[HN Gopher] Hundreds of millions of stars turned into a map of G...
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       Hundreds of millions of stars turned into a map of GitHub projects
        
       Author : anvaka
       Score  : 429 points
       Date   : 2023-05-13 18:47 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (anvaka.github.io)
 (TXT) w3m dump (anvaka.github.io)
        
       | topspin wrote:
       | Is Vue over represented in this? Seems like there would be a
       | Reactistan island somewhere before Vue would show up.
        
         | tomschlick wrote:
         | Vue is a pretty big deal in the PHP/Laravel community. Evan the
         | creator even gave a talk at Laracon a few months in, showing
         | the hockey stick growth after it started to get traction in the
         | community.
        
           | anvaka wrote:
           | True. Though I also expected to "Reactistan" somewhere more
           | explicitly, I wonder if it is scattered in Fronterra
           | continent?
           | 
           | I am also puzzled myself why the algorithm has separated
           | Fronterra from another large island to the west, seemingly
           | related to node and some other JS libraries. Decided to keep
           | it all as is in case I'm missing some reason
        
         | silverwind wrote:
         | My feeling is that the React community is at least double to
         | triple the size of the Vue one, so yes, I feel React should
         | definitely be it's own island.
        
       | bluefishinit wrote:
       | This is really neat! Are there any insights you gleaned from
       | doing this that were unexpected?
        
         | pvaldes wrote:
         | Somebody has been doing a lot of Covid-19 plots in Gnu-R
        
         | anvaka wrote:
         | I knew GitHub is not a tiny website, but I didn't imagine how
         | big it actually is. Each of those dots are giant parts of
         | someone's life.
         | 
         | There are a lot of interests that I didn't know exist. For
         | example https://github.com/cat-milk/Anime-Girls-Holding-
         | Programming-... - someone collects anime girls holding
         | programming books.
         | 
         | https://github.com/tylertreat/Comcast - and here is someone who
         | is amazing at coming up with funny project names =)
        
           | tomthe wrote:
           | What else did you use to calculate similarities? When I tried
           | something similar with HN co-commenters, I just got one big
           | blob with dang and other prolific commenters in the middle.
           | That was not very interesting or insightful.
           | 
           | How long did it take to calculate the Leiden clustering and
           | the force-layout? Do you think it would be somehow possible
           | to compute a force-layout of the whole graph?
        
       | matt_trentini wrote:
       | Very cool visualisation!
       | 
       | Though I noticed a couple of odd groupings - like that
       | MicroPython was clustered in Arduinoria rather than the adjacent
       | MicroPythonia... :P
        
       | shon wrote:
       | Wow.. that's cool
        
       | junon wrote:
       | The data seems a bit dated, but this is really cool.
       | 
       | I know this because I moved visionmedia/debug to debug-js/debug
       | in November of 2021.
        
         | anvaka wrote:
         | I've got data from 2020 to end of March 2023
        
           | junon wrote:
           | Ah okay, that makes more sense. Did you scrape it yourself?
           | Incredible work by the way :)
        
             | zX41ZdbW wrote:
             | I recommend checking https://ghe.clickhouse.tech/
             | 
             | It explains the full pipeline - how to download, collect,
             | and analyze this sort of data.
        
             | anvaka wrote:
             | Thank you! Google BigQuery has it readily available, so
             | probably took 10 minutes to fetch it =)
             | 
             | https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/public-
             | datasets/github-...
        
       | sdflhasjd wrote:
       | If you type a capital letter into the search box, it gets stuck
       | on "downloading index" indefinitely.
       | 
       | I was waiting for about 10 minutes wondering how big these
       | indexes were...
        
         | shadycuz wrote:
         | I also experienced this looking up DontShaveTheYak
        
           | anvaka wrote:
           | Oof, sorry! This should be fixed soon thanks to
           | https://github.com/anvaka/map-of-github/pull/1
        
       | pmontra wrote:
       | The Ruby world is part of an island labeled Art of node, west of
       | Fronterra. Strange choice.
        
