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Ask HN: What are you Building?

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Ask HN: What are you Building?

#12

Post by tikhonj »

I'm working on what I call "semantic version control". Namely, instead of diffing and merging text, the goal is to parse the program and diff/merge the AST.

EDIT: A better way to state the goal: I want to take advantage of the underlying structure of a computer program to inform the diff/merge. The first step just happens to be diffing ASTs, but I go beyond this.

I already have some neat features--for example, I can detect moves fairly robustly. That is, if you move a function, I can see that as a single action even if you modify the function a little bit when moving it (e.g. rename the parameters). Also, there is already more information for resolving conflicts in a three-way merge.

Unfortuntely, the performance is currently horrible, which makes it completely unusable. Once I fix that (I just need to memoize the diff function properly) and fiddle around with some of the algorithms a bit, I'll have something interesting (I hope :)). After that, I'll probably add a UI.

Also, I should add that I'm not the only person with this idea. A lot of the early design and features are based on YDiff[1], although I used no code from there. The merging and some of the other stuff I'm working on right now is more original though (I think).

[1]: http://yinwang0.wordpress.com/2012/01/03/ydiff/

Re: Ask HN: What are you Building?

#17

Post by rnochumo »

I just finished building a widget, for beta testing, that startups can grab from my website that has a built in screen recording tool. So once they embed this on their own website they can entice users to record their interactions and it will even pick up on audio feedback as well.

You can see the widget on my site http://betapunch.com. The widget is the little punch icon in the right corner of the page. It's not great as far as design goes, but that's why I am working on the 2nd variation of the widget I will be launching in a couple days.

Here's what it will look like: http://i.imgur.com/iBS7C.png.

I am trying to get as many people to grab the code and put it on their startup websites so I can make sure display and functionality are all in order in various different browsers.

So if you have a moment and want to give it a shot for your site that would be great! You can remove it whenever you'd like, I just want to make sure it does what it's supposed to. :-)

Re: Ask HN: What are you Building?

#18

Post by mflindell »

I'm building an online workspace for uni students to collaborate on assignments and includes a calendar, contacts management with chat across platforms and an email client with document editor built in for pdf & doc.

Re: Ask HN: What are you Building?

#19

Post by icebraining »

jwdunne wrote: post #5

I'm currently working on a little project that has a new spin on Pastebin. I'm playing with a Bayesian classifier (or attempting and learning a lot) to auto-detect the language and appropriately set the syntax highlighting automatically without a dropdown and a reload. The paste will also be saved automatically so there isn't a page load for anything. I'm still hacking away and haven't got very far whilst I'm getting…

Instead of having users train the software, why not download and feed it a corpus of open source software? Writing a script that clones random Github/Bitbucket/Google Code projects and feeds the code to the trainer (using the file extension to get the language) should be easy enough.
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