Show HN: YouRepl – Watch video-tutorials and write code at the same time | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: YouRepl – Watch video-tutorials and write code at the same time

yourepl.tumblr.com

90 pointsmattigames21 comments

It's crazy (to me) that people will install extensions like this. Seems like there's very little advantage over just keeping two windows open, and who knows what else the extension could be doing without telling you.

I think it's specially useful for small laptop screens, this is how it looks trying to have 2 windows open at the same time on Windows 10 (1280 x 800): https://i.imgur.com/vCWuoYA.png

- Code is too small to be readable by some (this extension allows zooming with mouse-wheel and pinch-to-zoom)

- Stacking console under makes it so you can only see 15 lines of code at time (unlike the 30 you get without stacking)

- A lot of horizontal space is wasted on scroll-bars, the edge of chrome and a few other elements

Some people still haven't heard the gospel of Tiling WMs, I guess.

This extension only ask permission for youtube.com and repl.it so any "potential malicious damage" is limited to those 2 sites. The code of the extension itself is pretty readable, you can open the Chrome developer console and check out yourself what it does.

About the tiling manager: I tried dozens of configurations and it doesn't come close to this, specially due the lack of mouse-wheel zooming feature.

> This extension only ask permission for youtube.com and repl.it so any "potential malicious damage" is limited to those 2 sites

That's not true. It also asks for the ability to 'read your browser history' and to 'communicate with cooperating websites'.

Furthermore, as I understand it, the extension can easily be updated in the background to do stuff that it didn't do when you looked at the code and installed it. I imagine one of those things might be uploading your browser history to a 'cooperating website'.

Correct me if I'm wrong though!

Couldn’t find another way to address your note at the bottom of the tumblr post. Inquiry posted below:

Hey Ivan, just saw your repl video on the other page. Cool work! I'm working on technology that will revolutionize many industries. It's called knophy.com and I am actively working on it myself. The core philosophy of knophy is that we can realign incentive structures in social media and online interaction to favor the competent rather than the loud. The website doesn't show much yet, but I'll have a prototype available soon and always love sharing and discussing the idea with others.

My email is in my profile. Let’s link up if you want to talk more about it. I don’t have any funding yet but am very confident that funding will come and I have a very sane business model that I think can again, help revolutionize many industries in our zero sum times.

You lost me at "extension".

I'm probably not the target audience for this, but I'm not going to install an extension for something like this. I feel installing the framework/language/servers/etc on my machine is part of the learning process and I prefer coding locally. Not to mention the privacy/security issues with extensions in general.

If it helps others get into programming, then so be it. Best of luck to you.

Totally understandable, if this could be implemented as a website I would do it but is just not possible; maybe someday the guys at repl.it will implemente this themselves (so it wouldn't need to exist as an extension)

Repl.it cofounder here. Pretty soon we'll open up our IDE for external plugins. I talked about it here with a demo near the end of what extensions could like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhECubL0R3U

Great stuff!

I want feedback about it so please try it out and tell me what you think; thanks.

This reminds me of this video player for screencasts and code tutorials I want to build where you could see someone code, and you could copy the code straight from the video/cast.

So basically a google doc where the caster is typing code and you are able to pause and speed up.

How difficult would it be to build that? :thinking:

I see one potential problem: external dependencies. Does it allow to install external packages?

What if I need a GPU to run PyTorch examples?

And how about graphical output/interaction, such as in Jupyter notebooks?

PS: I couldn't test it because I'm on Firefox. The video looks nice though!

Repl.it cofounder here.

>I see one potential problem: external dependencies. Does it allow to install external packages?

Yes. Repl.it allows external dependencies in some of the languages we support using our Universal Package Manager: https://repl.it/site/blog/packager (more language support coming soon)

>And how about graphical output/interaction, such as in Jupyter notebooks?

Any image output you generate we show you in the IDE so it can feel interactive. Docs here: https://repl.it/site/docs/repls/python-plots

We have some experimental features that allow graphical output in the terminal. More on this soon.

I'd love to see a real comparison of the effectiveness of video learning vs more traditional, skimmable text.

Scrimba.con does this elegantly at the server level, so it even works on tablets with no browser extension needed.

Safari can easily display a YouTube video picture in picture like that natively

why isn't it just a website? Having to install an extension just for this seems a little much...

It's impossible for it to be a website, because to be able to modify the HTML response repl.it shows on the browser it has to be an extension. Maybe someday repl.it will implement this functionality themselves, then this extension wouldn't be needed.

I think Scrimba has the best execution of this concept.

Thanks I will check it out.

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