poezn's comments

Is anyone using a log management tool in conjunction with Grafana? I.e. if you see something anomalous or see an alert triggered, how do you investigate what's going on?

Looks interesting at first glance. I was always wondering if DSLs like this one require too much boilerplate code. What do others think? Is this a feasible tool to use for testing a larger web app?

Gaah that's addictive. I mean, the source and blog post is nice too, but that game...! :)

On a more serious note: I've never heard of ECS before, but it seems like it's been used in game development for a while. I feel like most data visualization projects these days (especially the ones using D3.js) use some form of ECS, although not necessarily out of deliberation. I wonder if there are best practices from game development that can aide the development of data visualizations

Posts like this is what I like about Hacker News! It would be great if there were other examples like this where organizations share their setup for real-world projects and presences.

Yeah, you guys were slamming our servers. Feel free to try again, and if you run into the same problem, hit us up!

It's something that we wanted to show too. Apart from the technical complexity involved it would be hard to show warming. In the last century overall warming was maybe 1 deg C, but temperatures fluctuate from year to year by up to 15 degrees. Here is a delta graph for 1900 - 2012, for example: https://www.evernote.com/shard/s5/sh/6d1d932a-c1ed-411d-9b74... One way of doing it though would be to use a rolling average of, say, 5 years.

You mean something like http://halftone.co/projects/temperatures/date/2003/4? Good idea, thanks!

That's right, and I hope that's where both Tributary and programming in general are headed. However, saying that they "make the same mistake" seems odd. Progress can happen incrementally, and sometimes you have to see what works and what not. It's almost as if you have to prototype your idea and see real results immediately, very similar to the goals of learnable programming.

This is pretty amazing. Granted, I'm friends with the authors (@enjalot, @mrejfox), but Tributary has easily become one of my most used tools on a daily basis.

Love it! The beats alone make these tutorials so much more enjoyable to follow than usual tech turtorials.

The maps were originally created as GIS Shapefiles and then exported as GeoJSON.

D3 provides handy functions (d3.geo) to project GeoJSON files to reasonable looking maps.

You can find all original assets (Creative Commons licensed) here: http://poezn.github.com/us-history-maps/

When you're experienced in anything your advantage is that you can put things in relation quickly, which helps you learn things faster.

For me, I learn most when I create something or put my learning in practice immediately. Whether it's languages (natural or programming) or a certain framework, or paradigm. The key is that by running into problems you see how a piece of technology fits into the big picture.

Thanks for the feedback. I generally concur that there has to be a story for a visualization to be successful. The goal with this project was different for once. All data comes verbatim from one Wikipedia page. The goal was to explore how rich Wikipedia content can be presented more interactively and visually appealing.

As to the interaction you suggested: you can click yourself from map to map using the navigation at the bottom instead of having to go back to the tiles.

In my opinion it's a mistake to come up with perks just so you can tell the right story. In his most recent book Clay Christensen describes what makes you love your job better than anything else I've read. He distinguishes between motivators and hygiene factors (mainly citing Frederick Herzberg's research): "Motivation factors include challenging work, recognition, responsibility, and personal growth. Motivation is much less about external prodding or stimulation, and much more about what’s inside of you and inside of your work." On the other hand he lists hygiene factors: "status, compensation, job security, work conditions, company policies, and supervisory practices." (from http://www.fastcompany.com/1836982/clayton-christensen-how-f... and his book). You can pile up perks as much as you want; they just serve as hygiene factors. As long as your motivators are not met, a high retention quote is wishful thinking. HR departments at bigger startups (and bigger perks) know that all too well.

At the end of the day you don't work for the big colorful slide at your office, or Whiskey Fridays, or your favorite 80's arcade video game. Cynically speaking, these are just there to make your long work days a bit sweeter.

So what's left for startups to retain their top employees? It's figuring out what truly motivates them. This takes a lot of hard work, empathy, and will. It's a long term investment. As such it might not pay off in the short term, but it might well give you in return the high retention rate you're looking for.