Rendered at 19:48:27 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Cloudflare Workers.
hmartin 19 hours ago [-]
> Spinal is a new way to understand a codebase, how it's evolved, and the live changes streaming into it. It's ultra-low-latency, anticipates what you'll reach for next, and bubbles up the signals and insights that deserve your attention.
Ok, but what is it?
bluepoint 17 hours ago [-]
From them demo it looks like some search on structured data interface. So model the git data somehow and then index them?
15 hours ago [-]
sublinear 17 hours ago [-]
this is zombo com
beej71 18 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure why I instantly have these seemingly-unwarranted negative feelings toward this project.
aix1 14 hours ago [-]
For me, the word salad on the front page isn't helping.
purplecats 19 hours ago [-]
"near-instant" what's that mean. nanoseconds, milliseconds, seconds, mins, hours, days
aero_code 18 hours ago [-]
Sounds like milliseconds since the page says
> Benchmarked on the Linux kernel's 1.48M commits, 96K files, our engine returns the first search results in under 20 ms.
bifftastic 14 hours ago [-]
OK so I'm supposed to know what a predictive surface is now?
_nalply 9 hours ago [-]
Some projects have their own jargon. Two terms I ran into recently are "surface" and "oracle." I'm a greybeard programmer who started in 1983, and both were new to me. I grasped them immediately once I asked my favorite florid model what they meant.
A surface is whatever the user interacts with: a GUI, a TUI, an API, or anything else. I once exposed some functions of a web app on the window object. Boom, a surface for working in DevTools.
An oracle is a simple, independent way to compute a result. It may be limited, but it's still useful for testing, because you can check the real implementation against it.
I understand that programmers like me may dismiss all this as hot air. But it's just jargon.
And "predictive surface"?
It's a surface that anticipates what you'll want next and shows it before you ask. For Spinal, this might be simple. Say you query for all functions whose names start with x, that take an int32_t argument, and that return void. The result list doesn't just give you names; it also shows, visually, how often each function was edited, how long it is, and how complex it is. In other words, it displays information eagerly.
Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with Spinal. I'm only guessing from the demo on their site.
bot403 14 hours ago [-]
Well if you had a predictive surface you could have anticipated this product and already knew what it was.
veexx103 13 hours ago [-]
I didn't understand anything at all.
cypherpunk666 4 hours ago [-]
you are my prophet. have every and all upvotes in the universe.
Ok, but what is it?
> Benchmarked on the Linux kernel's 1.48M commits, 96K files, our engine returns the first search results in under 20 ms.
A surface is whatever the user interacts with: a GUI, a TUI, an API, or anything else. I once exposed some functions of a web app on the window object. Boom, a surface for working in DevTools.
An oracle is a simple, independent way to compute a result. It may be limited, but it's still useful for testing, because you can check the real implementation against it.
I understand that programmers like me may dismiss all this as hot air. But it's just jargon.
And "predictive surface"?
It's a surface that anticipates what you'll want next and shows it before you ask. For Spinal, this might be simple. Say you query for all functions whose names start with x, that take an int32_t argument, and that return void. The result list doesn't just give you names; it also shows, visually, how often each function was edited, how long it is, and how complex it is. In other words, it displays information eagerly.
Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with Spinal. I'm only guessing from the demo on their site.