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This is awesome! @danfox, sent you an email though commenting here too. I'm the CTO @ GitHub. Would love to talk to you about this and other things we are bui

This is awesome! @danfox, sent you an email though commenting here too. I'm the CTO @ GitHub. Would love to talk to you about this and other things we are building in this area at GitHub. Feel free to email direct to jason at github.com

sixwing 7y ago
hah. you beat me to it, Jason. @danfox, i'm always down to talk code search as well - rand@github.com
latenightcoding 7y ago
github's code search is notoriously bad, feels like a huge missed opportunity. Nice to see you guys reaching out to other people working in this area.
- lucasverra 7y ago
  I'm not a dev and what i like to to do is go searching for code (a la exact match) to replace whatever variable or text should be changed. Github search in repo kinda worked at some moment, then not. Then i had to download repo in my local; run VS code (updating first), search there, modify, push. I wish i could do this on Ghub web GUI
- erikpukinskis 7y ago
  The fact that you can’t search for file names is the funniest part to me.
  - nickthemagicman 7y ago
    You can but only in the repo itself not on a site wide scale.
    - cole-h 7y ago
      Really? I searched for `filename:home.nix` (which brought me to https://github.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=filename%3Ahome.nix https://github.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=filename%3Ahome.n...). That seems site-wide to me, unless I'm misunderstanding you.
      - nickthemagicman 7y ago
        That's awesome. I didn't know about the keyword filename: I've been using the button to the left of "Clone or Download" this whole time. Thanks for the info!
      - giancarlostoro 7y ago
        These kind of keywords really should be next to the search box with a question mark next to them or something. TIL some of them are on this page that you only see if you search for an empty string: https://github.com/search?q= https://github.com/search?q= Click on 'prefixes'. This kind of thing should be readily available from any search box that searches through GitHub.
  - WhiteOwlLion 7y ago
    If you fork a repo, you can't search on the forked repo. Confirmed grep.app behaves the same way as github search.
- sophiebits 7y ago
  Good news – they're working on it: https://help.github.com/en/github/searching-for-information-on-github/searching-code-for-exact-matches https://help.github.com/en/github/searching-for-information-...
- aantix 7y ago
  Agree. You can’t even do a literal search with symbols. I think there were better solutions on the early 2000’s.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
glangdale 7y ago
iirc, Github uses (used?) my old project (https://github.com/intel/hyperscan https://github.com/intel/hyperscan) at Intel. It's probably faster than the alternatives, although if you want to support all types of regex you'll need to use Hyperscan as a prefilter for a richer regex engine like PCRE. This project looks like it pulls literal factors out of the regex that I type in, maybe to an index a la that Russ Cox blog post a while back about Code Search. It seems to Not Like things that have very open-ended character classes (e.g. \w) unless there is a decent length literal involved somewhere. It seems to have a very rudimentary literal extraction routine, as it decides to give a partial result set when fed an alternation between two literals that it handles pretty well on their own.
- glangdale 7y ago
  pattern is, btw: (teakettle\w|abcd) Either pattern in alternation works fine, but even a simple alternation of the two goes back to the behavior that you might expect to get from awful patterns like \d..\d..\w...\s...\d (i.e. reporting only a partial set of matches).
  - michaelmior 7y ago
    Did you mean either patter in "isolation"?
    - glangdale 7y ago
      Yup, you're right - I wound up saying the opposite of what I meant!
sovietmudkipz 7y ago
I do enjoy moments like these on hacker news when someone presents a project for X and the CTO of X shows up and wants to talk. It shows how directly of an impact one can potentially have in this community. I hope this means we’re getting grep searches for github soon. Cheers.
- travbrack 7y ago
  If OP's goal was to get a job at Github, I'd say this was very well played.
  - sdesol 7y ago
    It would certainly be an expensive play. When he mentioned a 20 core system, I'm assuming it is some VM system, since I don't know of any 20 core CPUs. I'm guessing he is using DigitalOcean and he has two of them, so he is looking at $1000 a month in hosting cost.
    - samcrawford 7y ago
      It's an expensive side project for sure, but it doesn't have to be anywhere near as expensive as that. My own side project uses a server with 20 cores (2x E5-2690v2 CPUs), with 256GB RAM and a 2TB SSD. This is a dedicated server I rented from tier.net in Texas, after seeing it listed on webhostingtalk [1]. It costs about $160/mo, and that's recently fallen further by paying for 3 months up front. 1. https://www.webhostingtalk.com/forumdisplay.php?f=36 https://www.webhostingtalk.com/forumdisplay.php?f=36
WhiteOwlLion 7y ago
How about the ability to search code on forks? GitLab allows it. At least have feature parity? Thanks.

