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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

#161

Post by graypegg »

This seems oriented towards answering a question like “how do I…” where you expect an explanation, but I’d say most of the web searching I do is pretty specific.

Maybe half the time I know what I want (eg: the order of values in the animation CSS property), and from who (eg: MDN), so I just go to the relevant docs page via google with something like “MDN animation css”.

The other 50% of the time, I’m searching an exact error string, probably in quotes, on google. For that I also don’t really want a knowledge graph answer, I’d much rather see a GitHub issue or stack overflow post and I’ll derive the context I need.

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

#162

Post by wayy »

graypegg wrote: post #161

This seems oriented towards answering a question like “how do I…” where you expect an explanation, but I’d say most of the web searching I do is pretty specific. Maybe half the time I know what I want (eg: the order of values in the animation CSS property), and from who (eg: MDN), so I just go to the relevant docs page via google with something like “MDN animation css”. The other 50% of the time, I’m searching an exa…

We empirically find that most developer searches fall into a few categories consistent with this paper [0]. The author explains these categories nicely in her blog post [1]. It sounds like you're describing 4/6 of these categories: ad-hoc how-tos, understanding an API / recalling forgotten details, and troubleshooting.

We currently do well at answering "ad hoc how-to" questions and are working to improve our answers in the other categories. This could either look like augmenting our existing natural language answer, or building a separate view specializing in official documentation or errors.

[0] https://elisehe.in/i/googledrivendevelopment.pdf [1] https://bootcamp.uxdesign.cc/the-hidden-insights-in-develope...

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

#163

Post by wayy »

gitgud wrote: post #154

> We found that GPT-3, GPT-Neo/J/X, and similar autoregressive language models that predict text from left to right are prone to “hallucinating” and generating text inconsistent with the “ground truth” document. The term hallucinating is brilliant for how these AI systems seem to generate output. Your product is very interesting, seems to work nicely on easy queries "how do I sort an array of objects in JavaScript" .…

Thanks for trying it out! We've gotten some solid feedback about the UI and will be working to improve it. Could you tell us a bit more about what you were trying to do and how it was confusing for complex queries?

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

#164

Post by rushingcreek »

gitgud wrote: post #154

> We found that GPT-3, GPT-Neo/J/X, and similar autoregressive language models that predict text from left to right are prone to “hallucinating” and generating text inconsistent with the “ground truth” document. The term hallucinating is brilliant for how these AI systems seem to generate output. Your product is very interesting, seems to work nicely on easy queries "how do I sort an array of objects in JavaScript" .…

Hallucination is, funny enough, the technical word for this phenomenon from NLP research :)

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

#165

Post by HasanYousef »

UI/UX first impressions feedback: Unnecessary animations are annoying especially, you can rid of all the animations with no any exceptions (think of all the applications that we use everyday and designed by biggest companies, they all are free of animations). The same thing applied to shadows, someines shadows add extra complexity to the UI.

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

#167

Post by yojo »

wayy wrote: post #134
CodeSgt wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're right in that moving away from Google is a huge behavioral change. While our model does prefer natural language queries, what I was really referring to are the different categories of developer searches. Ad-hoc how-tos are a type of search where the developer knows what to do but not exactly how e.g "how to set a cookie in fastapi." Troubleshooting searches are things like copy-pasting a compile error, or "why…

I may not be representative, but the vast majority of my Google searches are troubleshooting.

If I need to know how an API works, I go straight to the docs.

Put another way, troubleshooting is a several times per week task for me, and doing something net new is a once a month task which may not result in a search query.

You’re going to have a hard time staying on my radar focusing on the less frequent case.

Possibly the traffic patterns are different for more junior devs, but my hazy recollection of my early career is spending most of my time troubleshooting.

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

#169

Post by anshumankmr »

Possible edge cases that aren't handled yet. https://imgur.com/a/mieqZIU

Though I know the first search term was unrelated but I tried it for some time as a regular search engine, tried a bunch of random keywords apart from what it was meant to do as well as some that can be legitimate questions as well.

I am liking the product quite a bit however. Good stuff.

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

#170

Post by aneeqdhk »

I ran a search for 'How to scrape Linkedin Profiles'. At a quick glance 1 out of the top 4 results actually contained some instructions. The rest was more SEO-bait. Just thought I'd share with you - not sure if this is the exact use case.

Congrats on the launch! I can vouch that this is indeed a problem devs face, especially new devs. The number of times I've had to steer away my students at Edyst away from SEO optimized articles!

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