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Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia

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Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia

#211

Post by incompatible »

hexane360 wrote: post #194
incompatible wrote: post #181

Earlier 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...

It's a bit surprising, since you'd think that with 1,645 paths with 5 degrees, there'd be at least one path with 4 degrees, but it doesn't work that way.

Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia

#213

Post by cortesoft »

jffry wrote: post #175
cortesoft wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminds me of the wikipedia rule I learned a while back: If you click the first link in an article (besides the pronunciation guide), you will always end up on philosophy.

There's even a great page with a small graph and a rundown of some more resources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Getting_to_Philosoph...

It even works for that page!

Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia

#214

Post by [deleted] »

aplorbust wrote: post #197

In case you receive the following message "Sorry internet hipster, this little side project requires JavaScript." here is a quick example of how to get the pages the "traditional way"[FN1]: #/bin/sh test $# -eq 2||exec echo usage: $0 source target; exec curl -H"Content-type: application/json" \ -d '{"source":"'$1'","target":"'$2'"}' \ https://api.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/paths \ |exec sed ' s/\",/\"\ /g;s/,\"/\ \"/g…

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia

#215

Post by mostly_harmless »

raz32dust wrote: post #191

Really cool! May be a bug: I tried Martin Luther Ling -> Elon Musk and it showed me a link from MLK -> Mark Zuckerberg -> Musk. But I couldn't find a Zuckerberg link from the MLK page. https://www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/?source=Martin%20Luthe...

It looks like it uses links in the 'category' box at the bottom of the page. Both MLK and Zuckerberg appear in the 'Times Person of the Year' category.

Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia

#216

Post by mostly_harmless »

larkeith wrote: post #176
apeace wrote: post #168

Did I find a bug? https://www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/?source=Adolf%20Hitler... It's showing "Bill Gates" and "Mark Zuckerberg" as the hops, but on the start page I don't see links to those. (Apologies for the subject matter. It was the first thing I thought of, because of a Wikipedia-path-finding game I had heard of before.)

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

This is incorrect, that's not the reason they are linked. It is using the category box at the bottom of the page, and both Hitler and Gates were voted 'Times Person of the Year' at some point.

Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia

#217

Post by tshaddox »

corobo wrote: post #184
dagss wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Just adding "Could you" to the start (and change first sentence's . to ?) would make a world of difference

If you can automatically detect sentences where adding "Could you" would make the author sound more tactful, then why not just mentally add them and assume that the author intended to sound that tactful?

This is a slight modification of the principle of charity, something I think is incredibly important and underemphasized, especially for online text communication.

Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia

#218

Post by jnbiche »

jwngr wrote: post #158
jnbiche wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not use a graph database like Neo4j instead of SQLite? This seems like the perfect use case. Is it because of the resources required to run one versus SQLite?

I actually had a friend suggest it to me and the Neo4j docs happen to be one of the many tabs I currently have open. I was already so far into using SQLite for this project and I wanted to ship it, so I decided to stick with what I had. I would be interested to see how Neo4j performs with such a big dataset (the resulting SQLite file is around 9 GB with nearly 6 million nodes and 500 billion links). I was a bit worri…

I've only played around with Neo4j, but it looks like Neo4j 3.0 could handle your node and edge count (although not earlier versions).

Your app likely would have been easier to write with python/Neo4j than python/SQLite due to Neo4j's query language (incidentally, Neo4j also prefers to use bidirectional BFS for shortest path, and executing the search is a very simple query similar to an SQL query). Neo4j would possibly perform better as well (I'm not sure about that, given SQLite is pretty optimized for reads).

However, as the neighboring comment states, Neo4j is quite resource-intensive. It wouldn't work on any kind of micro instance, I'm pretty sure.

Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia

#219

Post by jaitaiwan »

tshaddox wrote: post #217
corobo wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just adding "Could you" to the start (and change first sentence's . to ?) would make a world of difference

If you can automatically detect sentences where adding "Could you" would make the author sound more tactful, then why not just mentally add them and assume that the author intended to sound that tactful? This is a slight modification of the principle of charity, something I think is incredibly important and underemphasized, especially for online text communication.

That's a really cool concept. Write a medium article about it.
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