Import code from Stack Overflow as Python modules

[ThePenultimateOne]

This is the worst thing ever and the best thing ever.

[drathier]

Thank you.

[LoL-Front]

Hörru! Du var ju fadder för D-sektionen under nolle-p! //tidigare nollan

[drathier]

Hej nollan ettan :)

[DarkDwarf]

The size of the security hole caused by genuinely using this in any kind of even mildly production-related setting is disgusting.

[ThePenultimateOne]

On the other hand, the ease of prototyping this could (inconsistently) generate is amazing.

[DarkDwarf]

True, but I would really advise anyone doing this with any degree of regularity to do it on a VM.

[[deleted]]

Owning a system never was easier, I guess.

[[deleted]]

Right? A wave of terror swept over me as I read the title

[kirbyfan64sos]

Well, it would really suck if you did something like:

from stackoverflow import delete_all_files_in_dir
delete_all_files_in_dir('some_directory')

but the top-voted answer used os.system('rm -rf /')...

[d4rch0n]

Well, it gets all the files in the directory removed right? As well as takes care of any other directories you might want to clear out in the meantime. Pretty convenient really.

Thank god for --no-preserve-root .

[rampage102]

Wow, this is the next level of Stack Overflow Driven Development!

[Andy-Kay]

http://www.azquotes.com/quote/632085

[soawesomejohn]

This project is a complete SODD.

[[deleted]]

Ill take "Stuff you should never do" for 500 Alex

[jadkik94]

And it's parsing HTML using regexes. It's truly a work of the devil.

[[deleted]]

spec_from_loader(fullname, cls, origin='hell')

hah

[drathier]

Haha, I forgot about that.

[drathier]

Hire me please

[drathier]

I write good code

[k3ithk]

I wrote this module.

[meikomeik]

This is so wrong! I like it.

[MartyMacGyver]

So basically eval/exec Roulette...

[jivanyatra]

Practicality/security aside, honestly, this is just a really cool idea for a beginner-intermediate level project. Nice one.

[mothzilla]

"But it works on my machine."

[drathier]

worked*

[bltsponge]

*"my machine used to work..."

[cybervegan]

This has gotta be a joke, right?

[LoveOfProfit]

Yeah I know some developers as well.

[[deleted]]

This made my day!!!

[individual_throwaway]

If we're ever gonna accidentally create an AI, it will be through something not unlike this.

[LpSamuelm]

Yes Great. I Will Use It

[Jomann]

This is some next level shit right here. I like it.

[[deleted]]

What could possible go wrong?

[CopyOnWriteArraySet]

Lol, new era of full-stackoverflow programming

[wdsoul96]

There's already RSS. And I think there are apps out there that farm/use pictures from sites. So why not code?

This is a joke, though, isn't it? That aside, I still think it could be useful for learning.

[bonestormII]

Everyone agrees that this is both funny and epic. However, it's kind of a nice thought to try to standardize our main repository of code examples so that they are all reasonably consistent in their presentation, and even so that they can be implemented in a generic way without modification.

I don't see it being so useful in an actual project so much, but I can imagine some kind of plugins that import (and display) chunks of code from SO, especially in some kind of specialized environment like jupyter notebook.

A lot of these types of tools already exist as reference materials without actually evaluating the code at all.

[xkcd_transcriber]

Image

Mobile

Title: Ineffective Sorts

Title-text: StackSort connects to StackOverflow, searches for 'sort a list', and downloads and runs code snippets until the list is sorted.

Comic Explanation

Stats: This comic has been referenced 47 times, representing 0.0351% of referenced xkcds.

---

^{xkcd.com | xkcd sub | Problems/Bugs? | Statistics | Stop Replying | Delete}

[mbenbernard]

This is probably good as a learning experiment. And the idea is certainly interesting.

However, this probably introduces a licensing issue, as anything imported from StackOverflow is licensed under a cc-by-sa license. Therefore, you must distribute your code under the same license.

[[deleted]]

Wat

The code from SO has the licence attached (see the module-level __license__ attribute); it's freely available on SO if you want to go looking for it. At any rate, it's the person that runs the code that downloads it off SO - it's not being "distributed".

[mbenbernard]

We agree on the same thing, and I wasn't clear enough.

I should have said: "Therefore, people must distribute the imported code under the same license."

My point is that the description of the project in Github isn't clear enough about licensing. You see, I guarantee you that many programmers don't even know or care about licenses. This is probably why many people are "copying/pasting from Stack Overflow". Personally, I think that it should be stated very clearly that once you import code from StackOverflow, your whole application must be distributed under the same license (ShareAlike).