[HN Gopher] How We Built the GitHub Globe
___________________________________________________________________
How We Built the GitHub Globe
Author : scalableUnicon
Score : 160 points
Date : 2020-12-30 18:56 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.blog)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.blog)
| gk1 wrote:
| Looks a lot like the globe on Stripe's homepage:
| https://stripe.com
|
| They even had a post about it, too: https://stripe.com/blog/globe
| mrmonkeyman wrote:
| Stripe did it better. Github's sphere has just a handful
| things, it looks empty. Silent globe. Not a good message.
| Massive, astronomical waste of time.
| dmix wrote:
| Good design ideas are always 'stolen'. As long as it's not
| exactly the same clone then it's fine. Github's is different
| enough and looks cool so I don't mind the similarity. And as
| others have commented there is plenty of other examples in the
| past of global activity maps.
| benatkin wrote:
| This seems to be a blatant ripoff* with no attribution, and
| since the opening line is the arrogant "GitHub is where the
| world builds software", I'm not cutting them any slack.
|
| I'm also not forgetting Microsoft's checkered history with
| open source, or their current deals with government agencies
| like ICE and the DoD.
|
| * I'm not saying they didn't build it themselves. For
| companies like Microsoft/GitHub, the design is the hard part
| and paying engineers is easy.
| kowlo wrote:
| Very similar - and posted earlier! The GitHub one has some
| nicer effects.
| [deleted]
| elwell wrote:
| Dating further back, it might be even closer to this old
| "Chrome experiment" from about 10 years ago:
| https://github.com/dataarts/webgl-globe
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| Pretty much. Basically the "show internet actions via the
| globe" has a pretty rich history. There was even an animated
| and projected globe in the lobby of the IBM research facility
| in San Jose.
|
| Still, given that the "form" is well established, it is
| always interesting to me at least to see how they chose to
| represent the data. When Blekko was running Bryn Dole had
| done a visualization based on this theme were query requests
| were highlighted as streams from their point of origin (more
| queries, taller stream as I recall).
| kevincox wrote:
| I remember that Shopify used to have this as well for placed
| orders.
| gabereiser wrote:
| I watched the animation from Nat the CEO and what struck me as
| odd was the volume of which Brazil does "activity" at night.
|
| Clearly the USA is more active during the day, as is India and
| Europe. Brazil on the other hand is backwards. Anyone know why
| that would be? I've worked with Brazilians before during the day
| so that struck me as really peculiar.
| ddevault wrote:
| Alternate titles:
|
| How we broke our home page on your web browser
|
| Why your fans turned on when you visited GitHub.com
|
| We collected and stored your personal information to make a tech
| demo (and shared that info with Google, Wordpress, and anyone who
| visits our home page)
|
| Disclaimer: I run a similar service to GitHub, though I am
| legitimately salty about crap like this.
| umaar wrote:
| Related: WebGL globe showing live Wikipedia edits
| https://umaar.com/globe/
|
| I've also tried to visualise worldwide COVID data on that globe,
| however performance degrades making it completely unusable.
| kowlo wrote:
| Great way to visualise the data. I wonder if it will work its way
| into any plotting libraries...
| jeffbee wrote:
| Alt title: how we made yet another population density map, but
| this time using all of your CPU.
| dmix wrote:
| I'm not convinced of the performance, I heard my fans spin up
| when I first opened the new Github.com redesign a few weeks back
| and remember commenting on it to our developers ("how we
| destroyed your browsers performance" as a joke).
|
| It's still a heavy thing to add to any page IMO. Which shouldn't
| be downplayed.
|
| But it is very neat and I still like it.
| kevincox wrote:
| Performance != resource usage in this case.
|
| They optimized for hitting 60fps without any concern for the
| resources they were using as long as it fit in that budget
|
| I agree that using this amount of resources in the browsers of
| visitors shouldn't be taken lightly (they could be on battery
| for example).
| dmix wrote:
| That's a good point which I didn't consider when I read the
| top end of the blog post.
| gotem wrote:
| Crazy impressive. A little bit misleading though.
| tfsh wrote:
| What's misleading?
| gotem wrote:
| More than 56 million developers around the world build and
| work together on GitHub.
|
| Probably an overestimate as some people have multiple
| accounts or don't use GitHub anymore.
| mariust wrote:
| ohhhh well thank you it takes me a few seconds to login :d
| kowlo wrote:
| A link to something similar (but not the same)
| https://experiments.withgoogle.com/chrome/globe
| UnnoTed wrote:
| Not useful, all it does is lag the page and increase the cpu
| usage to 40% when you have hardware acceleration turned off.
