[HN Gopher] Software galaxies
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Software galaxies
Author : matesz
Score : 574 points
Date : 2024-06-28 04:54 UTC (18 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (anvaka.github.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (anvaka.github.io)
| matesz wrote:
| https://github.com/anvaka/pm/blob/master/about/README.md
| pmontra wrote:
| Navigating the galaxies is frustratingly hard.
|
| One finger touch moves forward, but it makes very hard to touch a
| point and see what it is. I keep selecting something past it,
| especially for large dots, which I'm curious to see what they
| are.
|
| Rotating the device changes the direction but it's hard to point
| towards a specific star.
|
| On the good side it's very nice to look at. I wish there would be
| something as fast as this for navigating real galaxies, with of
| course better controls.
| Varriount wrote:
| Although I agree that navigation via device orientation makes
| some navigation aspects difficult, I also find it oddly
| fascinating. It's like my phone has become a window into
| another world.
| ErigmolCt wrote:
| I think I had the same feelings
| sva_ wrote:
| It seemed hard at first, until I decided to get up and pan
| around (looking like a fool).
|
| Imagine you're in a spaceship and pushing down accelerates it.
|
| It was fascinating how quickly this perspective gave me a sense
| of orientation.
| soraminazuki wrote:
| It was easy with a PC and keyboard.
| metadat wrote:
| Mobile was awful, but from the desktop W-A-S-D + the arrows
| make navigating pretty fun.
| marapuru wrote:
| Interesting and very cool!
|
| But since navigating around is not easy, would it be an idea to
| implement a game like controller that allows you to move around?
|
| Current controls are not working so well.
| artpar wrote:
| seems to be done in the same way, but the parameters are off.
| aswd (camera angle) + arrow keys(panning) works nicely when
| zoomed out but very sensitive when zoomed in.
| cloudwalk9 wrote:
| I imagine Gentoo would be extremely difficult to visualize
| because USE flags add a 4th spatial dimension...
| vavooom wrote:
| Maybe provide some insights on the main clusters identified? I
| think of this youtube video on Wikipedia Graph:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JheGL6uSF-4&ab_channel=adumb
| edweis wrote:
| Beautiful work
| omoikane wrote:
| This looks very nice, but a 2D visualization might have been more
| practical. For example, the fact that the dot size represents the
| total number of dependents is obscured by the fact that the dot
| sizes are also a function of camera distance.
| zbendefy wrote:
| Reminds me of the 3D file browser user interface in Jurassic
| Park, which was an actual application. Looks cool but its not
| good to use (I mean the 3d file browser, not this software
| galaxies, which i found quite good).
|
| 3D interfaces rarely plan out, wonder if something like a
| vision pro or quest could make a 3D user interface work better
| than a 2D counterpart.
| aphrax wrote:
| IIRC it was an SGI application - very cool but not terribly
| practical!
| surfingdino wrote:
| To be fair, it was all new back then and people were
| playing with ideas, so a 3d file browser _seemed_ like a
| cool idea. A bit like the metal roller on the Paris Metro
| ticket machines
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=9SjBfRA3YzA
| dcminter wrote:
| The discoverability on those things is definitely
| lacking. I think it took us five or so broken touch-
| screens before my wife noticed that you could use that to
| select menu options instead! I guess once you know it's
| fine though? Feels a bit dated compared to the typical
| touch & go card payments elsewhere in Europe now though.
| surfingdino wrote:
| I couldn't work it out for a good while, because it's the
| most unintuitive UI I have found on reasonably recent
| ticket machines. Once you know how to use it, it's ok.
|
| ProTip: if you travel from London on a train, the buffet
| sells Paris Metro tickets.
| grimgrin wrote:
| Looks like it's "File System Navigator" or fsn (fusion)
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20160416092919/https://en.wikip
| e...
|
| Since removed, but still mentioned here:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphical_user_interface#In_s
| c...
