Hacker News Reader

Comment by kenkam | Hacker News Reader

I'm sure Jeremy can only do so much code reviews a day (unless he's a ninja robot), so why isn't there a crowd-sourced version of this? Sometimes I write code that I would like other coders to help/critique with. Github is great for collaborating and some code reviews happen (pull requests) but sometimes you're just working on a project and have no idea whether you're writing the right things or not. There have been times where I'm writing Python code and kept wondering whether I was being pythonic.

Think of it as a StackOverflow for code review. Reviewing someone's code gives you karma/points/kudos/<whatever>, and dupes are OK because we're trying to encourage everyone to help (score points). Note: I haven't really given this a lot of thought, just an idea.

View on HN

Sounds like an awesome project. I think there's room both for open-source-y versions of this, where you review shorter bits of code for the karma -- as well as a more professional version, where you spend a lot of time reviewing private code, in conjunction with testing a prototype of the application.

That said, if anyone is really excited about this sort of thing, and think they'd be good at it -- do drop me a line. I imagine there might be ways to team up.

http://codereview.stackexchange.com/

How will this work with SE's infamous hatred of discussion threads? I'd imagine posts about code style would generate multiple "right" answers with lots of discussion to be had?

I've not participated much in the new SE sites, but I feel they do not hate discussion threads as much as the original SE sites.

Generally speaking when it comes to SE, I've noticed the smaller the site the bigger the tolerance towards discussions, and codereview it's not quite a big community yet.

That's mostly Stack Overflow, not Exchange. If a Stack Exchange is appropriate for discussion, they're fine with it.

Noo.. the Stack* sites in general. Overflow is just one, I've seen the same deletionist bias on Superuser and Programming as well.

You mean something like this: http://codereview.stackexchange.com/ ?

http://codereview.stackexchange.com/?

This may sound cliche but I also thought of a similar concept when reading the post, with the added aspect of reviewing someone's review for 'karma' points. Self-policing, so to speak.

I agree. I wouldn't be surprised if someone threw something together after this post. As a new programmer, I love to read posted reviews of code.

Maybe fork Discourse? Naturally this would eliminate the crazyness that issues with every SE discussion. I can help.

On a semi-related note, it's silly how there isn't a "canonical" StackOverflow-like site for open discussions yet.

Slate.co looks like it could evolve into a viable contender in this space. I have a few qualms about the way questions are structured, but the site is pretty and nice enough.

Reddit comes close. I don't know that there can really be a 'canonical' discussion site, any more than there can be a canonical Q&A site (Stack Overflow is not that, given the existence of Quora, Yahoo Answers, etc. serving other large niches of Q&A).

Good old irc?

I use Quora for this mainly, but I'm not sure it's "canonical" yet.

Does a robot also need to be a ninja in order to process code quickly? Why so elitist?

Well, we all know that the best people at writing code happen to be ninjas (have you read any job descriptions or got any recruiter emails lately?), so I think this may perhaps be the reason.

Still open to explanations of why ninjas have an enhanced coding ability though.

> Still open to explanations of why ninjas have an enhanced coding ability though.

Do they? Seeing that you can't actually see ninjas, how can you see they have an enhanced coding ability? ;)

When you get into the office, and your code has seemingly magically improved with no explanation visible in your git log, it's ninjas.

merge conflict due to ninja throwing stars

Isn't that obvious ? Ninjas are fast, so they type faster. That's what coding is all about, after all.

I also heard that they can see in the dark thus you can cut the light when you leave them in the office.

On the other hand, I've seen it in the movies that they can disappear... I assume that's what they do before someone can actually try to run their code.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com