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Launch HN: Hello (YC S22) – A search engine for developers

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Launch HN: Hello (YC S22) – A search engine for developers

#121

Post by wayy »

closedloop129 wrote: post #107
rushingcreek wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those articles are coming from Bing as of right now. Our offering is based on analyzing those articles and summarizing them/picking out the most relevant parts. We definitely plan to augment (and eventually replace Bing) with our own index.

Have you considered using blacklists? You could cooperate with Brave and their Goggles: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31837986

We have considered blacklists but haven't looked into Goggles yet. Thanks for mentioning this

Re: Launch HN: Hello (YC S22) – A search engine for developers

#122

Post by CodeSgt »

wayy wrote: post #51
gbro3n wrote: post #43

Thought I'd try this on a problem I've been researching today (which I resolved) where my service worker for offline PWA usage was working for everything except audio files. I searched the following in say hello.so. "Service worker fails on request for audio file" I got back a couple of results related to general service worker use but none that get close to discussing the core problem that lead to the solution. The…

The description of the steps you took is super helpful feedback - thanks! Hello performs best on "how-to" questions at the moment. We're still working to improve troubleshooting type queries.

That'll be a difficult adaptation for potential users to make. I think most of us have been conditioned to phrase our queries a certain way to achieve the best results from Google.

Then again maybe that's just me.

Re: Launch HN: Hello (YC S22) – A search engine for developers

#123

Post by rushingcreek »

joshstrange wrote: post #70
danenania wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In your first comment, you say you want high information density. In this one, you say if there are irrelevant results on Google, you'll just ignore them and scroll past. I get that there's always a high bar to switch to a new tool, and Google obviously has certain advantages that are tough to replicate, but it seems like you're applying a bit of a double standard. If Google shows me a bunch of ads and irrelevant res…

Both things can be true and you are omitting/ignoring part of my comment about irrelevant results. Higher density of information means I can scan faster and see more with less/no scrolling. As for irrelevant results I called out that the relevant results were above the videos (irrelevant, to me in this context, content). Lastly, I very rarely get ads when doing technical searches so that doesn't really factor in here…

Right, but you still have to click on those links manually and potentially scan lots of text yourself for relevancy. Our goal is to automate that.

Re: Launch HN: Hello (YC S22) – A search engine for developers

#125

Post by joshgachnang »

This suffers from one of the things I've been hating about Google lately: it doesn't use exactly what I typed in. Case in point: "react-native-navigation" is an entirely different package than "react-navigation". I query about RNN and get results about RN. I get this is due to Bing, but it could be a fundamental flaw with the approach (for me at least)

The animations and page jumpiness are a bit off-putting and slow, but it is a beta!

Re: Launch HN: Hello (YC S22) – A search engine for developers

#126

Post by joshstrange »

rushingcreek wrote: post #123
joshstrange wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both things can be true and you are omitting/ignoring part of my comment about irrelevant results. Higher density of information means I can scan faster and see more with less/no scrolling. As for irrelevant results I called out that the relevant results were above the videos (irrelevant, to me in this context, content). Lastly, I very rarely get ads when doing technical searches so that doesn't really factor in here…

Right, but you still have to click on those links manually and potentially scan lots of text yourself for relevancy. Our goal is to automate that.

I understand that, unfortunately your goal is still in the future (be it a week, month, year, or decade I can't tell you but it's not there today). In the interim (and if you want users while you refine) your search results should at least be on par with Google/Bing/etc. That way the "happy path" is your ML spits out the right answer and no links need to be clicked but if your logic can't come up with an answer or if it comes up with the wrong one you need the results to be a viable fallback.

EDIT: Building on what I said:

I use Github CoPilot and have been very happy with it. It's far from perfect and even when it spits out good code I have to do minor cleanup but it does save me time and "sparks joy" when it works. When it doesn't work it doesn't really get in my way. If CP required I change my entire method of programing, IDE, or if I had to go into a "special mode" to use it then it would be next to worthless to me.

As it stands you don't have a good fallback (regular results). Your product should be additive to what currently exists in the space. Not "a step forward if we guess the correct answer and a massive step backwards if we don't". I 100% believe you can make changes such that the results function as a perfect fallback (I've outlined them in various places of this thread).

Re: Launch HN: Hello (YC S22) – A search engine for developers

#128

Post by ForrestN »

wayy wrote: post #65
ForrestN wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes

We've tested it on the latest version of Safari. Maybe try on an updated browser?

It's totally up to date. From the console:

"TypeError: N.at is not a function. (In 'N.at(-1)', 'N.at' is undefined)"

Re: Launch HN: Hello (YC S22) – A search engine for developers

#129

Post by rushingcreek »

aquajet wrote: post #115

> Training a sequence-to-sequence language model (T5 derivative) on our custom dataset designed for factual generation yielded much better results with less hallucination. Could you elaborate more on this or point to a paper/benchmark results?

I'd be happy to talk a bit about how we evaluated the model. The task we're performing is fundamentally long-form question answering (LFQA), and recent papers (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2103.06332.pdf) have shown that metrics such as ROUGE (used for the KITE benchmark) aren't great at evaluating the quality & truthfulness of generated answers. On our dataset, our approach is to use a combination of human evaluation (which is still arguably the most reliable metric used by the NLP research community to evaluate generated answer quality) and an entailment score (checking if a generated answer is consistent with a "ground truth" context document).

Re: Launch HN: Hello (YC S22) – A search engine for developers

#130

Post by laumars »

rushingcreek wrote: post #64
laumars wrote: post #59

I'm seeing the same page as result 1, 2 and 3. Interestingly only 1 out of those 3 results were scraped from that page. Even more curiously only 1 out of those 3 results were even valid code. https://beta.sayhello.so/search?q=hello+world+in+brainfuck Nice idea for the project though. Good luck with it

Our code extraction/ranking model hasn't been trained on that language yet, so it's definitely an out-of-domain example. We'll keep working on expanding our repertoire!

Ahh that’s fair enough. I think it’s fair to say “brainfuck” is outside most peoples domain. I was just curious how your search engine performed on less common search queries (the kind that are trying to debug a rarely hit problem with an otherwise popular framework or language and thus you often spend hours digging through irrelevant answers before you find that one blog post that solves it) but couldn’t think of a more realistic example off the top of my head.
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