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This will become the new github.com code search. Last year, we launched a Technology Preview of our new code search as a standalone site: cs.github.com. Today, we're bringing that powerful code search, plus a redesigned code navigation UX, to github.com.

Thanks! Nothing like a little friendly competition... :)

Our ultimate goal is to surpass the current code search index. As of today, there are about 25 million repositories in the new index, but we have more work to do before we reach full scale.

Content is deduplicated, yes.

All characters are indexed (UTF-8 only). Files larger than 350 KiB are currently excluded, though we welcome feedback on use cases that require larger files to be indexed.

Currently, we index the head of the default branch. However, the index format will support branch indexing, and we use that functionality to index forks, which was not possible in prior incarnations of GitHub code search. Indexing specific commits (e.g., associated with a PR or feature branch) is on our roadmap.

Hello from the GitHub code search team! I'm really proud of this release. It's the result of a year of hard work from multiple teams to bring the custom code search engine we built for cs.github.com to github.com. In the background, we've also spent a lot of time since the launch rebuilding the index format to let us scale up the system.

My colleague Tim Clem will be speaking at GitHub Universe today about some of technical details: https://githubuniverse.com/events/detail/virtual-schedule/49...

For anyone else interested in a light meter for an old camera, my coworker's friend developed a small light meter and spot meter that are pretty interesting (and affordable): https://www.reveni-labs.com/

Not mentioned in this article: In Philip K. Dick's alternative history The Man in the High Castle, in which the Nazis and Imperial Japan won World War II, the Nazis execute this plan and drain the Mediterranean. As the author mentions, there wasn't much care for what happened to the people living in Africa. In Dick's book, the Nazis visited some unspeakable holocaust on them.

(I work at GitHub.) We've started using our Discussions product for feedback. You can post a discussion here:

https://github.com/github/feedback/discussions/categories/ge...

At the beginning of the pandemic, my family would go to Stowe Lake in Golden Gate Park pretty frequently to get out of the house and look at the geese. I picked up some feathers and made a quill pen based on this YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EIgYQZZIes

I also made my own ink from beets, which looked pretty cool but faded quickly. Here's a photo: https://imgur.com/a/5zpj92t

One of the fun things about quill pens, if you're 40+ anyway, is you get to practice your cursive.

Interesting product. FYI, you have a typo in your post: utiliziing -> utilizing

She doesn't spend much time on English thinkers. The focus is on French and German thinkers who (she says) codified liberalism. The word was really rare (foreign) in English until well into the 1860s, IIRC. Anyway, it's one of the criticisms of the book e.g. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/what-they-meant-on-helen... (notably, this critic works for a libertarian think tank).

She argues that it's inaccurate to call them liberals because the term didn't exist then (at least with the same meaning, "liberality" meant generous) and they wouldn't have any idea what you were talking about. Basically, Anglophones retcon'd a rights-based liberalism in the late 1800s.

Personally, I think she takes the argument a bit too far. She credits Constant and de Staël for formalizing liberalism in the aftermath of the Revolution, essentially trying to save the good parts from the wreckage. But, like, Thomas Jefferson helped write the Declaration of the Rights of Man, which laid out the key principles Constant was trying to salvage, and he was most certainly influenced by Locke.

Still, I think this book is well worth reading as a corrective to the Anglo-centric, individual rights-based history of liberalism I've been exposed to in the past. There's a lot more to the story.

During the pandemic, I got heavily into the "Revolutions" podcast, and I wondered about these "liberal nobles" who were always cropping up trying to push for civil rights. So I wanted to read something about the history of liberalism. The typical story is "John Locke, Adam Smith, America's founding fathers (rah rah), John Stuart Mill, etc."

But Helena Rosenblatt's "The Lost History of Liberalism" makes a really strong argument that this anglo-centric definition of liberalism is counter-historical, and liberalism as a named, coherent political ideology developed in France after the French Revolution.

I really enjoyed this book. Probably my favorite of his books I've read so far. If you haven't read On Stranger Tides, check that out, it's great as well.

I just heard about this book on the radio (maybe?) and just the title instantly transported me back to the 1990s. Thanks for recommendation, I will check it out.

I also read The Library at Mount Char this year. I picked this up off the shelf at the library somewhat randomly. I didn't know anything about the book and so I was a bit skeptical. It took me a while to crack it. But wow, once I did...this is one of the strangest books I've ever read. Super messed up. But it was hard to put down.

(I worked on that system and the new one.)

Yes, sadly, that is literally when the file was _indexed_. So it's not particularly useful. It's a difficult problem to solve, but I'll bring up your feedback to the team.

Thanks for the feedback! We downrank test files with a heuristic, though we'll definitely be looking to make this more sophisticated. You can also exclude results using a regular expression, like `foo NOT path:/_test\.go$/`.

Thanks for the feedback, we're working on some changes to improve regular expression performance.

We're also working hard to increase the number of repositories indexed. :)

We'll be sharing more details soon on the GitHub blog.

(I worked on this and the prior version of code search that uses Elasticsearch.)

It is a custom search engine, built from the ground up for code. We'll be sharing more details about it on the GitHub blog soon.

(I worked on this.)

This is on our radar! We de-duplicate exact matches now, but we'd like to do the same for near-similar documents.

(I worked on this.)

Give it a shot and let us know what you think! Where can we improve it?

Naming is hard! Facebook used to have a _different_ Scribe (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scribe_(log_server)).

We used it at a company I worked for, but it had long-since been deprecated, so I was confused when I saw this Scribe.

I visited a week ago, and it was one of the most awe-inspiring buildings I've ever been in. It gave me hope for humanity that we still have the ambition to complete multi-generational projects like this. Thank you for your contribution!

Great writeup.

This is the third case I'm aware of where CI deleted the production database. Others are GitHub (back in 2010: https://blog.github.com/2010-11-15-today-s-outage/) and LivingSocial.

The author makes the argument that automatic translation could prevent the rise of a new lingua franca: https://www.amazon.com/Last-Lingua-Franca-English-Return/dp/...

The author of this article wrote a very interesting book about the connection between language and empire, "Empires of the Word".

https://www.amazon.com/Empires-Word-Language-History-World/d...

It is really interesting to read about how languages outlast their cultures. Latin comes to mind of course, but as the book discusses this was also the case with Sumerian and others.