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Comment by idibidiart | Hacker News Reader

WHOOPS! Set Labels to 200 instead of 20 and click Generate Labels. The diagram is not only incomprehensible, it actually wobbles, flickers and shakes as you scroll.

You need something better than a linear progression of ticks if you want to track and label lot of events that have happened.

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Why am i being down voted for reporting that it wobbles, flickers and shakes (on latest Chrome) when you scroll with a large number of points? I should be up voted because this is something that needs to be pointed out to anyone who wishes to use this library. And 200 points aren't a lot of points when it comes to presenting data. It just that this attempts with futility to work with any number of points and it simply can't without changing how data is presented, definitely not a linear progression of ticks on a line.

I think you're being downvoted because this is when the placing algorithm is still running - it's going down the diagram and using what looks like a genetic algorithm to determine the best placing for the labels.

It's terrible UX. Why do I care that the algo is still running while the window is scrolling? Detect the scroll event and pause the algo. Anyway, it's not fit for displaying a a lot of events, so that should be noted. The resulting diagram is incomprehensible. I'm talking data vis basics here, not being clever. C'mon.

Even the demo UI gives you the options to stop it from showing the intermediate steps, so your complaint is mostly that the demo doesn't magically pick the best parameters but lets you play with them?

That wasn't obvious from first use and at any rate the resulting diagram for anything above a trivial number of labels is incomprehensible. So magucally arranging labels is not really scalable. You need a differemt visualization model. That should be stated and made clear up front.

Are you sure that wasn't the algorithm making it's multiple passovers to better position the labels? Under the default settings and 200 labels it takes a while to finish positioning the labels. Try changing the Max. Round and Algorithm values to 1 and see if it still flickers/moves as you experienced before.

It's probably to do with the snark - intentional or otherwise - in your leading "Whoops!" - it comes across as "hey, everyone, I'm really clever because I found a flaw" which a) several other people found anyway b) you didn't actually report accurately; as others point out, the 'wobbling' is the positioning algorithm still running, nothing to do with scrolling c) is an edge-case; no matter what your claim that "200 points aren't a lot", most timelines I've ever seen online have had nowhere near 200 points. It's also painfully obvious before you even begin that 200 labels won't fit at all sensibly in the given width, so nobody using this library would actually make such a blundering mistake.

Positioning algo is dumb if it doesn't take UX into account. it should pause while the user is scrolling. Also, it is a futile to suggest that automatically placing labels is scalable for any number of labels beyond 40 or so.

That describes just about every high ranking regular on this site. It's a circle of big headed fellows who pat each other on the back, if you're in said circle, or down vote to eternity if you're not.

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