Live data from Hacker News

How We Built the GitHub Globe

github.blog

41–50 of 107 posts

Re: How We Built the GitHub Globe

#41

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?

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

Re: How We Built the GitHub Globe

#42
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can’t interact with a video.

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)

Re: How We Built the GitHub Globe

#43
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can’t interact with a video.

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.

Re: How We Built the GitHub Globe

#44

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?

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.

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_...

Re: How We Built the GitHub Globe

#46
post #36

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.

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).

That's a good point which I didn't consider when I read the top end of the blog post.

Re: How We Built the GitHub Globe

#47
post #41

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?

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

octocat prime directive is 'helmet stays on'

Re: How We Built the GitHub Globe

#48
post #35
post #3

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

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.

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.

Re: How We Built the GitHub Globe

#49
post #3

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

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.

Re: How We Built the GitHub Globe

#50

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?

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.

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
Post reply on HN