Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: Kite, copilot for programmers, available for Python

kite.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 257 posts

Re: Show HN: Kite, copilot for programmers, available for Python

#231

Post by jsonau »

ovidiup wrote: post #207
ovidiup wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. On MacOS X it's quite impossible to kill the helper and engine processes, so you can remove Kite.app. Something is restarting them automatically, which is really frustrating. 2. It's completely unacceptable to upload code to the cloud.

As far as an uninstall procedure is concerned, the expectations of a MacOS X user do not involve looking up instructions on a web site. The user should be able to quite the app, drag it to the Trash and clean it. In addition the instructions you posted on the web site do not work. There are two running processes shown in Activity Monitor: a KiteHelper and a KiteEngine. Killing them both does not work, they are resurr…

Yea was annoying. To prevent them from resurrecting, remove kite processes managed by launchd before killing the current processes

* launchctl list | egrep kite

* launchctl remove :KITE_LABELS

Re: Show HN: Kite, copilot for programmers, available for Python

#234

Post by nuggien »

not sure if this has been thought of before but why don't you just have kite cloud index open source and public code, and then have a separate local index for the user's project code. That way, autocompletes/help/doc searches first the user's project index (local), and then search the kite cloud for public/opensource code index.

Re: Show HN: Kite, copilot for programmers, available for Python

#235

Post by arihant »

ako wrote: post #221
arihant wrote: post #161

Since this program uploads code to the cloud, it would be worthy to clarify if it cleans out strings before upload or not. Because if it does not, it is a serious concern as it puts secret keys in code in awful risk. They also run a background process that needs to be manually killed to be able to uninstall. It feels like a quarantine. This is an editor plugin, is there really no simpler way to provide uninstall capa…

Is uploading code really that much worse than having closed source in a private cloud GitHub repository or pushing your closed source Python code to a PaaS platform like pivotal or bluemix?

It's not so much the upload, but the fact that it will always be unclear (and dynamic) what this service will do with a particular LOC. You might store sensitive documents in Google Drive, but it is unlikely you will type something sensitive into Google Search. Because it is a smart autocomplete feature, there will always be lack of clarity of when they delete your files, if at all.

Github and PaaS do not have any direct benefit of storing my lines of code forever. There is no logical comprehension of doing so. If they are caught, they will lose customers forever. In a service like this, however, it can always be claimed that the storage was done in order to make the service smarter. Which would be true. But it would be dangerous.

It is also worthy to note that this is a live tool. With other services, one has a chance to clean their code before upload. With this, even playing around with an API with embedded keys in your code has already put you at risk.

Re: Show HN: Kite, copilot for programmers, available for Python

#236

Post by heroprotagonist »

adamsmith wrote: post #201
sebleon wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Welp - after reading through these comments, seems like privacy and code upload are huge concerns. Might be worth it for you guys to get ahead of this, and address these issues explicitly on the home page and during installation. It will lower short-term usage & install numbers, but probably won't hurt long-term retention and word of mouth sharing.

Thanks, we appreciate the constructive feedback! We've worked really hard to make sure we're clearly communicating what's happening (transparency), and adding fine grained controls. We have a very clear step during the install flow that talks about how Kite works, and we will prompt for whitelisting within each of the editor plugins that can work without the sidebar (Atom, ST3, PyCharm). We also have a security page…

I could not find a privacy policy anywhere on your site after a few minutes of looking. This could be my own ineptitude, but it'd be good if it were easier to find. Where is it?

Re: Show HN: Kite, copilot for programmers, available for Python

#237

Post by mattmanser »

alexflint wrote: post #45
djsumdog wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does Kite still send all your code to Kite servers as you type? I remember that being an issue the last time someone talked about Kite on HN. I'm find with an editor or sidekick that can search stack overflow or duckduckgo or google quickly with a hotkey-- maybe keep snippets you can tag and easily reference-- but sending all my code as I type to a web service is something I'm not willing to do and something most com…

(Copied from above.) Totally legit concern. when we started working on this we realized if we wanted to index tens of thousands of libraries, we wouldn't be able to ship the entire index along with the client. Hence the cloud-based architecture. We've thought a lot about privacy and written up our thoughts here: kite.com/security. The short answer is: we don't index anything on your computer that you don't explicitly…

Oh no, not tens of thousands of indexes! My 5 Mb hard-drive just couldn't handle it.

Re: Show HN: Kite, copilot for programmers, available for Python

#239

Post by klibertp »

lomereiter wrote: post #141
joatmon-snoo wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> searching for it isn't that much of a bottleneck When I left IDEs for a terminal-based dev setup (Vim + CLI), this was what I thought. I rapidly discovered how incredibly wrong that was. A big factor, for me, was that autocomplete kept me from making typos . Even with a rapid feedback loop, those typos build up. Plus, the reduced cognitive overhead that comes from being able to bang out code faster also lets me sta…

On the other hand, autocomplete leads to typos in the middle of a variable name being repeated again and again. Plus, practice of typo-free editing is beneficial also outside IDE, i.e. for chats/emails/commenting on HN.

> On the other hand, autocomplete leads to typos in the middle of a variable name being repeated again and again.

No. It's programmers' dyslexia which leads to typos being repeated again and again.

The problem is that many programmers don't read their own code, and even if they do they don't know how to read it critically/carefully. It's incredibly frustrating.

There are a lot of similarities between writing code and writing prose. Many programmers are unaware of this. Even today, many programmers write code for machines to execute, not for other people to read. I feel that it's deeply wrong approach and that "creative writing" course (or something equivalent) should be mandatory for programmers.

I think we need a large shift in how introducing spelling and grammar errors into the code is seen. Namely, it should be viewed exactly the same as introducing bugs - it's that damaging in the long run. Please don't do this. Please use spell checkers and please learn your orthography.

Post reply on HN