18 ms·
A Sad Announcement
- wasd 10y agoWould you consider open sourcing some of your work on Ruby analysis?
- timr 10y agoUnfortunately, the docs site code is...elaborate, and I don't think anyone could replicate the current site without a ton of effort from us. I don't see us open-sourcing that.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- jordigh 10y agoI don't understand this. It's not like anyone's asking you to make it easier. A code dump, useless as it may seem, is better than no code than at all. A code dump doesn't mean you owe anything to anyone.
- niij 10y agoHe doesn't owe anyone a code dump either.
- jordigh 10y agoSure, but he seems to not want to do it because it involves work. It doesn't involve work[1]. Just dump it, in whatever state it is. -- [1] Well, other than perhaps and upload to bitbucket or github and slapping a LICENSE file on it, probably. It shouldn't involve any maintenance or development work, is what I mean.
- niij 10y agoAs discussed in other threads, he would have to go through the entire code base and determine licensing of all code he was using, talk to investors about being allowed to release, and strip out any confidential information. I honestly wouldn't hassle with it if my company just went belly-up, but it would be nice if it happened :) I did find out about Git notes through this thread, which seems interesting.
- wasd 10y agoI understand timr. Sorry for your lose. For what it's worth, I found omniref to be very cool. Good luck on whatever you decide to do next.
- nemild 10y agoI'm sorry to hear the news - code annotation is something we need more of, especially for teaching and debating different design choices. I remember your posts on how MRI/Ruby worked from a few years back, which were always fun - and something that I thought other open source projects would have benefited from.
- timr 10y agoThanks, I appreciate the kind words.
- ChuckMcM 10y agoThis is sad, and a bit perplexing. According to Crunchbase they had exactly 1 seed round (https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/omniref#/entity https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/omniref#/entity) and their project provides a really nice feature for github which is better than githubs existing feature. So I'm perplexed why someone like Github doesn't acquihire them, give them a nice bonus for their work over the last couple of years and add their biological distinctiveness to Github[1]. Or Atlassian integrating it with Jira so that your kanban notes can be attached to code as you're developing a sprint. [1] Yes that is an old Borg reference.
- ianai 10y agoPretty sure "biological distinctiveness" just got written into an MBA textbook. Integration will never be the same.
- timr 10y agoHi. Founder here. I wasn't expecting this to be on HN (was kind of hoping for the opposite, actually; I'm not in a mental place where I can write a big, Medium-style, "why my startup failed" missive just yet), so I didn't go into any of this sort of stuff. The short answer to your question is that companies are bought, not sold. They may seem common, but acquihires are statistically pretty rare, and they usually come with...terms. Which may or may not be good. There's also no guarantee that an acquired product will continue to exist post-acquisition. Anyway, if enough people are interested, we're considering open-sourcing the annotation tool. I'd like to see that live on.
- MaxLeiter 10y agoWhy would you not opensource it? This way, your work won't go to waste, and maybe the community can continue it.
- timr 10y agoOpen-source projects take a lot of time and effort to do well. They're kind of like startups in themselves, actually. And in this kind of situation, you're committing to publicly maintaining the thing that you're trying to shut down. If there isn't enough interest at the start, it's just prolonging the pain of failure. It's better to rip the bandage off and move forward with your life.
- Arubis 10y agoI'm sorry to see this. Before the pivot towards annotation, I used Omniref heavily for its excellent Ruby documentation access; while I hadn't used the newer featureset, I have very fond memories.
- ElijahLynn 10y agoWould you consider open sourcing your work?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- gravypod 10y agoThis is why I think no one should trust companies that sell you software, that you can't host yourself, for something as critical as documentation and source control. I feel really bad for all the companies that have to jump through hoops to get their data rescued from this company. It also sucks to loose such a smart company. I wish they had built their solutions as a self hosted system so that people could still use their obviosuly outstanding work.
