
Show HN: idea for the future of document editing - sonier
http://doc-edit.herokuapp.com/
======
sillysaurus
Great job! I encourage you to continue improving it.

I pasted a Paul Graham essay and the results were telling:

<https://dl.dropbox.com/u/315/random_pics/nlp1.png>

<https://dl.dropbox.com/u/315/random_pics/nlp2.png>

<https://dl.dropbox.com/u/315/random_pics/nlp3.png>

<https://dl.dropbox.com/u/315/random_pics/nlp4.png>

In short, the results aren't relevant at all -- either to the author or to his
audience. (The third screenshot is particularly conspicuous.)

I can think of some domains where this could be pretty handy -- you should try
feeding your algorithm a stream of tweets and see what happens.

All in all, this hasn't been done before and was presented quite nicely. Well
done.

~~~
ken
Another test case: I pasted a couple paragraphs of John Gruber's Kindle review
in there, and it shows me (only) "Fleetwood Mac" (derived from the phrase "my
Mac"), and "I Love" (the country music song, from the sentence "I love glowing
screens").

It skipped terms that seem to me much more obvious links, like "iPhone",
"iPad", "TiVo", "ATM", "Kindle", "credit card", "supermarket", or "e-ink".

------
blrgeek
This is very very cool, and makes for a good demo too.

One suggestion would be to put the latest topic on top - or at least
vertically near where you type.

Second being able to pick the corpus being used for matching. might make it
interesting. Say IEEE or ACM, or PubMed. Might bring up interesting things
that others have written that are similar, which they've not noticed before.

I can see a very good match with technical writing, publications, etc. Esp if
you can pull in excerpts. This would make for much better writing for many who
may not have Eng as first language.

Neat!

~~~
DeepDuh
Oh yes. Give me what you just described, integrated into a typesetting system
that can produce scientific papers of LaTex quality (or, simply, a LaTex
editor like Kile) and make citations to those sidebar infos drag & droppable,
with links to the fulltext PDF (might need integrated Login handling for the
electronic publishers).

Second idea: Scratch that and integrate it into a PDF reader instead and
instead of drag & drop give me the citations as plaintext popups (this way it
would be useful for other purposes, even book reading).

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tomjen3
An interesting idea, but it comes up with really, really useless suggestion --
I don't think anybody needs to be told what don't is, west may be a cardinal
direction but 'in the west we enjoy' does not refer to particular side of a
compass.

Also for some reason it blinks with 1. AD is a year (I did write the word one,
but it really shouldn't blink).

~~~
crucialfelix
I see it as an interface demo, not a search results demo.

obviously you would connect it to the best search results at your disposal.
that's a different problem entirely.

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suhastech
I think this would be a very good candidate for the future of document
_reading_

~~~
gliese1337
Particularly for educational environments. Annotation of texts to explain
cultural references, idiomatic usages, etc., is extremely useful in foreign
language instruction, and anything that can help do that automatically and
reduce the time an instructor has to to spend preparing the content would be
extremely valuable.

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notatoad
FYI: relevant, not relevent.

It's a cool idea, but presented in a sidebar like that i think it's mostly a
distraction. when you're writing you want less outside information, not more.

~~~
sonier
Fixed, thanks.

I guess there would need to be the ability to hide the sidebar in a more
usable version. Thanks for that tip!

EDIT: grammar

~~~
whatshisface
What if instead of a sidebar, you could get information about a word by
putting your mouse over it and doing something? (does javascript let you trap
rightclicks?)

~~~
sprobertson
The nice thing about a sidebar is you can investigate a broader scope of the
document's semantic content, as opposed to just specific sections. (but yes,
it does... and this might be a good way to narrow the context)

------
sonier
The idea is that as you type, some relevant information about what you are
typing should appear. Long term, it should integrate search into document
editing and simplify the writing process. This is currently far from perfect,
I just put it together on the past 4 hours.

~~~
JadeNB
Given the privacy flap when Google started serving ads based on the contents
of e-mails, do you foresee any worries here --or do you think it's
sufficiently different, or that such worries have faded away with familiarity?

Also, as a minor nitpick, 'relevant' is misspelt (as 'relevent').

~~~
sonier
I would imagine the biggest privacy concern would be trusting a strange site
with personal documents. Most people have no problem storing documents in
Google drive but I foresee there would be a slow adoption rate for more
serious writing.

------
ushi
Nice Work!

Your https doesn't work for me because you make calls to the unsecured
duckduckgo api and chrome refuses.

You should use: <https://api.duckduckgo.com>

~~~
sonier
Now using the secure DDG. Thanks for pointing that out!

------
timkly
I would like to see the ability to drag and drop the text directly into the
editor... and an ability to choose the sources for obtaining information
(Wolfram Alpha, Wikipedia etc). Also, if you could highlight individual
results and run a lookup against them you could drill down even further making
the information more relevant... and as a sidenote, I be would inclined to
target the student market whom could use this as a study tool (or lifesaver
for last minute assignments)

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jcla1
Is it just me, or are we missing the source code? Would be nice to have a
peek.

