[HN Gopher] Zoomable, animated scatterplots in the browser that ...
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       Zoomable, animated scatterplots in the browser that scales over a
       billion points
        
       Author : samwillis
       Score  : 135 points
       Date   : 2023-04-10 11:29 UTC (11 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (github.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
        
       | pphysch wrote:
       | It seems I don't have the necessary graphics extensions available
       | on my mobile device (mainstream device using mainstream browser).
       | Is this supposed to work on mobile?
        
       | tudorw wrote:
       | nice, https://github.com/laurolins/nanocube is/was another
       | interesting approach to the many points issue, though it's seen
       | no updates since 21 afaik
        
       | doodlebugging wrote:
       | I'm pretty sure I have seen this or something very similar
       | somewhere before but I can't remember where. It is pretty
       | impressive.
       | 
       | The background map they use though for this is definitely wishful
       | thinking in my area. I clicked on points that looked to be near
       | me and discovered that the census data used for those points has
       | people living on a couple of roads that haven't been built and
       | won't be built for at least two years if things go like they have
       | on the other road construction projects within a few miles of me.
       | Today the roads only exist on planning documents posted by the
       | city.
        
       | mLuby wrote:
       | Nice. At least 7 years ago I saw a similar demo: https://demo-
       | taxis.heavy.ai/ for an example.
       | 
       | Is the difference that nomic's billion points are rendered
       | entirely client-side?
        
         | VHRanger wrote:
         | yes, it's using webGPU to render the whole thing
        
       | kristjansson wrote:
       | Great tool to add to the visualization toolbox! It does seem to
       | lack the visual fidelity at large scales that it resovles at
       | finer ones. I wonder if it could extend to the render + raster
       | approach of Datashaper, while still running everything in
       | browser?
        
       | coppsilgold wrote:
       | Reminds me of a more ambitious project where you can view and
       | zoom 1000s of images: <https://gitlab.com/galapix/galapix>
       | 
       | There is also a simpler Rust imitation of that project:
       | <https://github.com/google/pix-image-viewer>
       | 
       | Demos:
       | 
       | <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJz0dz3oG-Q>
       | 
       | <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-Mg6MkE-tg>
        
       | paulgb wrote:
       | Nomic are also the ones behind gpt4all. Such a powerhouse team.
       | https://github.com/nomic-ai/gpt4all
        
       | larsrc wrote:
       | Is the name a reference to the democracy game from Scientific
       | American back in the 80ies (or so)?
       | 
       | Also, is there a good equivalent for node-edge graphs?
        
         | VHRanger wrote:
         | Ideally, you'd embed the graph into 2 or 3d first, then
         | visualize it as a scatterplot.
         | 
         | Visualizing the edges at scale doesnt yield nice results in
         | general. It's simply too noisy.
         | 
         | The way to do it is to reduce the graph to some 300d or 500d
         | embeddings, then use TSNE/UMAP/PACMAP to reduce that to 3d.
         | Then visualize.
         | 
         | My prefered way is to use some first order embedding method
         | like GGVec in this library [1] (disclaimer I wrote it).
         | Node2Vec and ProNE don't yield great embeddings for
         | visualization (the first is too filamented, the second too
         | close to the unit ball).
         | 
         | Another great library to do this work is GRAPE [2]. Try first-
         | order embedding methods, or short walks on second order methods
         | to avoid the embeddings being too filamented by long random
         | walk sampling.
         | 
         | [1] https://github.com/VHRanger/nodevectors
         | 
         | [2] https://github.com/AnacletoLAB/grape/
        
           | larsrc wrote:
           | Thanks!
        
       | wirthjason wrote:
       | Github issues, even low quality ones, are welcom here.
       | 
       | This a refreshing line to read. I wonder if the missing "e"
       | (welcom vs welcome) is intentional. It sounds like and easy (low
       | quality?) PR.
        
         | coding123 wrote:
         | I do find it funny when you have this glaringly bad bug that
         | effects everyone and the bug template wants you to report
         | everything down to your DNA. Sometimes it is nice to just
         | report: latest released version, here's my stack trace...
        
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       (page generated 2023-04-10 23:02 UTC)