There's a map for that • Hacker News Board

Re: There's a map for that

#21

Post by buro9 » Thu, Jun 13, 2013, 6:45 PM UTC

kmfrk wrote: post #20

The downside of this seems to be that it discourages users from using the superior format TopoJSON by Mike Bostock, as it outputs in plain .json: https://github.com/mbostock/topojson .

GeoJSON is a feature of Leaflet: http://leafletjs.com/features.html

Leaflet is the library used by Mapbox.

Pretty sure if you add a pull request to Leaflet with code for TopoJSON that Mapbox will get it too and then Github will have it.

Re: There's a map for that

#22

Post by dllthomas » Thu, Jun 13, 2013, 6:52 PM UTC

NoodleIncident wrote: post #19

noelwelsh wrote: post #11

I wonder about priorities when I read this. For example, how do I diff two commits via Github? There is a blog post describing this feature: https://github.com/blog/612-introducing-github-compare-view However it seems the UI has changed, and the only way I could find to use it was to manually construct the URL. I'd love for someone to show me some obvious UI I've missed. Diffing is really fundamental for a VCS. I'd m…

Why not just do that locally? Github lets you see the diff for a single commit on their site. This makes sense, because you can use this information to take action on their site, by either approving or denying the pull request. The only use case for commit-commit diffs that I can think of, though, is if you plan on manually merging them and resolving conflicts, which you cannot do on Github (to my knowledge). There e…

My site (an AGPL project) tracks a history of versions it has been built with (commit hash plus diff against that commit). "What changed between this version and the last" is the link I want in that feed.

Re: There's a map for that

#23

Post by Oompa » Thu, Jun 13, 2013, 6:53 PM UTC

graue wrote: post #17

Hmm, on Firefox 23.0a2 I just see a white box with nothing there. Usually this means an addon is interfering somehow. But I turned off AdBlock, Ghostery, HTTPS Everywhere, Flashblock and Greasemonkey, which is basically everything, and reloaded, and still nothing. Anyone else? (Edit: All fixed, thanks Oompa!)

Woops! Small issue. Should be fixed now :)

Re: There's a map for that

#24

Post by Fomite » Thu, Jun 13, 2013, 6:55 PM UTC

bitops wrote: post #3

I am curious if anyone has any insight as to what GitHub's strategy is with this move? It seems that they are steadily tracking towards a browser-based cloud IDE. GitHub also seems to be a popular choice for devs hosting their blogs. I wonder if they're hoping to be a more all-round app hosting service?

I think its really expanding its collaborative focus as it moves from purely coding to "Projects with code". Code itself is (or should be) inherently readable. A great deal of data that code deals with, like GIS data, isn't.

Re: There's a map for that

#25

Post by dakimov » Thu, Jun 13, 2013, 7:01 PM UTC

Wow. Speaking of Leaflet.js, modern web-technologies are powerful and elegant.

And GitHub is becoming a whole universe. What a wonderful service, idea, design, usability! I am really amused.

Re: There's a map for that

#26

Post by Caged » Thu, Jun 13, 2013, 7:11 PM UTC

kmfrk wrote: post #20

The downside of this seems to be that it discourages users from using the superior format TopoJSON by Mike Bostock, as it outputs in plain .json: https://github.com/mbostock/topojson .

We think TopoJSON is a fantastic format and some of us have usedit in recent projects. For example: https://github.com/caged/portland-census

Re: There's a map for that

#27

Post by state » Thu, Jun 13, 2013, 7:19 PM UTC

I look forward to the day when git is the defacto way to collaborate, and I'm so happy to see that GitHub is leading the way forward. This kind of stuff is great!

Re: There's a map for that

#28

Post by wallio » Thu, Jun 13, 2013, 7:34 PM UTC

Cool stuff - had not heard about the 3D rendering linked in the article either. These are not trivial features to implement or maintain and seem to have a somewhat narrow audience. GitHub has such an amazing team and the core functionality seems pretty complete. I wonder if the "ship code" ethic and loose management structure (both of which I think are great) will inevitably lead to a bloated, feature overloaded product eventually. This has happened so very often in the past to others. So far they have been pretty good at closing down unused features.

Re: There's a map for that

#29

Post by kombine » Thu, Jun 13, 2013, 7:42 PM UTC

Well they have a file system(git), now they add ways to interact with data, up until they create a fullblown operating system. Something that Google is already onto with ChromeOS.

Re: There's a map for that

#30

Post by dergachev » Thu, Jun 13, 2013, 7:48 PM UTC

I wish they would just make HTML previews work instead of hardcoding specific use cases with 3d models and geodata.

Eg why can't github just let visitors preview this html file: https://gist.github.com/dergachev/5769111#file-index-html

For now, I have to link bl.ocks.org, which is nice but far from perfect. And check out http://htmlpreview.github.io

(I understand that there are security concerns, but I'm sure they can be addressed with an iframe or by clicking an external link)