| Medox wrote:
| Can be seen here (@8.02):
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PP--lVTPCQ&t=482s
|
| (A $36,000 Graphical Workstation from 1993 | SGI Indigo 2)
| p_l wrote:
| There was a bunch of "demo" applications bundled in Irix,
| some more some less useful, that were used to showcase the
| capabilities of the systems. File System Navigator was,
| afaik, one of them (similarly there was bundled "dogfight",
| a networked flight simulator game).
| Fnoord wrote:
| Yes, it was a SGI application. Probably used in the movie
| Hackers.
|
| There was also a Doom file manager where you'd use BFG to
| nuke a directory. I only found one for Doom 3 but this also
| existed with original Doom. Nowadays, BFG is only used to
| nuke git repos.
| giobox wrote:
| Doom process managers where a thing for a while too, 20
| years ago. Using the BFG on a crowded room of processes
| usually resulted in a system crash. Hunting down a stuck
| program and shooting it in E1M1 was pretty neat though.
| Your comment reminded me of playing with this in MacOS X
| a long time ago.
|
| > https://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/chi/chi.html
| HPsquared wrote:
| In VR, there was a wave of that kind of thing (3D
| productivity apps, file browsers etc.) None really took off
| though as far as I can tell.
| _kb wrote:
| https://fsv.sourceforge.net
|
| There's a great write up at
| https://scifiinterfaces.com/2023/11/27/jurassic-park-1993/
| cratermoon wrote:
| There's also Doom as an Interface for Process Management
| https://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/chi/chi.html
| ethbr1 wrote:
| What's used to compute distance?
|
| I couldn't find any legend or description (mobile).
|
| _Edit_ Ah, noticed the bottom-right about:
| https://github.com/anvaka/pm/tree/master/about#software-gala...
|
| Distance is seemingly arbitrary, decided by clustering
| algorithm.
| digging wrote:
| It's weird, because there are (at least in the Rust "galaxy")
| several tiny, extremely distant constellations. I thought
| they were background decoration until I zoomed way in on
| them. Hard to image why they would be so distant if they're
| relevant.
| failbuffer wrote:
| 2D might be more practical if you were trying to make
| architectural decisions, but I feel the author's whimsical
| embrace of the starship metaphor made his/her project more
| interesting and fun. I've already seen a bunch of 2D code
| graphs.
| mdtrooper wrote:
| I love these kind of things: -
| https://github.com/acaudwell/Gource : generate a beautiful and
| organic videos from git repositorios. -
| https://code.google.com/archive/p/codeswarm/ : similar to Gource
| . - https://skyline.github.com : it is dead, like as Atom .
| FrostKiwi wrote:
| Hell yeah. In our department we setup Gource to render out a
| video every midnight and pimped it out with a bunch of overlays
| and profile pics to show project progress and to visualize who
| worked on what. Shown endlessly looping on an iPad in front of
| the department, so no contributions are forgotten, especially
| the ones by interns who participated only a short while.
| mdtrooper wrote:
| Cool. Do you have public (in a git repo or something) this
| setup for Gource?
| gavinhoward wrote:
| +1 for providing the setup if you can. I love Gource.
| theoa wrote:
| Wonderful!
|
| Want more.
|
| Every blob displays its icon
|
| Mouseover over displays much more stuff
|
| Right-click: the world is your oyster
|
| Ctrl-click: make a group, etc, much much more
|
| Ultimately: create 3D bash/OS/
| martypitt wrote:
| This is a UNIX System! I know this!
| peteforde wrote:
| I'm a bit confused by the Rubygems visualization. Many popular
| gems appear to be missing, and the role of Rails in the ecosystem
| is something you could miss if you weren't explicitly looking for
| it.
|
| Cool viz, just not 100% clear what I'm looking at.
| pyeri wrote:
| Off topic, I still couldn't find an easy or seamless way to
| search GitHub repos by keywords (repo name, coding language, etc)
| and have them order by most stars descending.
| SushiHippie wrote:
| Weird you are right
|
| I just tried this:
|
| https://github.com/search?q=lang%3Arust&type=repositories&s=...
|
| Filter by language to rust and then select sort by most stars,
| and the top repository has 249 stars...
