mgalka

That is a lot of activity on Hacker News. But I wouldn't put those other sites in the same category as the WSJ. Doesn't look like any of them are even news sites.

Transylvania just earned my respect

Ha! Don't forget Nobel Prizes.

Thanks. Cool graphic. Had not seen it.

The graphic is a canvas element overlaid on an svg element. I wasn't able to figure out a way of making the whole thing responsive so I just put it in a responsive iframe.

I'm sure there is a better solution. Would love to hear if anyone knows.

It's a fair point. An interactive stacked area chart or a dot matrix would give you the freedom to focus in and to take away a lot more information about specific trends.

My counter would be that there is more to data visualization than the quantity of information communicated. If that weren't the case, all data would be shown as numbers in spreadsheets.

This data involves population counts spanning several orders of magnitude, for 72 countries over 20 time periods. It could be shown in a chart, but one that would require some patience to figure out.

An animated map requires no reading of axis labels, no analysis of abstract lines or shapes. The meaning of everything is plainly evident. And for the minute it takes to watch, the information content is actually very high.

I'm impressed by the Hacker News crowd. Pretty cool to see a topic as esoteric (and awesome) as Phoenix / Elm hit the top spot. Very good post!

Yes. It originally did allow you to hover over the countries to see more information. But combined with everything else it required too much memory and caused it to run slow on mobile browsers.

Doesn't seem like removing a tooltip should make the difference, but it allowed me to simplify the map, remove jquery, and make a few other simplifications to the code.

If I were to make it over again, I would use WebGL for the particles next time instead of Canvas, and performance problems wouldn't be an issue.

This post gives some more information: http://metrocosm.com/animated-immigration-map/

There is a chart showing the major immigration flows as a percentage of U.S. population.

Here is the data source: http://metrocosm.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/usa-immigrat...

The footnotes on page 11 give a good explanation.

For the most part, Austria, Hungary, and Poland are broken out separately according to their present borders, even for the periods when they weren't separate countries.

Thanks. They actually are great circles, generated using arc.js. As they approach the poles the arcs look a little funny, but that is only because it is a cylindrical map projection.

No other js plugin can touch d3. If you have the time to figure it out, it is heads above anything else.

The only exceptions are webgl plugins, of which I think three.js is the best, and leaflet for making maps.

Having worked with nearly all the well known plugins out there, I see very few reasons for using any except those three.

Agree. Probably would have been better to submit something clearer than the Wikipedia page. That being said, the concept is awesome. I'm amazed it is not better known.

I was referring to Windows 10 data collection, which captures keystrokes and location info and sends it off to Microsoft. I don't trust them with such extensive data collection, which is why I did not want to install windows 10 in the first place. And I trust them even less now.

After having not used my computer for a few days, I look over today to see it running a Windows 10 installation on its own. Microsoft pulls sneaky, dishonest moves like that, then wants the world to trust them with all of our personal data.

Seems like this leaves a big unanswered question. Why haven't any manufacturers done this? Seems like it would give their product a big advantage.

In any case, as annoying as it may be that they don't offer free FM radio, I don't see why for-profit businesses should be under any obligation to do so.

There is a torrent that lets you download the whole database. Though the structure of it and what the fields represent is not so easy to figure out.

Completely agree. Though I think the issue here is bigger than that. Journalism by its nature is subjective. So it may be bias, and that's still crummy, but at least the people consuming it know what they're getting.

Facebook, on the other hand, portrays its "trending" news as being determined objectively based on what people are sharing. That goes beyond bias to manipulative. It would be the same if Google were filtering conservative news sites out of its results.

“OMG please don’t teach him GOTOs!!”

GOTOs are easy to abuse, but they would really come in handy sometimes.

I have to think the market is smart enough to factor in differences in accounting standards. Can't see how an accounting change could really be devastating for Twitter.

Agree. I have no doubt the decision was based on lots of data and that Google got it right. And for my part I agree. I would imagine 95% of the people zoomed in around NYC are looking specifically for NYC. Having other, smaller cities labeled on the map only makes it more confusing.

Would never have expected that from the Boston Globe. Can't imagine how the step up in year two is even legal.

Wonder what the avg life span is of businesses who have built tools like this in the past. Instead of offering a cash prize, they should just promise the winner they won't depreciate its API calls with the next update.

Just launched a first version of FOIA Mapper, a tool for searching offline government records.

https://foiamapper.com

FOIA is a niche topic, which is not a bad thing for a side project - fewer eyeballs, more opportunity to really make an impact.

Just commented that this was a surprisingly smart move for Twitter. Spoke too soon. Sounds like it was really the NFL who saw the opportunity.

There may be hope for Twitter yet. Sounds like a very smart move. Twitter-style commentary is a natural fit with sports games.

Completely agree. Maybe will focus on that as the next round.

Pieced together with duct tape at the moment. The site is wordpress with a bunch of php/mysql and JavaScript added thoughout. Most of the work went into getting the data (lots of FOIA requests) and pulling it out of PDFs.

This idea was my entry in the Knight Foundation News Challenge in Jan. Just completed a working version and launched earlier this week.

The purpose is to help Freedom of Information requestors (journalists mostly) find the info they're looking for.

Interesting way of approaching the problem.

I didn't realize the go solution "just" used monte carlo branching. Still impressive, but does not seem as revolutionary as it's been portrayed.