Hacker News Reader

Comment by vaillancourtmax | Hacker News Reader

I really, _really_ love this kind of visual guide. Do you guys know of anything similar for other (unrelated) learning subjects?

Edit: just saw this one in the footer of the Waveforms page. http://www.r2d3.us/visual-intro-to-machine-learning-part-1/

View on HN

There's one about programming the hexagonal grids (eg. for the turn-based strategy games):

https://www.redblobgames.com/grids/hexagons/

Creator here, also keen to know if anyone has suggestions. The r2d3 one was (obviously) a huge inspiration, it's such a nice way to learn things.

I can't seem to find it now, but either the NY Times or the Washington Post built something similar, for the 2018 US house/senate races. Lots of graphs as you scroll, with scroll-based events, IIRC.

EDIT: ah, how could I forget Nicky Case's explorabl.es! Was a huge inspiration for me as well.

Mike Bostock is the creator of d3.js and does, or did, a bunch of visualizations for NY Times. Check his website, it's amazing.

https://bost.ocks.org/mike/

Nice work!

I have a suggestion about the chord:

With a single chord like this I think it sounds better to tune it with "just intonation". For a major chord it is [ f * 1, f * 1.25, f * 1.5 ]. With these frequencies the chord will not wobble.

Thanks for the feedback; I saw this further down the comments as well. Will give it a shot!

EDIT: Yep, sounds way better. Will definitely have to look more into this! Thanks again.

A little wobble can be nice though. When I write synthesizer patches, I almost always detune the oscillators a few cents.

On a synth in a musical piece, absolutely.

But in a technical piece like this, I prefer if it isn't.

there's the https://pudding.cool site that kind of does this stuff?

Here's a whole page of them: http://explorabl.es/

Wow, thanks for sharing. That site and all the sites it links to restore my faith in humanity.

Here's a fantastic one for complex numbers. It visually motivates the "imaginary" axis, how complex numbers describe rotation and motion, and why they're useful.

https://acko.net/blog/how-to-fold-a-julia-fractal/

I love these kind of things too and link to them frequently from my audio-themed newsletter (http://webaudioweekly.com). I'm particularly fond of Tero Parviainen's interactive explorations of generative music, for example: https://teropa.info/blog/2017/01/23/terry-rileys-in-c.html

Hi Chris! Creator here, I'm a subscriber to Web Audio Weekly. Appreciate the work you do, always excited when I receive it :)

Thanks Josh! This is going in the next issue, of course :)

Bret Victor has been a major protagonist of interactive visualization: http://worrydream.com/

"The Ladder of Abstraction" is close to this explicit document style, but if you're interested in the history and philosophy of interactive visualization, you can lose days on that site.

Here's a ML one (linked to by the above site):

http://www.r2d3.us/visual-intro-to-machine-learning-part-1/

Distill has some great ML articles that are kind of similar:

https://distill.pub/

Tensorflow Playground, more of a self-driven place to play with machine learning: http://playground.tensorflow.org/

Please checkout 3Blue1Brown.

3Blue1Brown, by Grant Sanderson, is some combination of math and entertainment, depending on your disposition. The goal is for explanations to be driven by animations and for difficult problems to be made simple with changes in perspective.

Here's a favorite of mine that lets you explore Fourier synthesis. Be sure to left-click for more settings.

http://toxicdump.org/stuff/FourierToy.swf

Edit: Oh, it's down. But I'll leave this here in case it's a temporary problem.

Ah. Here's one that was inspired by that one.

http://beneskildsen.github.io/fourier/fourier.html

> Do you guys know of anything similar for other (unrelated) learning subjects?

Raft consensus http://thesecretlivesofdata.com/raft/

There's the 4D toybox by the person who's making Meigakure: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0t4aKJuKP0Q

Check out https://idyll-lang.org/ , a language that aspires to make making these easy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com