         | anvaka wrote:
         | I agree. I'm not sure why they are together. Maybe all that
         | tooling stuff that was happening in early days?
        
       | _nalply wrote:
       | The title is clickbaity in a very clever way, and I mean this as
       | a compliment! I thought about what it says for almost a minute
       | before clicking. Stars being made into Github projects? Would I
       | find Orion and Alpha Centauri? I thought hard on about how to
       | pull this off.
       | 
       | Then I clicked and I realized that it is the opposite way, in
       | reverse. And then this realization brought a smile on my face.
        
         | anvaka wrote:
         | You are very kind and your compliment put smile on my face too
         | :)
        
       | metalliqaz wrote:
       | Did it break under the load? I can't search
        
       | amrb wrote:
       | Group names are 10/10
        
       | Abimelex wrote:
       | just came here to give it my upvote. That's so insane cool!
        
       | OmarShehata wrote:
       | This is amazing! I love this effect of showing me that my little
       | project that I was working on fairly solitarily is actually part
       | of a community of other people doing similar work that I can
       | reach out to/collaborate with etc!
       | 
       | What does it mean if, I click on a repo, and it shows 5-6 links
       | to specific projects? Does that just mean the jaccard similarity
       | index was below a threshold?
        
         | anvaka wrote:
         | Yes! I picked only the highest scores to form an edge in
         | relationships graph. Typically a sigma (std deviation) or two
         | away from the mean. So if there is a direct link between your
         | project and others - the similarities are abnormally high.
         | 
         | Note that I'm not rendering direct links outside of the country
         | yet, there might be more there. Will probably add a "focused"
         | view to see those better
        
       | PedroBatista wrote:
       | AILandia was big before but now has been growing at an astounding
       | rate almost surpassing Frontera.
       | 
       | Some say it's a cancer others say it's inevitable and here to
       | stay. Probably both are right.
       | 
       | Also, why is Swiftoria so big?
        
         | anvaka wrote:
         | I've been watching changelog nightly emails for a while - they
         | summarize most starred daily repositories, and growth of AI
         | there (subjectively) seems to be even higher than frontend tech
        
       | speak wrote:
       | W'
        
       | phirschybar wrote:
       | incredible and so inspiring. thank you!!
        
       | jxf wrote:
       | I'm embarrassed to admit that I read "stars" in the title and
       | spent far too long trying to figure out how these were arranged
       | into constellations.
        
       | __MatrixMan__ wrote:
       | This is so fun, thanks for making it.
       | 
       | I bet that several of these regions have a common image in their
       | readme (the python logo, the nix logo, etc). Imagine little flags
       | popping out of each region...
        
         | anvaka wrote:
         | haha, I love the flags idea :). I wish I had the prowess to
         | implement it in a way that is visually appealing and not
         | obscuring the map.
         | 
         | I would also love to have a giant octocat hugging the
         | archipelago, with some radial gradient emitting inside of it.
         | Alas my design-gl foo is not there yet
        
       | irrational wrote:
       | Is there a page that explains what the island names mean? I
       | understand Minecraftria, but Fluttopia (and most others)? No
       | clue.
        
         | zX41ZdbW wrote:
         | I found many ClickHouse-related projects in a dedicated cluster
         | - "House of Clicks" :)
         | 
         | But ClickHouse itself somehow appears in Kubernation, and
         | ClickBench - in Datapolis. Nice names btw.
        
           | anvaka wrote:
           | Thank you!
           | 
           | It could be a curse or popularity? Some projects are so
           | popular that you can place them nearly anywhere, and they
           | would still find a lot of densely connected group of
           | neighbors
        
         | detaro wrote:
         | it usually becomes clear when zooming in and looking at the
         | examples. E.g. "Fluttopia" is Flutter-related repos.
        
