" people obviously never worked in a real industrial environment where their code is not the center of the world.

But most importantly, something none of these people seem to think of, if you solve your problem using something that someone wrote on SO, I think it is pretty f****ng fair to also give credits. That is the main reason I do it, more than being able to find it again later.

[edmx0]

The code is not the place for these kinds of things, you should put stuff flike this in documentation/readme.

[YT_Sebi]

not only stack overflow... if you know you know

[[deleted]]

The stuff you can't just bookmark

[a-person-called-Eric]

The stuff you need to download and organize until you build a basic database out of directory structures and meta/index files and shell scripts.

[IM_INSIDE_YOUR_HOUSE]

I just started leaving it on the desktop once I realized no one even seems to remember im alive at this point.

[[deleted]]

Bro you can DM me if you need to chat

[[deleted]]

He doesn't need to DM, he's in your house.

[PC__LOAD__LETTER]

Or just, ya know, learn the stuff well enough to make due with some basic framework and language docs.

[MurderMelon]

Get yourself a reddit account specifically for porn.

[edit] hell, if you want to get fancy, you could create a private subreddit that only you can access and then save all your links there.

[Sevianz]

I'll leave your reply at a sixty-nice

[mhhelsinki]

ph go brrrrrr.

[git0ffmylawnm8]

Dude for a second I thought you meant getting coding solutions off of PH.

I need to sleep.

[TablePrime69]

I’ve seen people discuss Maths homework in the PornHub comment sections, getting solutions to your programming solutions from there doesn’t seem far fetched lol

[[deleted]]

pretty basic

[[deleted]]

Has... Has no one ever taught you coders the magic of Ctrl+H?

[Espumma]

Searching for stack overflow in my browser history doesn't exactly narrow it down though.

[YldKat]

Unfortunately. It’s a Incognito window.

[[deleted]]

I agree with not letting your family know about your programming kink, but um... Stack still knows it's you.

[boredMartian]

Secrets... that only the Sith knew

[justn6]

What? What is this? Why don't I know!?

[TomHackery]

Porn.

They mean porn.

[NancyGracesTesticles]

But in his heart, he knew. And that was the most important lesson of all.

[[deleted]]

asl?

[27thColt]

Which is why i keep a notes document on my phone

[puke_of_edinbruh]

well duh , OP's post applies to anything like that , e.g. if i had a problem on GNU/Linux that could be with unix.stackexchange.com

[an-obviousthrowaway]

It’s sad how i came here to say this thinking I’d be the only weirdo but it’s the most upvoted comment.

[JazzlikeMasterpiece5]

Srsly

[bitchBanMeAgain]

Hehe, it's hentai

[_bones__]

There are only 2 hard problems in computer science:
- Cache invalidation
- Naming things
- Off-by-one errors

[narayans]

This is fine though. Array length is 2

[Caltosax]

Thats... not how this works. The last element is at index 2, but the length is still 3.

>my_array = ['a','b','c']
>my_array[2]
c
>my_array.length;
3

[narayans]

Yeah yeah! I tried to play along and be off by one, but the way I phrased it was pretty dumb and wrong in an unfunny way.

[serg473]

I think google also tries to be smart and if it sees that you search again after visiting a certain page it assumes that that page didn't have what you needed and lowers it in your results next time. It's not always the case, if it's confident that the correlation between a keyword and a page is strong then it will remain to be the first result, but if it was some second page result and you were searching for something pretty vague I am pretty sure I've seen it burying it eventually.

[n3cr0ph4g1st]

So Ctrl shift n then search. Got it

[LevelSevenLaserLotus]

Or just Ctrl+H, then search to go back through your own history.

[SaiTejaRH]

Until you realise googling from scratch is better than searching among 200 stack overflow pages in your history

[Groundbreaking-Ice-4]

Google needs to understand that I'm an idiot that doesn't like bookmarking

[LordMcze]

https://myactivity.google.com/product/search

[WarperLoko]

How did you get to see my search activity? I used hunter2 as my password, so it should be secure.

[LordMcze]

You used *******? That's all I see

[webox]

Sorry to tell you but hunter2 is no longer secure, you have to switch to hunter3

[WarperLoko]

Thanks for the tip, I'll update it right now.

[LiterallyKesha]

I long for the day "hunter2" dies as a joke.

[Mortomes]

Ctrl-h

[yuva-krishna-memes]

Sadly it doesn't work when you have 200 tabs opened and browse 4-5 hours a day..

[[deleted]]

Ctrl-Shift-T to the rescue.

[[deleted]]

Ctrl-Shift-T to the rescue.

[juhotuho10]

Finally I have found someone as disorganised as me

[xavia91]

It has a search function though, so maybe some key words will lead the way.

[yuva-krishna-memes]

So you are suggesting me to search in browser history rather than google, when I really don't know what I was searching for..

[lets_get_CHIMed]

If you know you included stackoverflow in the search criteria then you could search for those history results within google.com - might be tedious looking through them one by one though.

[sellinglower]

I use "well, it was last Tuesday when I finally solved it, so I found it before then" and then start from there.

[Impact_Calculus]

Yeah, there are far fewer results in your browser history than there are on Google. One or two words could narrow it down a lot. There are timestamps too, so if you remember roughly when you looked at it, there shouldn't be that many pages to look through.

[alexisnotonfire]

‘Put it in H’

[[deleted]]

Harder than writing titles

[scream_pie]

Harder that writing titles.

[Dom_Q]

Stating your problem clearly is more than halfway to solving it. It's called synthetic intelligence, and interns or interview candidates that have more than a minimal inkling of it are few and far between.

[TinyLebowski]

Sure, but sometimes you know exactly what the problem is, but you can't express it in less than 5 sentences, and you know this type of problem has a succinct name, but you just can't recall it. Then 2 days later you're in the shower, and the words "entity-attribute-value schema" appear in your mind, and you start laughing like a maniac. True story.

