9 ms·
Open Source Goes to Mars
- ocdtrekkie 6y agoIronically, people hated the contribution graph stats because it gamified code contributions, and now we're introducing "achievements". This is kind of neat as a one-off, but it seems like it'll get weird with scale. Isn't it disappointing if your code is on the rover but you don't get a badge because your code isn't on the helicopter?
- easton 6y agoI've started making a decent amount of commits to a public repository, and I almost feel embarrassed having my stats there because the commits have been rather marginal. I wish there was a way to block the specific numbers or block certain repositories from filling the stats.
- sdesol 6y ago> I wish there was a way to block the specific numbers or block certain repositories from filling the stats. This is somewhat related, but I'm working on impact based metrics that doesn't focus on commits, but is based on a contribution formula that I'm currently working on. You can get a sense of how the formula works by switching to the impact view in the following link: https://public-001.gitsense.com/insights/github/repos?q=window%3A30&r=github%3Amicrosoft%2Fvscode&v=repo https://public-001.gitsense.com/insights/github/repos?q=wind... As a side note, if you want, DM me your public repos and I'll add them to my public index list, as your contributions might have a greater impact that you may think. Plus it will provide me with more data points for refining my formula.
- ocdtrekkie 6y agoFirst, yes, commits is a terrible metric, because it lacks both the nuance of the size of commits and the substance of the commits. Also different projects have different norms around commits. Some people commit each step along a process, some force-push updates to their branches so a given improvement sits in a single commit. There's no good direct comparison between work across projects. That being said, don't feel like "rather marginal" commits is unhelpful. Support, docs, and tweaks are woefully undervalued parts of public projects, and you don't have to be building core features to be a big part of adding to the long-term success of a project. Don't sell yourself short.
- kelnos 6y agoAnd on the flip side, I got the badge because I have a few commits in the Linux kernel, even though the code I touched is almost certainly not compiled into any of Ingenuity's systems. Feels a little undeserved.
- hn8788 6y agoSound like the National Defense Medal you get in the US Military if you served during an ongoing war, regardless of what you did. I think it's the only medal you can get before you even finish boot camp.
- lapetitejort 6y agoIt's called the Pizza Stain medal for a reason. Service-members are still eligible for it 20 years later, handily beating the Vietnam's 13 years of eligibility. See also the GWOT [0]. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_War_on_Terrorism_Service_Medal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_War_on_Terrorism_Servic...
- sneak 6y agoI think it's important to remember that the people who "hated the contribution graph stats" were the people who specifically complained about hating them. Many multiples of that number of people comprise the set of people who were indifferent about them + people who liked them. (Probably a lot more in the first subgroup.) It's selection set bias. You only heard from the complainers, making it seem like "everyone" disliked them. I think the contribution graphs are cool, and so are badges/achievements.
- playpause 6y ago> Ironically, people hated ____ and now we're ____. All that's changed is your own vague impression of what the current most popular opinion is.
- mraza007 6y agoThis such an achievement for open source developers whose software has made significant impact. I wonder what world would look like where we open source software didn't existed? Anyhow I really appreciate the work of open source developers as myself who uses open source software on daily basis
- pm90 6y agoThe pace of innovation would have slowed. Some projects that didn’t succeed would have thrived and others that did succeed would have failed. I don’t think it would have fundamentally altered the trajectory of technology, just the pace and environment (which is still amazing but let’s keep things in perspective).
- anaganisk 6y agoEvery day would be a field day for Oracle/Microsoft lawyers and sales guys. And AWS wouldn't exist.
- michaelgiba 6y agoI’m concerned why chardet is on that list haha
- ctoth 6y agoYou know, to figure out the encoding of files found in the recently unearthed (unmarsed?) ancient datacenter.
- pabs3 6y agoIt would be nice if GitHub could allow opting out of all future achievements things so folks don't have to do it manually every time there is a new achievement. Would also be nice to know what I did that counts for each of the achievements.
- rsa25519 6y agoHovering on the achievement shows which contribution(s) were the cause
- pabs3 6y agoLooks like that feature requires JavaScript.
- tkzed49 6y agoLuckily almost every browser supports it these days
- pabs3 6y agoThere are a lot of browsers that don't and a lot of people that disable it in browsers that do.
- nexuist 6y agoIf Google could make a few cents from every comment on HN disparaging JS they wouldn't have to show us ads anymore (edit: I realize there are legitimate reasons to block JavaScript so I just wanted to clarify this is a joke and I don't mean to insult OP, just commenting on how often this discussion pops up in comment sections here and how predictable they all are.)
- Cthulhu_ 6y agoAn anecdotal "a lot of" is not an authoritative source. >99% of browsers in active use support JS (https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share) and <1% of people have JS disabled (https://deliberatedigital.com/blockmetry/javascript-disabled https://deliberatedigital.com/blockmetry/javascript-disabled). You say "a lot of", but the statistics say "a statistically insignificant percentage". I'm all for designing your static webpages with no need for JS, but the claim that a lot of people have it turned off is demonstrably false. Anyway, hovering on an image to get a description shouldn't need javascript, that's an alt tag that is definitely supported by anything but hobby project browsers.
- slimsag 6y agoWhat does the Mars 2020 Helicopter team use Elastic Search for? Searching logs/data?