           | anvaka wrote:
           | Yes! Thank you
           | 
           | Note that some country are missing their names because I
           | didn't have enough knowledge to assign a name to them.
           | 
           | Here is my naming process if anyone wants to help with the
           | rest: https://github.com/anvaka/map-of-github#country-names
        
             | swyx wrote:
             | very cool! how did you decide on the boundaries and
             | placement of the continents?
        
         | speedgoose wrote:
         | From the project readme on GitHub:
         | 
         | > A lot of country labels were generated with help of ChatGPT.
         | If you find something wrong, you can right click it, edit, and
         | send a pull request - I'd be grateful.
        
       | VitoVan wrote:
       | I'm quite unhappy with SBCL located in Schemaria:
       | 
       | https://anvaka.github.io/map-of-github/#12/13.469/-8.175
       | 
       | It should be Lispana.
        
         | anvaka wrote:
         | Should I rename Schemaria to Lispania?
        
           | ReleaseCandidat wrote:
           | No, as there are all/most/some (Haskell, OCaml, Purescript,
           | Idris, Coq, ...) functinal languages. Lambdania would be a
           | possibility. Although Prolog and Forth are located there too.
        
           | VitoVan wrote:
           | The Scheme people would be unhappy then.
        
             | anvaka wrote:
             | True... Scheming Lispania :)?
        
               | andreareina wrote:
               | Parentensia
        
         | defanor wrote:
         | ML-family languages are placed in Schemaria as well; apparently
         | it is a catch-all for functional languages.
        
       | paulddraper wrote:
       | Nice!!
       | 
       | But how do I zoom in/out?
        
         | bluefishinit wrote:
         | Scroll wheel works for me.
        
       | internetguy wrote:
       | This is frickin awesome. Made me really see how the programming
       | community can come together and contribute to something powerful.
        
       | arthurcolle wrote:
       | Reminds me of dotlan Eve maps
        
       | data_ders wrote:
       | 1. this is so cool. i'd love to see more name for the regions! 2.
       | nit: one repo dear to my heart dbt-labs/dbt-core was previously
       | dbt-labs/dbt as well as fishtownanalytics/dbt. they show up as
       | unique nodes on your map. what most interesting to me is that
       | each name of this repo links to a different set of related repos?
        
         | anvaka wrote:
         | Thank you!
         | 
         | The connections are inferred from stargazers. If they lead to
         | different set of related projects it might be a sign that
         | different group of people gave stars different things at that
         | time.
         | 
         | Github of course has much more dimensions than a flat 2d
         | surface can show
        
       | danking00 wrote:
       | This reveals an interesting dichotomy in the project I work on,
       | Hail. I think of hail as a serverless workflow, relational, and
       | linear algebra system most similar to Dask, BigQuery, Snowflake,
       | Spark, etc. but this map is constructed from the perspective of
       | the _user_ so Hail lands squarely in the world of bioinformatics.
       | 
       | Also neat to see how bioinformatics is such a splitbrained
       | community. They land next to R but are filled with Python
       | projects.
        
       | rmorey wrote:
       | This is amazing
        
       | pizza wrote:
       | Damn that's good
        
       | paxo wrote:
       | Haha, very nice. I was able to locate multiple projects even ones
       | with less than 1k stars easily.
        
       | casey2 wrote:
       | Amazing way to see related projects in an environment you aren't
       | familiar with.
        
       | geokon wrote:
       | This gives a really cool top level view into the whole Chinese
       | opensource community - which has always been very mysterious to
       | me. Bc it's absolutely massive and almost entirely on its own
       | doing its own thing due to the language barrier
        
         | anvaka wrote:
         | Indeed! A lot of amazing things happens there. A few are
         | getting world wide adoption (echarts are awesome if you are
         | into frontend viz, so is element-plus library for vue
         | components). There are giant communities of ML too
        
       | paulddraper wrote:
       | IDK how I feel about Kubernation: Firecracker, Grafana,
       | Localstack, Podman, Terraform, Vault?
       | 
       | Seems like a really overreaching power. Wait, never mind, that
       | makes sense.
        
