awww man perfect! i remember playing the wikipedia game a ton in a hs business class, thanks for this!
Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia
281–290 of 354 posts
Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia
#282Creator 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…
This is pretty cool. It would be great to write a blog around your technical decision making for this project. Thanks!
Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia
#283Creator 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…
Looks pretty cool - do you have any plans to support subsites other than enwiki?
Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
I went and made it political: Anime -> Alt-right. The result was a little more predictable... I guess I shouldn't have had to look it up. https://www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/?source=Anime&target=A...
But going Alt-right -> Anime has a second path through Vaporwave.
Now try Donald Trump -> Nazism
Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia
#285Not 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…
On a scale of The Monty Hall Problem to Manifest Destiny this is a 5!
Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia
#286[deleted]
Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia
#287Earlier 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.
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.
This is a bit off topic, but just to blow ones mind: Finnish, which I am natively speaking, is lacking direct "please" word completely and I have to admit that especially orally I forget it often. (We make things sound nice by conditional, "could you", "would you be so kind" etc..) I have no immediate reaction what so ever how it would feel if someone left out "please". I understand the concept, but it feels horrible how much wrong I can go with native English speakers without meaning it. Thanks for the reminder! (thank you we do have;)
Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia
#288Nice, wasn't there some website when one can play against other to who can get from on article to another the fastest?
Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
This is not how humans work. Humans are not rational emotionless robots. Humans are complex beings , they have feelings, biases and emotions which they do not control. It’s humane , considerate and kind to keep that in mind when communicating with each other.
Nobody is perfect. We shouldn’t expect anyone to be. Being kind and considerate is not a waste of anyone’s time, it’s not disrespectful nor patronising.
Maybe all of this is not true for OP, maybe they’re so zen they immediately see past their human instinct to attach themselves to their work (a well known and documented human trait). But it can’t hurt to be tactful , just in case they’re not.
I know I personally would’ve felt hurt if that first comment were the reply to something I did. I might, hopefully, have realised that it was, indeed, a useful comment and that I should swallow my pride. And I hope I would have the presence of mind to reply with a smile and a thank you. But it would be a pretense.
Why put each other through that? We can be truthful and tactful. There is no reason to be blunt.
I can understand the desire to unshackle ourselves from the low entropy morass of politeness. It’s fake and not what you really feel, right? The truth shines through anyway, so do them the honour of not sugar coating it, and be straight? I do understand, but hear this: you lack the nonverbal cues to make that incredibly delicate call. Face to face you would see the twitch in someone’s eye, the soft breeze of disappointment whisking along their face. A tear of pain streaking their human heart while they smile and nod and say thank you. You have an incredibly attune radar for empathy, and you would adjust. But when you lose all that, and the medium for your truth is this harsh knife forged from the soulless steel of words, it cuts more sharply than you can imagine.
In a text only medium, I implore everyone on HN: take a moment to consider our humanity. Not just here, but in all threads. Not just of the person we reply to, but of those we speak of. They might read it one day. And they, too, are human.
(I should say the painful irony in this rant is palpable to anyone who knows me :( but I am not proud of it. Perhaps it’s precisely why I feel so strongly. It does, after all, take one to know one.)
Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia
#2909 paths with 3 steps from Gluon to Lemur. No way this is going to be addictive. Disappears for days Edit: I finally got 4 steps! Clitoris->Dictation I am a child.
Best result: No path of Wikipedia links exists from Bertolt Brecht to 97.
Found 87 paths with 5 degrees of separation from Asteroid family to SIX
Found 460 paths with 4 degrees of separation from Imaginary unit to Borscht
Found 460 paths with 4 degrees of separation from 433 Eros to Shooting of Oscar Grant