sixwing 7y ago

hah. you beat me to it, Jason. @danfox, i'm always down to talk code search as well - rand@github.com

latenightcoding 7y ago

github's code search is notoriously bad, feels like a huge missed opportunity. Nice to see you guys reaching out to other people working in this area.

lucasverra 7y ago
I'm not a dev and what i like to to do is go searching for code (a la exact match) to replace whatever variable or text should be changed. Github search in repo kinda worked at some moment, then not. Then i had to download repo in my local; run VS code (updating first), search there, modify, push. I wish i could do this on Ghub web GUI
erikpukinskis 7y ago
The fact that you can’t search for file names is the funniest part to me.
- nickthemagicman 7y ago
  You can but only in the repo itself not on a site wide scale.
  - cole-h 7y ago
    Really? I searched for `filename:home.nix` (which brought me to https://github.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=filename%3Ahome.nix https://github.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=filename%3Ahome.n...). That seems site-wide to me, unless I'm misunderstanding you.
    - nickthemagicman 7y ago
      That's awesome. I didn't know about the keyword filename: I've been using the button to the left of "Clone or Download" this whole time. Thanks for the info!
    - giancarlostoro 7y ago
      These kind of keywords really should be next to the search box with a question mark next to them or something. TIL some of them are on this page that you only see if you search for an empty string: https://github.com/search?q= https://github.com/search?q= Click on 'prefixes'. This kind of thing should be readily available from any search box that searches through GitHub.
- WhiteOwlLion 7y ago
  If you fork a repo, you can't search on the forked repo. Confirmed grep.app behaves the same way as github search.
sophiebits 7y ago
Good news – they're working on it: https://help.github.com/en/github/searching-for-information-on-github/searching-code-for-exact-matches https://help.github.com/en/github/searching-for-information-...
aantix 7y ago
Agree. You can’t even do a literal search with symbols. I think there were better solutions on the early 2000’s.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

glangdale 7y ago

iirc, Github uses (used?) my old project (https://github.com/intel/hyperscan https://github.com/intel/hyperscan) at Intel. It's probably faster than the alternatives, although if you want to support all types of regex you'll need to use Hyperscan as a prefilter for a richer regex engine like PCRE. This project looks like it pulls literal factors out of the regex that I type in, maybe to an index a la that Russ Cox blog post a while back about Code Search. It seems to Not Like things that have very open-ended character classes (e.g. \w) unless there is a decent length literal involved somewhere. It seems to have a very rudimentary literal extraction routine, as it decides to give a partial result set when fed an alternation between two literals that it handles pretty well on their own.

glangdale 7y ago
pattern is, btw: (teakettle\w|abcd) Either pattern in alternation works fine, but even a simple alternation of the two goes back to the behavior that you might expect to get from awful patterns like \d..\d..\w...\s...\d (i.e. reporting only a partial set of matches).
- michaelmior 7y ago
  Did you mean either patter in "isolation"?
  - glangdale 7y ago
    Yup, you're right - I wound up saying the opposite of what I meant!

sovietmudkipz 7y ago

I do enjoy moments like these on hacker news when someone presents a project for X and the CTO of X shows up and wants to talk. It shows how directly of an impact one can potentially have in this community. I hope this means we’re getting grep searches for github soon. Cheers.

travbrack 7y ago
If OP's goal was to get a job at Github, I'd say this was very well played.
- sdesol 7y ago
  It would certainly be an expensive play. When he mentioned a 20 core system, I'm assuming it is some VM system, since I don't know of any 20 core CPUs. I'm guessing he is using DigitalOcean and he has two of them, so he is looking at $1000 a month in hosting cost.
  - samcrawford 7y ago
    It's an expensive side project for sure, but it doesn't have to be anywhere near as expensive as that. My own side project uses a server with 20 cores (2x E5-2690v2 CPUs), with 256GB RAM and a 2TB SSD. This is a dedicated server I rented from tier.net in Texas, after seeing it listed on webhostingtalk [1]. It costs about $160/mo, and that's recently fallen further by paying for 3 months up front. 1. https://www.webhostingtalk.com/forumdisplay.php?f=36 https://www.webhostingtalk.com/forumdisplay.php?f=36

WhiteOwlLion 7y ago

How about the ability to search code on forks? GitLab allows it. At least have feature parity? Thanks.