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Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia

sixdegreesofwikipedia.com

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Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia

#251
post #97
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I not understanding something? When I linked Obama to Uruguay, Myanmar came up (the only surprising one). https://www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/?source=Uruguay&target... I went to the Uruguayan wiki page and found nothing on Myanmar and nothing relating to Uruguay on the Myanmar page. Awesome project btw, great idea.

It's a directed graph. Your source is Uruguay and your destination is Obama. You'll find Obama on the midpoints. Opposite direction: no Myanmar https://www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/?source=Uruguay&target...

Which is kind of weird since he is using bi directional BFS.

Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia

#253

Not 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 i…

dfsf

Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia

#254
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.

Please and thank you are such basic concepts that honestly, I judge the hell out of people who don’t seem capable of it regardless of platform. If that minimal degree of politeness isn’t reflexive for you, again, the world at large judges you. Not to put too fine a point on it, but maybe “why not add it in your head” is the kind of thing thst gives some in tech a bad name?

It costs nothing to be polite.

Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia

#256
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a suggestion, not a request and a good one at that. So who should be saying 'thank you' here (if anyone)?

There’s a human being at the other end of the line. They have feelings. This is their baby, which they’ve gestated for multiple years. Rational fundamentalism is not the one ring to rule them all. There is room for love and compassion in the world. I know (painfully well) that Internet forums (and this one in particular) anything but empower empathy, but that doesn’t make it any less true or valuable. There is room f…

When your baby grows up, and you put it out in the world, you no longer need to--and no longer should--continue to treat it like a baby. The author is not her project, and statements about the project are not personal attacks on the author. And if she were going to take them as such, she probably wouldn't be sharing that project on HN.

Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia

#257
post #246
post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I’m all for being charitable in our interpretations of the motives of others, but I think a total lack of the most basic courtesy should be seen for what it is. The lower end of the spectrum being lazy, and the high end being rude, even charitably no positive interpretation exists IMO.

Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia

#258
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a directed graph. Your source is Uruguay and your destination is Obama. You'll find Obama on the midpoints. Opposite direction: no Myanmar https://www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/?source=Uruguay&target...

Which is kind of weird since he is using bi directional BFS.

I do a bi-directional BFS, but the search from the target node traverses incoming links as opposed to outgoing links. That's why I have to store both in the `links` table[1].

[1] https://github.com/jwngr/sdow/blob/f0b5a9ebe47ea0eca49d8220a...

Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia

#259
post #13

Creator 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.

Thank you! The graph is built using vanilla d3, no library on top of it. The code for it lives all in one file, ResultsGraph.js [1]. I pieced together the code from a handful of other attempts online. I am still not 100% pleased with the performance of it with a larger number of nodes (250+), but that seems to be a common complaint with the d3 force simulation layouts.

[1] https://github.com/jwngr/sdow/blob/master/website/src/compon...

Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia

#260
post #13

Creator 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…

Hi jwngr,

Thanks for the cool hack. Its nice.

How about representing the destination page as a circle around the whole graph, instead of a node? so that all the paths can be drawn in different directions but still reaching the same page. I somehow feel that it might look more beautiful.

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