guillaumec

Yes for now I thought it would be better to not show anything than a poor UI, and also the performance is not great on mobile right now. This is something I would like to improve for sure. Maybe a simplified version with limited UI?

Thanks a lot, really appreciate!

Thanks a lot for the feedbacks! I spent quite a lot of time on this yes, though I was already quite familiar with 3d rendering and astronomical computation so it wasn't that hard. In fact the most difficult part was probably to learn WebGPU that I never used before.

For the issues:

1. Yes there are some bugs currently with the temporal anti aliasing. I was a bit aggressive on the effect because without it the Milky Way doesn't look good. I'll try to fix that (ideally it should adjust to the the velocity field).

2. All the time controls is still pretty much untested, I'll see if I can fix that.

3. I'd like to add more scale hints, but it's hard without cluttering the view. I'll see what I can do.

4. Yes at the moment there is only one black hole (sgr A*), I'll add more as soon as I can.

As for how this will evolve, I am not sure yet. I have a basic mobile version prototype working on iOS, so I thought this could turn into a mobile app at some point. No plan for an actual heavy PC app at the moment.

Yes mostly. The comets and satellites data is updated twice a day.

At least for chess the article mentions that they considered the top 10 players in children and senior categories. This would indicate that prodigy chess players are millions of time more likely to become elite compared to the general population.

I notice more and more pushes to 'improve' C and turn it into something it should not become. I feel like the C++ community gave up on C++ because of the growing complexity and so turned to C with the hope of adding to it the good parts of C++ without the ugliness. But this is of course hopeless: every added feature will create new issues that will be solved with new features until the language becomes too complex for anyone to fully understand.

I often wondered if Patrick uses unnecessarily convoluted sentences, or if he is simply careful about using the proper terminology, and my English is just not good enough to follow him like a native speaker would.

I wrote this in go and it made the front hackernews page at the time:

https://plaintextco.in

This was my first time using go and I found the language very handy for this kind of projects.

My original tweet had a typo (their -> there) :(

I deleted it and reposted it without the mistake. Sorry for this duplicate.

Yes, since I got too many requests from HN, I had to enable the CDN. I didn't realize it would cache both html and terminal request together. I tried setting "Vary: User-Agent" but it didn't work. You can add: "?term=true" to make it work in terminal for now.

You are probably right. I should also probably add a link to a 'true' plain text version that returns a pure txt.

Not at the moment, this was a week end project, and the code is quite horrible. But yes I should probably put it online and get advise.

Actually it also supports a black and white mode using only utf8 characters. I haven't exposed it yet though.

It's all done by hand in go. Yes it uses the user agent to guess if the request comes from a terminal.

Well, I should have tested a bit more before posting.

Back online for now... please be gentle ;)

I think the server code has a concurrent access bug that makes it crash in the middle of a request. Unfortunately due to the current charge I can't even restart it at the moment.

Yeah the server is not handling the load at the moment... I am trying to restart it.

Thanks for the comment! I wanted to keep the html and css as simple as possible so I didn't put much layout. If it gets traction I will improve that. Same thing for the font.

It's all hand crafted. My first time using golang so the code is probably not as efficient as it could be.

Thanks for the answer!

Interesting project, and I like the simple UI. How does the Sentiment Analysis is done? What kind of back-end have you used?

Yes! I just finished it. Best vulgarization book I have ever read. Not a single equation, but still telling you exactly how the physics work, without any hand waving. I can't recommend it enough.

Good article. Compilation time is indeed an important issue, and the main reason why I use C instead of C++ as much as I can.

For anyone interested about this kind of things, I did something a bit similar for 3d voxel rendering: https://voxeltoy.com/, also inspired by shadertoy.

I think it was mostly because we knew we could do it this way. Having a C code base is also nicer for integrating back into Stellarium desktop, do other platform ports, etc.

Yes, but here having a small code is a necessity since we can't have a too big final executable on a website. I am actually still thinking we could make it even smaller.

In the end the target is web assembly, so even writing the code directly in js would require some compilation. Why C and not an other language that can be compiled to web assembly? I guess that was mostly a question of taste.

For Gaia, it would be impossible (or too expensive) to put the whole catalog into a conventional DB. The solution is probably going to be something similar to OpenDAP (https://www.opendap.org/), but I haven't looked much into it myself.

As for the database size consideration, it will most likely be an issue once we start to support queries into the Gaia catalog (about 500GB of data). There are some ways to make it work though.

Currently, there are about 2 millions searchable deep sky objects, plus all the Hipparcos star catalog (about 100,000 stars).

If you zoom in you can actually see the entirely of Gaia dr2 catalog (about 1 billion sources, mostly stars).

We also have most of the major solar system bodies.