         | anvaka wrote:
         | :D btw, if you find any country label to be missing or could be
         | improved - right click it, change it, and then send a PR (it's
         | two clicks away)
        
           | swyx wrote:
           | how exactly did you name and cluster these things? i love how
           | you presented it and dont know of any existing quantitative
           | methodology
        
             | anvaka wrote:
             | Check this out https://github.com/anvaka/map-of-github#how-
             | was-it-made - I gave a short overview there - does this
             | help?
        
       | samsquire wrote:
       | This is absolutely awesome. Such a good job well done! The search
       | is fast! The sidebar is a great feature. I also love how you
       | highlight the repositories you search for and draw red lines
       | between things.
       | 
       | I found my journal repositories in the "Land of Node" in
       | "Frontartia". I am surprised by that because I didn't realise I
       | was associated with the node community!
       | 
       | I am so impressed with your visualization, it is intuitive and
       | interesting the different communities of GitHub.
        
         | anvaka wrote:
         | Thank you so much!
         | 
         | I'm puzzled by some countries in Frontartia's island too. I'm
         | not sure why it was even pulled away, as if there is something
         | I'm missing.
        
       | rightbyte wrote:
       | This is really neat. Clustering of data like this makes for so
       | interesting graphics.
        
       | specproc wrote:
       | This is a beautiful project. It's useful, aesthetically pleasing,
       | and based on a clever methodology. Absolutely love it. Great
       | work.
        
         | anvaka wrote:
         | Thank you so much for your compliment!
        
       | edrxty wrote:
       | This is amazing, the GitHub ham radio and hardware scenes are way
       | bigger than I previously thought. Shout-out to OpenRTX and M17
       | along with all the awesome SDR applications!
        
       | mftb wrote:
       | To me this is proof that doing a good visualization is really an
       | art. I saw this on hn for a couple hours, but really didn't think
       | much of it. As soon as I clicked through the funny names, and
       | "continents" brought a smile to my face.
       | 
       | I guess my little project is too small to make it, but now I too
       | aspire to join the great nation of Golandia.
        
         | anvaka wrote:
         | Thank you!
        
       | kelsolaar wrote:
       | This is very cool and was pleasant albeit surprising to see
       | colour in Gamedonia!
        
       | sethkim wrote:
       | Very cool!
       | 
       | If you work on a dynamic version that allows users to understand
       | changes in the open-source topography over time and
       | detect/predict new clusters, this could be a very powerful tool
       | for investment intelligence.
        
       | coffeeshopgoth wrote:
       | I love these things - to see everything sort of classified, and
       | all at once, helps me find things I would never think to look
       | for. Forgive me if this has been posted somewhere else, but if
       | you want to see a reddit map, here it is (maybe you found it
       | already in their github, but I just have it as a bookmark):
       | https://anvaka.github.io/map-of-reddit/?x=18083.096950551575...
        
         | terrycody wrote:
         | Yeah I just wanna paste this and found your answer :P, now we
         | have another similar tool about Github, much more useful for
         | many people, kudos to the author!
        
           | anvaka wrote:
           | thank you :)
        
       | mellosouls wrote:
       | This is great, not just nice to look at but useful too. Top work!
       | 
       | How it was constructed (also really interesting) is described at
       | the repo:
       | 
       | https://github.com/anvaka/map-of-github#readme
        
         | anvaka wrote:
         | thank you!
        
       | divan wrote:
       | Check out other anvaka's projects, there are gems:
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=anvaka.github.io
        
         | tomthe wrote:
         | Or check them out directly on the map:
         | https://anvaka.github.io/map-of-github/#12.36/-31.74456/14.8...
        
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       (page generated 2023-05-14 23:02 UTC)