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>the implementations are two stack overflow answers.

This is pretty uncharitable. One of the "answers" is just a link to the authors research paper. Not like it's just something they quickly threw together for some SO post.

It is a bit strange that they link to the SO post and not the paper though.




But also, a ton of people use SO code verbatim.


Do they? I very much doubt that.


I can't tell you how many times I've caught juniors trying to pass off unmodified SO answers as their own work. It's rather alarming to me because they have this attitude that popular things can't be wrong, and public things don't need attribution. But knowing, that people often approach life in this way, is half the battle.


Lesser known is that SO content is generally under a CC-BY-SA license, which means not only attribution, but also "share-alike", which generally means releasing derivative work under the same license...

There is significant legal risk if your juniors are pasting non-trivial code from SO into your codebase verbatim...


Could be worse when I’m really tired I copy the code from the question and fix that.


For several years I have seen this being the case especially for algorithms people need to use, or regexes.




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