- sysstemlord 6y agoTo search for extra terrestrials.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- atdt 6y agoBy my count, six of the sixty projects cited were initiated by the amazing Armin Ronacher (aka mitsuhiko), whose genius for designing and implementing clean, intuitive library interfaces has, for the past decade or so, been a boon to the world of open-source software development. Kudos to him. [*] click, flask, itsdangerous, jinja, markupsafe, and werkzeug
- nonameiguess 6y agoArmin's work is great but I'm curious if the Mars rover really implements a web interface? Are all the boto AWS libs just dependencies of opencv with its mess of supported data sources? Why are they deploying unit testing code to Mars? Given the 28 minute average round trip time between Mars and Earth for a light speed signal, they can't realistically be running distributed workloads partly happening on Earth. All the PKI libs are amusing, too. JPL isn't sending signals to Mars via public networks, are they?
- mulmen 6y ago> All the PKI libs are amusing, too. JPL isn't sending signals to Mars via public networks, are they? They're using radio waves so yeah, it's public. In fact I suspect the protocols are pretty much standardized because why reinvent those wheels? I'm sure there's some blog post at the bottom of an internet rabbit hole where someone figured out the protocol, or just knows it, or is the one who invented it. It's not a defense thing, NASA may well have published the details themselves. In fact, that's pretty much the point of NASA. E: quick quack rabbit hole seeds: https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/mission/communications/ https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/mission/communications/ https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/mission/communications/ https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/mission/communications/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Deep_Space_Network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Deep_Space_Network Of course the HAMs got there first: http://www.prutchi.com/2020/10/15/recap-of-x-band-dsn-activities-and-plans-for-the-future/ http://www.prutchi.com/2020/10/15/recap-of-x-band-dsn-activi... https://hackaday.com/2020/10/17/it-came-from-outer-space-listening-to-the-deep-space-network/ https://hackaday.com/2020/10/17/it-came-from-outer-space-lis...
- 6y ago
- abinaya_rl 6y agoHappy to see my favourite library Python Requests[1] on the list. Congrats team. [1] - https://github.com/psf/requests https://github.com/psf/requests
- neatze 6y agoThis is so awesome, most interesting aspect for me is fprime documentation is organized, so far.
- jedbrown 6y agoIt's informative to think about what is missed in the listed dependencies (https://docs.github.com/en/github/setting-up-and-managing-your-github-profile/personalizing-your-profile#list-of-qualifying-repositories-for-mars-2020-helicopter-contributor-badge https://docs.github.com/en/github/setting-up-and-managing-yo...), such as C and Fortran libraries vendored within NumPy and SciPy, packaging infrastructure like pip, interactive tooling (Jupyter, editors/IDEs), compilers and build systems.
- varjag 6y agoJust like with humans, a figurehead takes all the credit ;)
- sargun 6y agoI wonder why they chose to use Kernel 3.4 on the helicopter (https://docs.github.com/en/github/setting-up-and-managing-your-github-profile/personalizing-your-profile#list-of-qualifying-repositories-for-mars-2020-helicopter-contributor-badge https://docs.github.com/en/github/setting-up-and-managing-yo...). I wonder if they'll ever upgrade the kernel aboard -- it seems like they can do upgrades, given they have Python 3.9.2 aboard. An aside -- I'm surprised how much Python is aboard. It seems like they're using Python + OpenCV for something. I'm particularly surprised by Boto. Perhaps this is the beginning of the newest AWS region -- mars-1.
- easton 6y agoPresumptively not all this code is running on Mars, but some of it in Mission Control to deal with data coming from the helicopter. Either that, or they’re running Flask on the helicopter with some really large timeouts set.
- _Gyan_ 6y agoI don't see FFmpeg on there. See https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11214-020-00765-9 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11214-020-00765-9 "The core EDL data processing and compression engine is powered by FFMPEG (ffmpeg.org)."
- maxst 6y agoThat's a big one. Probably hundreds of contributors. But what percentage of FFmpeg code they would actually run?
- siminuk 6y agoHi! PM at GitHub here. This achievement only accounts for packages used for the Ingenuity Helicopter, as it celebrates the first ever powered, controlled flight on another planet. Based on the article you shared, FFmpeg was used on the Rover.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- cmacleod4 6y agoSo what has changed since Tcl was rejected for use on the Mars Pathfinder because "interpretive language code is too difficult to test" - https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/Mars+Rover+Project https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/Mars+Rover+Project ?? As usual, this looks rather like Python making a big fuss about achieving something Tcl did long ago :-) See also https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/International+Space+Station https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/International+Space+Station .
- Longhanks 6y agoBut not to GitHub. Ironic.
- amarant 6y agoLooking forward to reading on haxx.se about how someone contacted Daniel for help with their Martian helicopter that, according to the manual, runs curl.
- noselasd 6y agoThe RTEMS project should be there - it's provided the realtime OS for the radio communication unit both on rovers and satellites - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electra_(radio) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electra_(radio)
- kleiba 6y agoWow, amazed not to find a mention of GNU in the list of used open-source software.
- scbrg 6y agoI guess they only list projects that are hosted on GitHub. GNU projects tend to be hosted elsewhere.
- joana035 6y agoWeird that the big projects mentioned there does not have a link.