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

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181–190 of 208 posts

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

#181
I tried it for a typical query for firebase. The issue I have is Google would get me to the firebase docs just fine (well I’d hope so!) and once there, I want to be in those docs to get the code and the context of that code. Having bits of code on the search results page isn’t that useful.

What would be useful is if you could present information from different docs sites in the same format and combine them.

Maybe that is a different startup idea completely but it would be cool to have MDN, React and Firebase docs in one place, brutalist style where I can quickly get to what I want.

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

#183

Personally I’ve never really had an issue with Google - I think my mental model with how it works is to the point it makes sense. It would be amazing if this could be used for internal documentation however. Like we have so much documentation on our wiki which is just disorganised.

Bing has a offering which works on searching through internal documentation as a part of the Office. Works well with Sharepoint and other traditional office products.

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

#184

Sorry to be blunt, this site is one of the worst ui/ux experience I've seen. For a website targeted towards programmers mainly, the lack of dark mode is a crime. And the first half of the page is just logo and the searchbar. Poorly named and designed logo and branding. 'sayhello' is a stupid name for a search engine catered towards programmers. Why make the product at all when clearly you havent done enough thinking…

dark mode works just fine for me.

> the lack of dark mode is a crime

Well, everybody is different. I just hate dark mode.

When I come to a website that defaults to dark mode and I can't see a way to change it, I leave immediately.

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

#185
post #151

I searched the walrus operator and all results were unrelated

What was your query? I just searched ( https://beta.sayhello.so/search?q=walrus+operator ) and got "The walrus operator is a new syntax for assigning variables in the middle of expressions." with one of the code examples being "(walrus := True)"

:=

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

#186
Hey Michael and Justin, congrats to the launch!

My co-founder and I were building the same product as you are some time ago [1]. We managed to scale it to around 5k WAU before we decided to pivot for various reasons.

If you think there might be any useful information and experience we could share with you, please shoot me an email - vasek@usedevbook.com. I'd love to help in any way I can to help you guys succeed.

[1] https://www.producthunt.com/products/devbook

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

#187
I searched for "Position based dynamics" and I was pleasantly surprised by the results. The output if full of blog posts that I never encountered while searching on Google. It might be related to the fact that it rely on Bing which, I have to admit, I never used.

When I compared the output between Hello and Bing, the filtering worked pretty well. It removed most of the StackOverflow results, which are 99% of the time not insightful.

Great job on this search engine and congrats on the release.

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

#188
Awesome work guys! A couple of knee jerk reactions while playing around with this:

1. In my work (also at UT actually: Hook 'em), we've found that the hallucination problem is, in part, lessened by over-parametrizing the model. Places that have the budget to do this have noticed that the performance of ml4code transformers increases linearly for every 1e3 increase in the number of parameters (with no drop off in sight). Love to hear your thoughts on this.

2. I'm concerned that finding code snippets from a short form query is underspecifing the problem too much and may not be the best user-interaction model. Let's compare your system to something like Github Copilot. I pass a query:

> how to normalize the rows of a tensor pytorch

With GitHub Copilot, I can demonstrate intent in the development environment itself with an IO example / comment / both and interact more efficiently. If I see errors in the synthesized snippet, I can change the query in >1 second etc. Etc. This is hard with a search engine style interactive environment. For this query, I had to navigate to the website, type in the query, check the results (which were wrong for me btw. Y'all might need to check correctness of the snippets), copy back the result, maybe go to the relevant thread and parse more closely etc. A good question to keep in mind here would be to figure out how to make this process more interactive.

3. Finally, I just want to say that the website is phenomenal, even on mobile. Kudos on the frontend/backend/architecture side of things.

Also, don't let my or anyone else's comments take away from the awesome work y'all have done!!! I pulled out that example from a paper I read recently called TF-coder. They have a dataset of these examples as part of their supplement material. All the best!

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

#189
A small observation: I searched "How to implement trie" it showed me some code examples of specific things that can be done with Trie (such as search) but all of them were in Python language.Is that because your training set? Also when I slightly change the question "How to implement btree" I do not get really any code result. Simple observations. Maybe helpful for you.

Congrats on the Launch!

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