|
| Though if I add a filter for stars greater than 1000 the
| results look way better:
|
| https://github.com/search?q=lang%3Arust+stars%3A%3E1000&type...
| KolmogorovComp wrote:
| It seems cool but is completely unusable on mobile. It still
| amaze me how today people do not think about designing mobile-
| first website.
|
| The gap between devs and users is far from closed yet.
| Arch-TK wrote:
| Assuming this was done in free time, for fun and posted here
| because it looks cool, why would you hold these expectations?
|
| This is the kind of expectations you should have of a
| commercial product that you're paying for. Not of someone's
| random side project.
| KolmogorovComp wrote:
| As you've said given it's a project done in their freetime I
| don't have any expectations.
|
| At the same time when I design a project I want to share to
| others (in my free-time too), I always think about making it
| working for the majority of the users (mobile in that case).
| neontomo wrote:
| I do too, but usually not until I've first validated the
| idea is interesting to people. Not much sense in optimising
| the wrong thing.
| mgnienie wrote:
| It's for us geeks, not the majority :)
| gluke77 wrote:
| How users (who are non-devs) are planning to use this piece, I
| wonder. Also is there any well established web-native way to
| navigate in 3d space, that works on mobile? Personally, quake-
| style keyboard only navigation on my desktop works like a
| charm.
| etwigg wrote:
| super cool, but no jvm maven central?
| ivolimmen wrote:
| Yeah that is what I came to ask here as well. Also no p2...
|
| Edit: I see someone open an issue for it
| https://github.com/anvaka/pm/issues/2
| kreyenborgi wrote:
| Fun. Needs haskell hackage :-)
| brandly wrote:
| I wrote up some details about adding Elm packages to this if
| you want to do the same for hackage!
| https://mattbrandly.com/every-elm-package/
| rpgwaiter wrote:
| This is so cool! I'd love to see this kind of thing for nixpkgs
| visarga wrote:
| Where is CPAN, I don't see it.
| gregorvand wrote:
| This is very hard to understand
| adityaathalye wrote:
| This is art! I wonder... What if the depth at which a package
| first appears depends on its release date? And what if each
| universe evolves in terms of package releases?
| dim13 wrote:
| As for Go, the dataset looks very-very old and outdated. At least
| 5 to 10 years old.
| kkoncevicius wrote:
| Same for R
| jzer0cool wrote:
| How does this manage to plot so many points yet running pretty
| smoothly here on a low end computer browser?
| sva_ wrote:
| I'd presume a WebGL particle shader
| Kuinox wrote:
| Lots of star in the nuget galaxy, but there is not several
| package I worked on :(.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Incredible. The amount of effort that goes into each of those
| dots.
| ggm wrote:
| Brew but not ports or pkgsrc
| me_bx wrote:
| From the same author: * Related subreddits graph
| - https://anvaka.github.io/sayit/?query=linux * Map of
| reddit - https://anvaka.github.io/map-of-
| reddit/?x=18239&y=12514&z=32433.55559794627&v=2
| witx wrote:
| This is such a cool visualization. It's so interesting to see
| that Rust's embedded libraries are on a more separate, dense,
| group.
| dirkc wrote:
| Wow, I love this. A long time ago I did some dependency graphs
| for gentoo linux packages [1] and also for a django project [2].
| I put all the packages on a circle with dependencies being drawn
| as lines. This is so much cooler!
|
| [1] https://www.thebacklog.net/2011/04/04/a-nice-picture-of-
| depe... [2] https://www.thebacklog.net/2012/10/13/visualizing-
| lernantas-...
| smartmic wrote:
| Impressive visualization, for sure. But a honest question: What
| are real use cases of such a representation? I mean, can (and
| will) this be used in a productive manner for solving what kind
| of problems?
| throwaway55533 wrote:
| no.
| ordu wrote:
| The only use I can imagine is to use it to write a guide on the
| available software. You can pick from the image clusters and
| make them into chapters in your guide or something like.
| ErigmolCt wrote:
| It could be very effective in some cases
| Fnoord wrote:
| Seems like a very useful way to navigate on a large
| touchscreen.
