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Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia
201–210 of 354 posts
Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia
#202Not sure if you deliberately designed it this way, but I noticed when spot checking some results that it includes the bibliography section links as connections. This seems like it may not be desirable. Example, I did a search that went from the Crusades to Buzz Aldrin and I noticed that Routledge was the first hop from the Crusades. It strikes me as odd that Routledge (a publishing company) would be mentioned on the…
Yeah unfortunately I don't know of any way to differentiate the different types of links. Wikipedia's pagelinks database doesn't different them. I agree it's undesireable but I just cannot figure out how to cull them.
If it was technically possible, it would probably also be worth culling anything linked within a template. Like disambiguation headers at the top of a page, or semi-related lists grouped in blocks at the bottom (things like "Cities in Australia").
Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
It uses a pre-downloaded database of links [1], so presumably certain pages that were once linked have been updated. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16469427
Thanks! Makes me wonder why those links were in there in the first place...
That's an excellent question - I'd speculate that they were perhaps mentioned in the passage beginning,
...Further, Haffner claims that other than Alexander the Great, Hitler had a more significant impact than any other comparable historical figure...
Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
Great work! Do you simply do a BFS to find the shortest paths? If so, are you doing any tricks to avoid the path explosion problem?
Thanks! I'm glad you asked. I actually do what I call a bi-directional breadth first search[1]. The gist of it is that instead of just doing a BFS from the source node until I reach the target node, I do a reverse BFS from the target node as well and wait until the two searches overlap. That helps with the exploding path problem, although that still becomes an issue for longer paths (>= 5 degrees generally). I also p…
The downside of bidirectional seems to be that things like place names are linked via short paths through boring articles like "Census designated place" or "City"
Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia
#205Creator here. Six Degrees of Wikipedia is a side project I've been sporadically hacking on over the past few years. It was an interesting technical challenge and it's fun to play with the end result. Here's the tech stack: * Frontend: React (Create React App) * Backend: Python Flask * Database: SQLite * Web (frontend) hosting: Firebase Hosting * Server (backend) hosting: Google Compute Engine (it runs fine on a tiny…
I've not yet had a chance to look over the code (in case it's already there or infeasible due to architecture), but you may wish to consider caching prior queries and their results - this seems like the type of service that would be likely to have certain paths shared widely, such as the first few top-level comments on this post.
I'm not sure caching would help a ton given how I structure the data and do my searches in batches of pages, not for individual pages. I already do some "caching" by precomputing all incoming and outgoing links for each page when I create the database, which, as you would expect, yields a huge performance improvement. A cache certainly would help, but I would expect the hit rate on it to be extremely low, making it not worth the effort. I may have a different opinion after analyzing some of today's results though. Thanks for the suggestion!
Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
'Please' and 'thank you' go a long when requesting additional features for an OSS project.
There's a certain irony to the lack of tact in this post suggesting better manners. I suspect the point would be better received were it more politely made. I, of course, am merely propagating the cycle.
That post seems like quintessential trolling. It was my expectation as well when going to the page to just click the "Go" button and see what the results would be, and I think the suggestion is great feedback. I think it is generally in the spirit of these "Show HN" posts to give and get feedback and discuss with the creator. The response post to that user, to me, is patronizing and is undoubtedly going to ruffle some feathers. But, now we aren't even talking about the OPs cool project...
Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
'Please' and 'thank you' go a long when requesting additional features for an OSS project.
Come on, this is Show HN! Not some GitHub issue tracker. Try to insert please and thank you in that post ... it will make it sound rude! It will turn it from Show HN feedback to sounding like a feature request, which it is clearly not...
You're right that please and thank you could come off as sarcastic or a bit odd in a comment section like this.
The best route is probably to clarify that it seems like a good concept, and you think that adding x and y would be the best features to focus on that would make it even better.
Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia
#208Parquetry -> Romeo and Juliet, 46 paths ( https://www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/?source=Parquetry&targ... ). None through Shakespeare. Parquetry -> Tromeo and Juliet, 508 paths ( https://www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/?source=Parquetry&targ... ). All through Shakespeare.
508 paths, nice. I was about to post Wake in Fright -> Las Vegas, which has an amazing 414 paths, but yours is a winner. https://www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/?source=Wake%20in%20Fr...
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Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia
#209Creator here. Six Degrees of Wikipedia is a side project I've been sporadically hacking on over the past few years. It was an interesting technical challenge and it's fun to play with the end result. Here's the tech stack: * Frontend: React (Create React App) * Backend: Python Flask * Database: SQLite * Web (frontend) hosting: Firebase Hosting * Server (backend) hosting: Google Compute Engine (it runs fine on a tiny…
make it so that if I visit the page and just click the "go" button, it will use the placeholder examples as the start and end points. i did this and got an error message stating "You'll probably want to choose the start and end pages before you hit that." that was annoying. the placeholders that were auto chosen were actually really interesting.
This has been fixed[1] and should behave in a more intuitive way now. Thanks for the suggestion!
[1] https://github.com/jwngr/sdow/commit/6e42e06488a592784e5d3d2...
Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
508 paths, nice. I was about to post Wake in Fright -> Las Vegas, which has an amazing 414 paths, but yours is a winner. https://www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/?source=Wake%20in%20Fr...
https://www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/?source=Frank%E2%80%93... This isn't really the best measure though, because it only counts # of paths at the minimum depth level. edit: although I found some deep searches with very few links: https://www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/?source=Frank%E2%80%93...
I found one with 813 paths with 4 degrees, but yours has 1,645 paths with 5 degrees. I suppose there are end points with many thousands of links. It's a bit of trivia, not really a measure of anything.