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I'm surprised to see this kind of things here, of all places. I'm even more surprised to see all the positive comments (so far). The most important feature of

I'm surprised to see this kind of things here, of all places. I'm even more surprised to see all the positive comments (so far). The most important feature of the periodic table of elements is that it is based upon some underlying structure of the elements. It was initially used to make predictions about the existence of elements that had not been found at the time. The "true" Periodic Table was truly a stroke of genius, equivalent in many ways in coming up with a scientific model/theory to describe nature. The "periodic" part refers to the fact that some properties reappear as move from element to element, from the lightest to the heaviest: this is related to the filling of the atomic orbitals and their effect on chemical properties. There is absolutely nothing of the kind in this so-called "periodic table" or its various cousins (I have seen some for "design" and other topics). There is no hidden structure revealed, no predictive power to be made if one were to actually leave one of the squares unfilled. It takes a wonderful communication/organisation scientific tool, keeping only a superficial visual element and leaving all essential meaning behind.

Waterluvian 9y ago
My hat off to you. I read your critical analysis of my joke and for a few minutes thought you were serious.
- flashdance 9y ago
  Poe's law is working against me here, what gives away that this person isn't serious? I think it's cool, by the way.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - westoncb 9y ago
    I'm curious about that, too. I'm betting they are serious and just didn't get that it was a joke. As it stands I'm not quite sure I get the joke either, but it is kind of funny how useless an organization scheme this is since all the repos are unrelated and it's highly unlikely any one person would be looking for multiple element-named projects. I think it'd be even funnier if the repos it links to weren't even named after elements, but just had names resembling the abbreviations or something. But then again, it would be hard to find some more useless grouping criterion than being named after an element... I wonder if it's actually worse than random :)
    - Waterluvian 9y ago
      It's not an organization scheme in any practical sense. It's just a way of looking at all the repos named after elements and seeing which ones are still up for grabs, because naming things is hard so let's pick an element and name it that! But more than that, it's just a personal exercise and publishing something without getting caught up on weeks of perfecting it.
- ATsch 9y ago
  As someone with a chemistry interest these thoughts mirror mine unironically, so I doubt this comment was a joke. I think it's a fair reaction to be mildly annoyed when someone uses something within your field without any real understanding what it does. After all, programmers are one of the first to point fingers and laugh when e.g. movies use random code snippets or wrong jargon. One of those "Periodic Table of X" things is basically the chemist equivalent of Saying "I'll write a GUI in Visual Basic to track the killer". This website has a different purpose though, as many people note.
  - jjjensen90 9y ago
    Why do you think they have no real understanding of what the periodic table does? This is a really silly reaction. If someone made a map of the US with only cities that have repositories named after them highlighted or some such thing would reasonable geographers think, "this is meaningless! They don't even understand what a map is!" (I hope not). It's something for fun, and not presenting itself any other way... It's not even "abusing" the period table format for some other data (when I saw the link I thought it might be related to languages used on GitHub), it's literally mirroring the names of the elements that are in the real table but linking to projects with the same name... Sometimes I just don't get some perspectives on HN--if I were a chemist who also knew that naming things in software is hard, it probably would have made me chuckle not furrow my brow. Edit: missing word
tombone12 9y ago
My browser rendered it as a long list, so it doesn't even respect the canonical table format :'(
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
olodus 9y ago
I get that these criticisms can be waved towards the "design" version and maybe others like this. This though, as far as I understand, only means to show that devs use "element names" as a naming device for their projects a lot. As such it isn't trying to copy the structural logic and purpose of the periodic table but only using it's design to in an intuitive way show which names has been used / how much of the table has been covered. I think it is interesting to see how bad the fantasy of dev are / which names you could use to be original :p

Waterluvian 9y ago

My hat off to you. I read your critical analysis of my joke and for a few minutes thought you were serious.

flashdance 9y ago
Poe's law is working against me here, what gives away that this person isn't serious? I think it's cool, by the way.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- westoncb 9y ago
  I'm curious about that, too. I'm betting they are serious and just didn't get that it was a joke. As it stands I'm not quite sure I get the joke either, but it is kind of funny how useless an organization scheme this is since all the repos are unrelated and it's highly unlikely any one person would be looking for multiple element-named projects. I think it'd be even funnier if the repos it links to weren't even named after elements, but just had names resembling the abbreviations or something. But then again, it would be hard to find some more useless grouping criterion than being named after an element... I wonder if it's actually worse than random :)
  - Waterluvian 9y ago
    It's not an organization scheme in any practical sense. It's just a way of looking at all the repos named after elements and seeing which ones are still up for grabs, because naming things is hard so let's pick an element and name it that! But more than that, it's just a personal exercise and publishing something without getting caught up on weeks of perfecting it.
ATsch 9y ago
As someone with a chemistry interest these thoughts mirror mine unironically, so I doubt this comment was a joke. I think it's a fair reaction to be mildly annoyed when someone uses something within your field without any real understanding what it does. After all, programmers are one of the first to point fingers and laugh when e.g. movies use random code snippets or wrong jargon. One of those "Periodic Table of X" things is basically the chemist equivalent of Saying "I'll write a GUI in Visual Basic to track the killer". This website has a different purpose though, as many people note.
- jjjensen90 9y ago
  Why do you think they have no real understanding of what the periodic table does? This is a really silly reaction. If someone made a map of the US with only cities that have repositories named after them highlighted or some such thing would reasonable geographers think, "this is meaningless! They don't even understand what a map is!" (I hope not). It's something for fun, and not presenting itself any other way... It's not even "abusing" the period table format for some other data (when I saw the link I thought it might be related to languages used on GitHub), it's literally mirroring the names of the elements that are in the real table but linking to projects with the same name... Sometimes I just don't get some perspectives on HN--if I were a chemist who also knew that naming things in software is hard, it probably would have made me chuckle not furrow my brow. Edit: missing word

tombone12 9y ago

My browser rendered it as a long list, so it doesn't even respect the canonical table format :'(

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

olodus 9y ago

I get that these criticisms can be waved towards the "design" version and maybe others like this. This though, as far as I understand, only means to show that devs use "element names" as a naming device for their projects a lot. As such it isn't trying to copy the structural logic and purpose of the periodic table but only using it's design to in an intuitive way show which names has been used / how much of the table has been covered. I think it is interesting to see how bad the fantasy of dev are / which names you could use to be original :p