The Most Copied StackOverflow Java Code Snippet Contains a Bug

The admission comes from the author of the snippet itself, Andreas Lundblad, a Java developer at Palantir, and one of the highest-ranked contributors to StackOverflow, a Q&A website for programming-related topics. From a report: An academic paper [PDF] published in 2018 identified a code snippet Lundblad posted on the site as the most copied Java code taken from StackOverflow and then re-used in open source projects. The code snippet was provided as an answer to a StackOverflow question posted in September 2010. The code snippet printed byte counts (123,456,789 bytes) in a human-readable format, like 123.5 MB. Academics found that this code had been copied and embedded in more than 6,000 GitHub Java projects, more than any other StackOverflow Java snippet. In a blog post published last week, Lundblad said that the code had a flaw as it incorrectly converted byte counts into human-readable formats. Lundblad said he revisited the code after learning of the academic paper and its results. He looked at the code again and published a corrected version on his blog.