Inspired by HN: ReadMyCode.org - Idea to reality in 24 hours

Clickable link: http://readmycode.org/

Or if the DNS hasn't propagated for you yet: http://readmycode.heroku.com/

Hey aarongough, I am doing a podcast about various ideas/projects/stuff that HN members are working on.

Interested in being on one of the episodes?

I put up the first episode and am pivoting based on the feedback I got from the HN community: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1379942

If you are interested, email me: marc {at} ideatin {dot} com

There seems to be some kind of bug with the voting though it could be intentional. I upvoted one link and then subsequently downvoted it (I suppose this could be because you are allowed two votes per item?) and then could not click up or down.

Cool app for 24 hours!

Could you put up a link to an explanation of what the website is all about? You already have that in the comment you linked to. I wish RefactorMyCode would do this, too.

Some kind of tag feature would be neat. Say I wanted to read just Haskell code, I could click a link which would filter out everything that wasn't Haskell oriented.

This is a really cool idea, though.

Very cool. Why didn't you use Disqus for commenting though?

Posting a bunch of code by esteemed coders that I normally wouldn't stumble across myself would be cool. For example, some cool Peter Norvig's code snippets, pieces of Quake II, etc. I would normally have to hunt these down but your site can provide a consolidated home for interesting code.

It's funny, when I come to a page with a bunch of links and up/down arrows, I think 'oh god, here comes another site full of crap links and the arrows mean "we're not even going to attempt to sort this out for you"' I encourage you to consider innovating here rather than copying.

PS: I don't think I get that effect on HN because the buttons are so small and I don't have a down button yet. :)

I think you should allow per-line comments like in Github, so someone could go through and explain what's going on, or ask questions about particular lines, etc. Great idea though!

I think that one feature that is needed is the ability to edit submissions. I added one of my pieces of code and then realized that I had accidentally introduced a bug while reformatting the code for adding to the site.

Nice!

It'd be good to know the license(s) the code is made available under. That way we'd be able to re-use it in our projects.

Looks great! language filtering url would be a nice addition.

I think it'd be really cool if you posted the site's code in various snippets on the site. The whole meta-/self-ref thing might be too awesome for your site to handle.

Other than that, looks pretty decent. It would be nice if you could linkify URLs in both code comments, and comment responses.

I like how you use github to host the code. That's a great way to build off existing infrastructure to download/share/render code. I'm not totally sure how gists work -- are they editable, and can they be synced with a normal git repo? If so, this is really powerful.

I've tried twice to submit something. It's not appearing in "Newest Code" or anywhere else.

I'm attempting to use an existing gist. Perhaps that's the problem?

http://gist.github.com/417955

When you submit an item it should start out upvoted by you; otherwise if you don't realize you can upvote your own submission you start at 0 instead of 1.

Don't know where the problem is, but there seems to be no code listings on the site right now. I saw three code posts a few hours ago... ??

EDIT: Now I see two posts, but neither is one of the three that I saw earlier.

EDIT 2: And now one of those two posts is gone.

I've been thinking about implementing something similar except with the opposite sort of sentiment that this project, application, program was poorly optimized, bug-ridden, and could use some improvement.

Easiest way I can describe is take all that crap on all those code snippet sites out there + all the basic features from DCVS + some experienced developers/programmers with some time to kill + somebody that knows what they've written is crap yet functional and is looking for some suggestions.

I got the idea from the simple fact that there are still plenty of people out there writing sub-par code who could never dream of pushing something serious they've written to github or bitbucket. The goal I had in mind was to a create sort of preliminary sandbox for users to push projects/snippets anonymously to a place where others could criticize, make fun of, and explain to them why their code fails. I'm sure the concept could easily attract programmers trolling other programmers, but that's also part of the fun since the community your pushing it for know their code was crap to begin with.

A couple more comparisons I couldn't resist: a DCVS for 4chan or extending pastebin to the point that it has an API and a user community who prefer logging and learning from their failures by contributing to this repository.

As an update: someone is actively griefing the site right now. Possibly a script kiddie I pissed of a little earlier by foiling an XSS attack they were trying.

I'm working on a fix and hopefully it'll be pushed out before morning...

What a great project -- I want to shake your hand for making that in a day.

There was a similar site once, slickorslack.com, around long enough to show up some biases in the ratings. Most obviously, short cryptic snippets got lots of undeserved love: you could see this because code with great ratings didn't even work. Like, a broken but even shorter version of the Haskell pseudo-quicksort we've all seen handily beat out the good version. I tested this bias by fixing some other broken or poor submissions, with usually similar results. You can kind of see the same pattern on the new site where the 1/sqrt(x) approximation currently rules -- how many upvoters understand how it works?

I'm not sure what to do about this, if anything. Make it easy to run the code? Would help, but does nothing about judging things cool because you don't understand them at all. Deliberately post broken code to keep people on their toes? Eh.

This love for the obscure didn't extend all the way to IOCCC obfuscation -- the sweet spot seemed to be dense code apparently written for someone much smarter than you.

So I'm tempted to strip out helpful doc comments, even 1- or 2-liners, for the ratings.

There was a heavy Ruby bias -- dunno if we'll see any equivalent here.

Since slickorslack was an anonymous hotornot-style shootout, there's an opportunity for new biases now, like positive feedback on the visible ratings, or submitter reputation. I'd like to be able to blind that info until I've judged for myself. Maybe view in either reading mode, without vote arrows, or judgment mode, without metadata until you've judged?

I think I'd like to be able to fork submissions and offer supposed improvements.

Wow, awesome so far!

Just a few ideas:

Add a column for "Description" or "Why this code is important/interesting)

Functional Area(s): <math>, <statistics>, <sorting>, etc (rather than just language), ie: method to do: <xxx> Category:<Statistics> , etc. (could get complictaed, but there may be a way to sort it out) Related to that, an interesting idea (I've seen this elsewhere) is have well-known algorithm <x>, and then have people submit implementations in different languages (and I supose people could upvote the best implementation per language). For example, there are many different common algorithms known to the world of CS that have been around for years, it would be nice to have a hub where one could go to find these, and be able to see implementations of said algorithm in your language of choice.

You might want to implement a bookmark system and advanced search so people could tag things they want to read later, and advanced search would allow to search title, within description, only tagged, etc etc

A lot of what you should be doing for a site like this is the same thing stackoverflow has done, yet, it is distinctly different, and useful.

This could turn out to be a really great website! Stackoverflow has kind of explicitly avoided getting really deep down into the source code level, but I think there would be a really huge demand for such a thing if it was done properly, and nice work for 1 day!!

I hope you run with it, I think it's a really great idea that will work, if you put enough work into it!!

By the way, there is a typo in the comment email you send out:

"To see the original threaded_comment and all it's comments:"

"it's" should be "its".

Nice work. I like the simplicity of the UI- very clean.

One piece of metadata that might be useful would be the code's degree of difficulty (beginner, intermediate, advanced).

I recommend adding an About page which describes the site. Either that, or add something to the landing page. Some sort of quick way to provide feedback would be good, too. What mechanism exactly is up to you: blatant mailto link; JS-based feedback popup; third-party (UserVoice, etc.); mailing list; link to this HN thread; ...