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Comment by yorwba | Hacker News Reader

Fascinating, thanks for the link.

What I don't understand is how the duration each changeset is shown is determined. I got to spend a while watching someone circle individual yurts in Mongolia, but some other places disappeared so quickly that the satellite tiles in the background hadn't even started to show up yet.

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I worked on this ages ago :). It's replaying the last minute's edits, and since all of the editing tools just file a changeset (like a commit) all at once, it has to reconstruct what it looked like to draw those features. That timing is just based on a fixed count of seconds it should take to draw a line, a point, etc. The code's here:

https://github.com/osmlab/show-me-the-way/blob/gh-pages/js/s...

Hello there, nice work. I like how relaxing it is... Watching someone somewhere contributing. I'm going to leave this running on my 2nd monitor full screen.

I think the duration for each changeset just depends on the number of map elements it touches. Every map element gets 1.5 seconds. Every individual yurt is a map element so that changeset gets a lot of "airtime", but a changeset that just adds one building is only visible for 1.5 seconds.

There's also a number, top left, which is counting down as each change occurs. It doesn't seem related to one place. I can't tell what it is.

The element ID for it is "queuesize". I think it just fetches a batch of recent changes then queues them up. When the queue gets empty enough it fetches a new batch, and the number still in the queue is what you see.

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