- jzelinskie 10y agoThe reason why you see startups avoiding this model is because supporting self hosted solutions is extremely difficult as a small team and only impedes the ability to evolve your product. It's a shame, but companies shouldn't adopt products if they lack a feature requirement (data migration).
- gravypod 10y agoThis is only the case for complicated deployment proceedures. One of my favorite pieces of software that I love updating is a project called GitBucket. It's a GitHub/BitBucket-esq site. It's simple to host and easy to use without much overhead. The deployment procedures go as follow: 1. Install JVM 8 2. Install GIT 3. Run If you aren't running a database it defaults to the internal one. All the defaults are sane. It also supports transfering the internal DB to other systems. The self-hosted model works but it only works for extremely... not simple... but "refined?" setup and deployment procedures. Well bugtested and thoughtout releases. (This includes backups, auto migration, user prompts at startup of dangerious proceedures). I think that due to this forced side effect of host-your-own that it makes the option preferable. It's harder to do but it proves higher quality control standards and allows for a much much more fail-tolerant archatecture.
- dceddia 10y agoI think part of the problem is that for every person like you (competent DIY'er) there are N people who don't really know how to do those 3 steps, but for whatever reason (budget, fear of SaaS, etc) decide to host the thing in-house. Those are the ones that become a support nightmare. I get the feeling that the number of not-so-competent DIY'ers far outweighs the competent ones.
- zump 10y agoInteresting.. I had the idea of code annotation as a service, but gave it up when I saw this was already out there.
- dkarapetyan 10y agoI posted this because I needed a code annotation tool to help me understand some C code and I remembered Omniref. I'm sad to see it disappear like this. I hope they will open source the annotations so that others can host it. My use case isn't anything fancy. I just want to understand what tail is doing behind the scenes with inotify so that I can implement it in another language but I haven't found a rigorous enough outline of tail in pseudo-code to translate it. So now I'm just fighting with it in Vim and VSCode to strip away all the baggage that C forces onto a problem to get to the meat of the actual solution. I think we all gain when code is more understandable and don't have to individually reverse engineer things to transport the lessons from one code base into another. I thought crowd sourcing the annotation process was an interesting take by Omniref. Maybe it was ahead of its time.
- dang 10y agoPlease don't be snarky toward a fellow user. We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13281887 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13281887 and marked it off-topic. Edit: the comment was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13282118 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13282118. My mistake; undetached.
- murgleburgle 10y agoHas anyone used both this and Code Genius' annotation, and can offer a comparison?
- Sanddancer 10y agoThis would have been a better project, and had probably gotten a lot more traction, had it provided plugins for the big editor suites -- eclipse, visual studio, etc. As the project stood, it's neat, but at the same time, it's an impedence mismatch. You can't just annotate in your environment of choice, you have to go into a browser window to view the same code you have open in another window and see if there are any annotations. There's a place for something like it, but it needs to be a lot more intimate with how people already work in order for it to get any sort of needed traction.
- timr 10y agoFounder here. Yes, this is absolutely true. Problem is, one editor integration doesn't cut it. Or even two. The editor world is balkanized, and even targeting the "most common" tools wasn't enough. Early adopters are probably more varied in their editor use than the general developer population. More importantly, that was just one feature in a pile of other "must have" features that people said they needed. It was on the roadmap, but we never got around to it.
- sapeien 10y agoStupid question: what does Omniref do that can't be done with source code comments? Comments are readable by anyone in any editor and do not require external tools. They are co-located to the relevant lines of code by being part of the source, and are as portable as the code itself. My first impression is that it is a solution seeking a problem.
- throwaway161220 10y agoThe problem seems to be post-commit code review or something like that. I don't know if they did, but I hope they used git-notes which has been in git core for a while now.
- throwaway161220 10y agoIf this has been using core git's notes[1] feature, then there's nothing to export from the site. But as export is mentioned in the announcement, it seems unlikely. [1] https://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-notes.html https://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-notes.h...