| wiz21c wrote:
| When you imagine that each dot is a program and that behind each
| of these dots, there is at least on person, it gives a very good
| appreciation of how complex each of these projects are. These are
| pretty big human architectures..
| martin-adams wrote:
| Going to be wild when AI starts to contribute to the code base
| on it's own
| ErigmolCt wrote:
| And it emphasizes the immense human effort involved in these
| projects.
| sva_ wrote:
| Would be interesting to see one for the Linux Kernel. Each
| include an edge on the graph
| yayr wrote:
| just to be a bit astronomically nitpicky ... ;-)
|
| they are more like star clusters than galaxies. Galaxies usually
| have a lot of mostly circular momentum with arms forming etc.
|
| might be even the better marketing term "Software star clusters"
|
| not to mention the widely accepted hypothesis that galaxies
| require dark matter to be held together... we don't want to dive
| into the analogy here for software, or do we? ;-)
| HPsquared wrote:
| Not to be confused with Github stars and their social dynamics.
| bregma wrote:
| But really it's the dark web that binds us all?
| classified wrote:
| I'm a bit disappointed that it has Homebrew, but not MacPorts,
| which is superior in my opinion.
| BoppreH wrote:
| The gyroscope aiming on mobile is fantastic!
|
| I've never seen a demo with such small latency and responsive to
| small movements. Even more impressive by being a web page and not
| a native web.
| zheninghuang wrote:
| Doing a Research paper Galaxies would also be interesting,
| especially in the domain of AI.
| bombela wrote:
| The UX is garbage. It tracks my phone's motion, making it
| incredibly jittery (I guess I don't have the rock steady hands
| required?). And one finger starts an automatic zoom, while two
| fingers unzoom.
| jackcviers3 wrote:
| No maven central?
|
| I imagine it would be pretty large, too.
| viveknathani_ wrote:
| love this!
| ramesh31 wrote:
| Holy crap, Bower still exists?
| brandly wrote:
| I think this is a 9 year old snapshot of Bower
| tantalor wrote:
| My God! It's full of leftpads
| egorfine wrote:
| is-even was the first package I have tried to search.
| xnorswap wrote:
| Nuget has a lovely SampleDependency constellation.
| rmorey wrote:
| I love anvaka's maps! See also reddit:
| https://anvaka.github.io/map-of-reddit/ and GitHub:
| https://anvaka.github.io/map-of-github/
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| I use his reddit graph all the time to find related subs. That
| one is 2d and imho is much more useful than a 3d visualization.
| Sad that it's probably not getting updated any longer due to
| reddit's apis no longer being available.
| sachahjkl wrote:
| no nix pkgs, what's even the point
| brandly wrote:
| Add the dataset!
| ahmadnoid wrote:
| Am I the only one who is getting some sort of gambling site (go-
| search.org) when clicking on golang galaxy?
| linux2647 wrote:
| That's what I get too
| SushiHippie wrote:
| https://github.com/anvaka/pm/issues/44
|
| Yep, seems like someone already opened an issue
| quectophoton wrote:
| Links in the Go galaxy point to a casino page.
| klibertp wrote:
| Is it just me, my extensions, or are the controls broken in
| Firefox?
| numbers wrote:
| might be you, I am on firefox and things work fine. Press ? key
| to show the controls if you don't see them.
| Nischalj10 wrote:
| this is crazyyyy
| flkenosad wrote:
| Shit that's cool.
| drofmij wrote:
| can we do one for the java + maven repository galaxy?
| atonalfreerider wrote:
| primitive.io has a VR browser for Java Maven, .Net, Node, Pip
| and PhP
|
| Disclosure: founder posting here
| DrNosferatu wrote:
| Couldn't find the TensorFlow family in the Python galaxy...
| chuckadams wrote:
| Couldn't make the Elm galaxy show up on my phone. Anyone know
| what accounts for the disconnected islands? I know Elm has a
| fairly closed-off core development process that could be part of
| it, but can't otherwise tell...
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(page generated 2024-06-28 23:00 UTC)