
Show HN: Periodic Table of GitHub - Waterluvian
https://ablakey.github.io/periodic/index.html
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aroberge
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.

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

~~~
flashdance
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.

~~~
westoncb
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
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.

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Waterluvian
This was based on a joke at work. I'm sharing it because I have a serious
problem with the "it's not perfect yet!" paralysis that causes nothing of mine
to get completed. The goal was to hack something functional together and be
okay with sharing it, despite the embarrassing code and the voice inside
screaming at me that it's terrible.

~~~
prezjordan
Congrats on releasing and posting it here! Cheers to you getting over this
paralysis. This is a neat project - I haven't looked at the code (and don't
really plan to), but it works and that's good enough for me.

EDIT: I just looked at the code. It uses CSS grid - very cool! I'll be sure to
use this as a reference.

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Waterluvian
My first use of CSS grid. I really enjoyed it!

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rdiddly
No one picked lead?! AWWWW!! Poor old heavy, non-soaring, non-inspiring lead.
Poor unglamorous, non-magical, non-shiny, inert lead. Old toxic, brain-
damaging lead. Poor dull, dense, leaden, lead. The one every alchemist tried
to turn into gold. The one every character in a Western movie had to eat. The
one every character in a gangster movie had to get filled fulla.

~~~
jameshart
[https://github.com/tcoxon/lead](https://github.com/tcoxon/lead) ?

Even uses the periodic table box as its logo.

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Waterluvian
I wonder why my script didn't pick that one up! Will have to test and learn
something new.

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nategri
Nicely done. Just need one for planets and elementary particles now.

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nerdponx
For some reason this is blocked at work, so I can't actually view it. But
jokes aside, I do think there's legitimate taxonomic value in these "periodic
tables". See also: [https://linux.pictures/projects/colored-periodic-table-of-
gn...](https://linux.pictures/projects/colored-periodic-table-of-gnu-linux-
distros)

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westoncb
Can we get a catalog of some 'molecular' repos which combine multiple
elemental repos as dependencies?

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khstangherlin
Great job. Looking forward for the Github Space exploration, because naming is
hard everywhere in universe.

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Waterluvian
I just noticed that while phones were never a target, it looks awful on a
phone. Will need to scale the font.

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adamnemecek
totally guilty of this lol. i've also done greek/roman gods and planets. what
do other people do?

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Zyst
I basically exclusively do gods tangentially related to the thing I'm making.

Some document virtualization thing became Enki, some anti procrastination
became Aergia, and so on and so forth. I actually quite like that.

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mfrw
I was kinda looking for something like this :)

Thanks

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j_s
Going to have to claim one of those available rather quickly...

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ameliaquining
Where's libsodium? :-)

