This is great. I often use "find the bacon number of two wikipedia" as a take-home programming challenge question for software dev candidates.
Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia
241–250 of 354 posts
Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
Every single example I can find makes it painfully clear it is an undirected graph. Sets may differ going from one direction to the other simply because it is only trying to find a sample set of correlations, not an exhaustive set.
The graph is most definitely directed. One small example is Facebook -> Narcissism (1 path of 1 degree)[1] compared to Narcissism -> Facebook (8 paths of 2 degrees)[2]. [1] https://www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/?source=Facebook&targe... [2] https://www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/?source=Narcissism&tar...
Philosophy links to neither sexism or "The Demographics of Africa" (and while some older version might link to sexism, it seems unlikely that it ever linked to the Demographics of Africa"). Both of those do link to Philosophy, however.
Alternately it is directed, except when it doesn't find an easy route and uses an undirected result.
Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia
#243Earlier 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…
Maybe the Neo4j guys would be into helping as they are quite into marketing. This could be a neat showcase speaking to both business and tech types.
Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia
#244This makes the "How many clicks to Hitler" game much faster. For those uninitiated, the game was to click the "Random Article" link in the sidebar and count how many links it took to get to Hitler. It is really interesting to see just how big of an event WWII was. Every country article has a section on their involvement or why they were not involved. After playing with it more, this is pretty fun. I vote that a "degr…
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.
Finding ones that don't go through "science" is interesting.
Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia
#245Not 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…
A few years ago I made something similar (http://ratewith.science/) that only uses bi-directional links, that is pages that both link to each other, and this gives much more interesting results.
When two Wikipedia pages both link to each other they are usually related in some reasonable way, but unidirectional links give you things like Wikipedia -> California, which only exists because Wikipedia is headquartered in California, a pretty weak connection.
Other than the fact I have it running on an overburdened tiny VPS, my app is also really fast even though I only do a unidirectional BFS because I use a custom in-memory binary format that's mmapped directly from a file that's only 700MB, and a tight search loop written in D.
Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> why not just mentally add them and assume that the author intended to sound that tactful? Because, that could be the wrong action to take. Could you, Would you, Will you, I want you to, You should, The project is stupid unless you, etc. Therefore, the author should communicate well enough to be understood.
Based on the thread here, many people interpreted the comment as a well-intended feature request, but instead of requesting the commenter to change their comment, it seems like it would’ve been fine to just use that charitable interpretation.
Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia
#247Didn't see that coming
https://www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/?source=Penis&target=M...
Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
'Please' and 'thank you' go a long when requesting additional features for an OSS project.
Stack overflow has conditioned me to not use manners. My personal preference is to use them.
Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia
#249Creator 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…
Really cool. I'm interested to know how the graph is build. Did you use any third party components.
Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia
#250Creator 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…
Could you please add a mode that does the opposite?
I've always enjoyed playing 6 degrees myself, so if it gives a link to the first page and names the second page, then only shows the available routes when I'm done, that would be a lot of fun.
I have a couple of "hub" articles that I like to use, but I'd like to see how much more effective I could have been with a tool like this. And if it randomizes my start and end like the placeholder text shows, that makes it even easier.