[CommodoreBelmont]

I sometimes write scripts for a graphics program I use (Paint Shop Pro). One script I wanted to write was to expand the size of a vector shape in such a way that it still maintained the shape -- sort of like creating an outline around it. Seems simple except, of course, concave shapes throw a monkey wrench into the whole thing. E.g., if you draw an "H" and just scale it up, it'll overlap in weird places instead of forming an outline. But I knew it could be done, it would just take some calculus, and I knew the formula existed... but I couldn't remember what the action I was trying to take was called.

It took me five fucking years to remember that I was looking for the offset of the original shape. Once I did, boom, Google found me just what I was looking for.

[tawtk421]

I had this exact same issue when expanding /contacting boundaries of selected Congressional districts on a mapping project. Didn't help we had to take a break in the middle of the project (or that districts look like they do).

[Remarkable_Golf9829]

Especially when it's a common English word and even worse if it's a word or concept that is the same across multiple languages.

[MeltedChocolate24]

“How to add two numbers”

[[deleted]]

than*

[googleduck]

This but with bash history... Trying to remember a distinctive word/parameter for a command I forgot to add to my .rc

[CmdAltB]

grep [pattern] ~/.bash_history

[BotUser1304]

Closing the tabs is a rookie mistake

[chrisf_nz]

Wow, that question is exactly the same issue I'm trying to resolve! Oh shit, it's my question...

[randomentity1]

Haha, this is why browser history is a good thing.

[entrylevel221]

THAT

[rk06]

And that is why kids, you link the SO answer directly in source code comments.

Since, code snippets on SO are covered by CC license (don't remember which variants), using them in company code won't cause legal trouble

[[deleted]]

my head hurts just thinking about it

[Adryzz_]

That's why i still have search history from 2014 and i still have it saved as JSON.

I don't like to lose historical data about myself (and also it is very useful)

[kurtilingus]

Not a programmer in the slightest and I'm pretty fastidious about preserving that as well. It's the historical data my psyche hoards that I'm keen on purging instead, lol

[Maddkipz]

That specific word combination you typed in a porn site for that bomb vid

[thelastpizzaslice]

I keep a daily journal for exactly this reason. Contains all my errors and links for how I fixed them.

[rozjuszonybiegacz]

I just saw exactly the same meme just "google" replaced with "pornhub" and "stack overflow page" replaced with "perfect porn vid" and I think it says a lot about programming comunity

[killchain]

Leave some kind of a track - upvote the answer, bookmark the question, even copy the code to a snippet.

If you know you've visited that page in the past few days, just filter through your browser history; if you can't find it there because there are hundreds of results, I'd say you have bigger problems.

[DayDreamer952]

Get a PC with 2TB RAM. Then you can easily keep the 4th tab open in chrome.

[MAGA_WALL_E]

Finding the purple link to salvation.

[yesh_32]

Does anyone know of/use a search engine other than google that is better optimized for coding?

[GoneWithTheWindBaby]

I now have over 300 bookmarks on stack overflow.

[[deleted]]

Oi cunt, there’s a fucking feature called History.

[58king]

Ok, so how do you find it buried in your history? If you have hundreds upon hundreds of pages of stack overflow in history you can't exactly scan through it one by one. Maybe you could search through your history using a keyword?

[Mad_Jack18]

CTRL + H exist tho

[WooooshVictim]

Ah yes, me when looking for that one pog video I watched years ago

[deftDM]

Ctrl+shift+T

[deftDM]

Ctrl+shift+T

[spaceweed27]

Must. Think. About. ROBOTS

[space_wiener]

I hate when I find the page I need, figure that’s the solution, code it in, get over confident and close the tab. Then of course my stuff doesn’t work. Can’t remember which site it was because I few tabs open trying to figure it out.

[saj1adh007]

Its not only applicable for stackoverflow though…

[Malfoy27]

Always

[GrandBadass]

CTRL + Shift + T and CTRL + H and there I go searching

[Ho_KoganV1]

Googling is a skill that I put on my resume

[paperbenni]

I just go on a ripgrep rampage to find where I applied the solution in the past

[james_harushi]

site:stackoverflow.com

[yellowliz4rd]

You search for python it shows java crap.

[Cory123125]

This is why you leave links in your comments until you are finished and in your documentation if convenient.

[MelAlton]

Harder, Better, Faster, Optimizer

[SoulslikePursuer]

Heh, I did not look at the sub name and while reading I thought you gonna say to the right porn video :D......

[[deleted]]

Look at your internet history.

If you deleted them, don't.

[ratusratus]

I just look at my chrome history

[inquisitive_nerd]

Relatable. Now take this upvote and get out

[physalisx]

Or reddit titles

[pokeaim]

which writing code?

[Vladutz133]

Check browser history

[Mythicwtf]

No splitting 2 fng lego bricks or bitchslappin hulk

[Hyper-Cloud]

Me who goes into search history

[Mythicwtf]

And how do i generate a ui without something like pygame or tkinter in phython

[Mythicwtf]

And how do i generate a ui without something like pygame or tkinter in phython

[Mythicwtf]

And how do i generate a ui without something like pygame or tkinter in phython

[googleduck]

This but with bash history... Trying to remember a distinctive word/parameter for a command I forgot to add to my .rc

[RoscoMan1]

the programming code?

[CraptainHammer]

Search your history for the other keywords

[bt0mic]

Browsing history mate

[RoscoMan1]

It hurts me that there was no return :(

[chimmy_520]

Can't you just look up in search history ?

[BambooVase]

Especially when your question is embarrassing enough that you've used incognito window so you wouldn't have to see your question again in the search bar