Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Code Hike – More than syntax highlighting

codehike.org

1–10 of 40 posts

Re: Show HN: Code Hike – More than syntax highlighting

#2
Hi! I'm looking for feedback and ideas before making this production-ready.

You can see an early ancestor of this project on this post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21536789 from two years ago (which had great feedback!).

If you want to try it, beware that current docs are minimal. If you have questions or feedback GitHub Discussions is the best place to post them. Thanks!

Re: Show HN: Code Hike – More than syntax highlighting

#3
The marketing on the homepage needs an overhaul. Took me a really long time to understand the product! The automatic code changing at the top was super confusing. Clicking on the demos didn't work. A lot of the demos had locks on them (???), which is weird -- the demos help me understand the product, why would they be locked? More confusing, a lot of the locked demos had been unlocked by sponsors, so clicking on them worked! So why was the lock still there?

Also the tag "more than syntax highlighting" is what threw me off. I thought this would be an IDE extension or something that extended syntax highlighting in some cool way. I thought you were just using markdown as an example. Maybe "supercharged markdown code blocks" might be a better tag line.

That's probably the biggest thing I see as a production-ready blocker. The feature itself looks cool based on the few demos I saw.

Re: Show HN: Code Hike – More than syntax highlighting

#4
post #3

The marketing on the homepage needs an overhaul. Took me a really long time to understand the product! The automatic code changing at the top was super confusing. Clicking on the demos didn't work. A lot of the demos had locks on them (???), which is weird -- the demos help me understand the product, why would they be locked? More confusing, a lot of the locked demos had been unlocked by sponsors, so clicking on them…

I think the idea of having to sponsor to see the demos which should make people decide to sponsor/invest in the project because they find it useful for them is weird enough.

Re: Show HN: Code Hike – More than syntax highlighting

#5
post #2

Hi! I'm looking for feedback and ideas before making this production-ready. You can see an early ancestor of this project on this post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21536789 from two years ago (which had great feedback!). If you want to try it, beware that current docs are minimal. If you have questions or feedback GitHub Discussions is the best place to post them. Thanks!

Why are certain examples "locked"? Nothing discourages me from using a tool more than an arbitrary popup telling me that I need to spend more money to get an idea of what your product is...

Re: Show HN: Code Hike – More than syntax highlighting

#6
post #4
post #3

The marketing on the homepage needs an overhaul. Took me a really long time to understand the product! The automatic code changing at the top was super confusing. Clicking on the demos didn't work. A lot of the demos had locks on them (???), which is weird -- the demos help me understand the product, why would they be locked? More confusing, a lot of the locked demos had been unlocked by sponsors, so clicking on them…

I think the idea of having to sponsor to see the demos which should make people decide to sponsor/invest in the project because they find it useful for them is weird enough.

I'm not going to pay $9 a month to unlock what is effectively documentation.

Make the product or library itself paid in some form, sure...but I don't understand why you would hold your own marketing material hostage that way.

I also don't understand why there are video-based examples of what looks to be a React component.

Re: Show HN: Code Hike – More than syntax highlighting

#9

Ok, so, real talk (and this isn't meant to be a shallow dismissal -- I'm truly interested in the answer): what can I do with Code Hike that I can't do with Pandoc (possibly with a custom filter or 2)?

I think the feedback loop would be much faster with Code Hike.

Re: Show HN: Code Hike – More than syntax highlighting

#10
Quite impressive, I didn't get it at first because I thought it was just MDX. Then I saw that there were changes in the video such as "```js focus=2,4[9:30],6", ans I saw that the code in the video was highlighted differently, then I understood the product. It's a way to annotate code more deeply than just with MDX. You need to make that much more explicit IMO, it needs to be quite clear when people read the site. I recommend a site that is more long form and describes the features well.

Also get rid of the weird "sponsorship for unlocking documentation" model. Make the library sponsorware if you need to, as in you can't see the code until you sponsor, but why would you make the docs sponsored? They're what might entice people to actually pay to use your software. As someone else said, you're actually crippling your own sponsorships by hiding marketing material behind a paywall. Marketing should be free so that as many people see it as possible, and some subset will buy. If you cut off the top of that funnel, you just get fewer people buying.

Post reply on HN