Edit: Sorry, didn't see that is was just JS! EditEdit: But where is the source
to /keywords

~~~
saurik
(Did the developer claim somewhere the implementation was open source?)

~~~
jcla1
No, but if it wasn't I would obfuscate my JS... ?

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sprobertson
Wow, this is very very relevant to something I've been thinking of for the
past few months -- if you're interested in collaborating, shoot me an email.

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flipstewart
So... does this actually work?

I'm using the latest Safari and OS X 10.8... if I delete the contents of the
text box, four of the terms on the right remain.

If I enter new content... still just those four terms.

edit: the more I write, the less terms there are on the right, but they're
still terms from the original content... if I type a word twice, I get the
definition... three times and it goes away.

~~~
sonier
There are in fact a lot of bugs, it was written in just a few hours as a proof
of concept.

------
infinitebayes
Typing "Bayesian classification of" somehow causes the relevant content "Naive
Bayes classifier" to be added repeatedly in a loop.

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Rangi42
Interesting idea. It could be improved by filtering out stop words; right now
it recommends Oregon and Belgium for "or" and "be."

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jakobmarovt
fyi, zemanta (zemanta.com) has been working on a similiar product (targeting
bloggers) for years. Take a look at it.

~~~
riffraff
google docs also has an integrated information sidebar this days

------
fabm
This is really cool and I can definitely see it being useful once the kinks
are worked out.

Without repeating most of the feedback given already, I’ve noticed that it
picks up too many pointless words. I’d suggest making it more selective with
the words picked out to be relevant. Quality over quantity.

------
jonsterling
Very cool. I don't think this is the “future of document editing”, but it's a
neat project nonetheless.

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gprasanth
I was just testing it using other top news on HN, like this one: Roy Bates's
death.

It seems there is a bug when I enter this line:

    
    
      "Roy Bates died on"
    

Paddy Roy Bates's wiki page keeps getting added to the right column
continuously.

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antidoh
It might be useful to show relevant content from my local system on things
that I've written already, like maybe notes from a project, or excerpts from
email.

Writing code, similar suggestion, showing other code, requirements, design,
etc.

------
CapnGoat
I wrote a text with "German constitution" and now it's stuck in a loop
fetching the information to "Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany".

<http://i.imgur.com/0QaY2.png>

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samirahmed
The real time information is neat!

FYI, This feature is available (in non-real time manner) in Google Docs and
Microsoft Word, which are powered by Google Search and Bing respectively to
research terms, images and relevant content.

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chrishan
Modern remembrance agent ([http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~rhodes/Papers/wear-ra-
personalt...](http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~rhodes/Papers/wear-ra-
personaltech/ra-screen.jpg))

------
Jayasimhan
Ooh! I had the same idea about providing contextual information. But you
executed on it. This is a wonderful tool that I'd use. All the best. Keep
improving it.

------
antidoh
In Firefox 16.0.1 on Linux, if I type a letter after the pre-existing text
then the browser opens a tab that I had previously closed. Works fine on
Chromium.

------
instakill
Very cool. The right hand side should auto-scroll.

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reader_1000
When you write "times" in documents, it starts to flash (I mean time entry
goes and comes back continuosly)

------
sonier
I just pushed an update that gives better results and fixes a few of the many
bugs.

Thank you everyone for the feedback!

------
Peteris
This is super amazing for writing Mathematics, if the context aggregation
could be tweaked a bit.

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iamrohitbanga
looks cool ... what I have always found missing in text editors is a local
undo (each line maintains its own undo history) ... bad from user experience
and weird requirement I know but something like that would be useful for some
programmers IMHO.

------
jnazario
hey that's pretty cool. given that i was just reading about ted nelson's
project xanadu this fits pretty neatly with that.

hopefully you can tune it to ignore various words that have less impact on
things and instead focus on more core and unique elements.

~~~
sonier
That is the idea, I would like to go one step further. I see it as being in 2
possible 'states' The first would be some overview of the document and the
second would be very relevant to what you are typing right now and what you
are about to type. For example if you typed "Ted Nelson" right away you should
get a picture, bio, birthday and anything else that may be relevant.

~~~
krapp
Some terms could use further disambiguation. For instance - 'lance armstrong'
brings up lance, arms (but not arm) and armstrong (which is apparently an
airport in Louisiana) but not Lance Armstrong. Cobra brings up the snake, the
Cabinet Office Briefing Room but not the insurance plan.

Still, it is pretty cool.

------
nesu
Nice work!

This would be very helpful for writers, although it can also be used to target
ads.

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srj55
Nice effort here...this is a really tough problem to solve "correctly".

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bergie
if you want to do this sort of entity recognition, there is Apache Stanbol
which is quite useful: <http://stanbol.apache.org/>

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bakztfuture
how does the NLP work for this?

