I think it's important for CS students to learn to get help from the programming community. I've seen far too many programmers fresh out of college reinventing the wheel simply because they had no idea that places like this exist!
Concur. The problem is finding a balance between not helping the OP at all and helping the OP too much. From past experience, though, I think we're pretty good at finding that balance.
Edit: Perhaps a bit more diligence is required. :-(
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Yours in pedantry,
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"Anything you put in comments is not tested and easily goes out of date." -- tye