| framecowbird wrote:
| Agree! They could have cached way more of this. A pre-rendered
| video would have had the same effect. A fun and impressive
| thing to build for sure, but its value isn't worth its
| complexity.
| bronson wrote:
| You can't interact with a video.
| kevincox wrote:
| To be pedantic you can. They would have to ship the
| locations along side the video.
|
| Of course part of the art is that it is real time (ish).
| That may be harder to do with video. (But I guess it could
| be a live stream)
| sciurus wrote:
| Wow, thanks for this comment. It hadn't occurred to me that
| you could interact with it. Neat!
|
| I wonder if I'm just odd, or if people not realizing it's
| interactive is widespread.
| modeless wrote:
| I work on WebGL in Chrome and I am curious why you have
| hardware acceleration turned off.
| Plaastix wrote:
| This is amazing! Is it just me or is the performance of Github's
| globe really bad on Firefox? The FPS is super low for me on
| Firefox but fine in Chrome.
| GraemeMeyer wrote:
| Performance is fine for me in Firefox, but it is using 3x the
| CPU of Edgeium, and more RAM, so I would guess the GPU
| acceleration isn't working in FF
| apocalyptic0n3 wrote:
| Yeah, I'm getting a really low framerate in Firefox but it's
| perfectly smooth in Chrome.
| sciurus wrote:
| I was pleasantly surprised that it's performing fine for me in
| firefox on a pixel 3a.
| jessikat wrote:
| A link to a repo of the actual code would be nice too for
| inspiration
| xixixao wrote:
| Based on the Satellite video it looks like the US is the only
| place on the planet coding more during the night than during the
| day.
| willcodeforfoo wrote:
| Pretty clever using the timezone offset to approximate the user's
| location without using GeoIP. I hadn't noticed that but sure
| enough, my (approximate) location is in view first.
| ramenmeal wrote:
| Wow, hardware acceleration makes a big difference here. I'm on a
| recent top of the line macbook pro and it couldn't handle it
| without hardware acceleration turned on. I wonder if they
| can/should disable the feature if it's off?
| modeless wrote:
| I am curious, why do you have hardware acceleration turned off?
|
| To answer your question, the failIfMajorPerformanceCaveat flag
| allows sites to turn off their hardware accelerated features
| when hardware acceleration is off.
| dharmab wrote:
| It's sometimes necessary on Linux due to bugs in out-of-tree
| drivers or desktop managers.
|
| A recent thread that turned out to be a lightdm bug: https://
| www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/kl9map/cant_run_...
| Isthatablackgsd wrote:
| Not the person you are responding to. I can provide a reason
| why it is off. Some software behaved differently/weirdly with
| hardware acceleration and often it is recommended to disable
| it. I have hardware acceleration disabled in Excel because of
| scrolling graphic bug.
| modeless wrote:
| I work on WebGL in Chrome. It's my job to fix bugs like
| these. I'm hoping to learn what _specific_ bugs people are
| hitting.
| matsemann wrote:
| Most people in my company had to turn it off in Chrome (or
| switch to Fx) because webpages became a mess on their
| MacBook. Think this is the issue (screenshot there
| representative of how it looks, at least)
| https://support.google.com/chrome/thread/35828402?hl=en
| sprsimplestuff wrote:
| Shopify did something similar, I'm pretty sure, for Black Friday
|
| looks so cool
| bluenose69 wrote:
| Wow, very interesting. Although I'm on GH every day, I seldom
| look at the base GH page and so I would not have noticed this for
| a long time. Many thanks for posting this. The article is very
| interesting.
| lights0123 wrote:
| And you don't see any of this stuff when logged in.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| You do, just go to https://github.com/home
| chungy wrote:
| Is that even linked anywhere? GGP isn't alone, I've
| literally never seen the Globe before either.
| dmix wrote:
| It's still almost brand new still, they launched a new
| homepage around Dec 14th, or maybe earlier.
| davidjnelson wrote:
| Their home page is really a work of art, just beautiful.
| awinter-py wrote:
| why is the octocat wearing a space helmet if there are plants
| growing below it? what happened on this planet to make the air
| unbreathable?
|
| Some kind of chernobyl event, possibly caused by the ICBMs in the
| globe image?
|
| What is the octocat standing on top of? Abandoned silo? Or live
| silo about to go hot?
| dharmab wrote:
| Perhaps the Octocat is following interplanetary hygiene best
| practices during their visit to Earth from the Octoplanet. [1]
|
| 1: https://sma.nasa.gov/sma-disciplines/planetary-protection
| awinter-py wrote:
| octocat prime directive is 'helmet stays on'
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2020-12-30 23:00 UTC)