https://www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/?source=Shit%20happens... seems to crash the tab in Firefox, but works fine in Chrome.
Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia
291–300 of 354 posts
Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia
#292Not 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…
Maybe I made a mistake somewhere, but I'm not sure it uses bi-directional links. For a really odd search like GoldenEye -> Abbotsford [1] it uses multiple "special" Wikipedia links that I'm pretty sure wouldn't be bidirectional.
[1]: http://ratewith.science/#start=Goldeneye&stop=abbotsford
Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia
#293Not 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…
Perhaps you could refine that by also allowing double backward hops, triple backward hops etc.
Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia
#294Took some tinkering to hit five degrees, from 'Hemisphere Dancer' (Jimmy Buffet's old seaplane) to the VC (Vapnik–Chervonenkis) dimension. Rewarding for the site to say ' wipes brow I really had to work for this one.' [0] https://www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/?source=Hemisphere%20D...
Same with "Yilan Creole Japanese" to "Gustav Eberlein" with a nice 537 paths.
Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
When I was first playing with this, I actually really expected you to be using an expensive performant solution like neo4j. When I read that you were using sqlite, I didn't believe it at first and thought it was a mistype from dev until I looked over the source. That's an impressive and well thought out performance enhancement, and that the app runs so blazingly fast on sqlite is very impressive.
Neo4j is not necessarily more performant, especially for a particular use case like this.
Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia
#296Another similar project from years ago came to the conclusion that disregarding "list" wikipedia entries the centre was the article on The United Kingdom. You reach a similar conclusion?
Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia
#297Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
When I was a kid my mom told me "always say 'please' and 'thank you'." So from then on, when I wanted something, I said "please and thank you." I think this was my first social hack. I just wish it had worked better!
I've see something similar when offering items on freecycle: people seem to think that the more they insert "pls" and "thnx" into a message the more likely it is that they'll be first in the queue.
I swear at least once there was more instances of "pls" and thnx" (there seems to be a significant overlap between people who overuse the words and people who don't bother to type them properly, though that may be the linguistic snob in me talking) than all other words combined. It backfired by making the message difficult to read so I binned it and read the next.
Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia
#298So by default I block all javascript and I got this message: "Sorry internet hipster, this little side project requires JavaScript." These kinds of condescending messages towards people concerned with privacy aren't going to win you any points here.
It's more funny than condescending.
[deleted]
Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia
#299This 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…
My colleague saw me looking at this site, and I went through exactly the same thought process as you! His feeble attempts at non-Hitler linked articles failed miserably.
Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia
#300Could you make it possible to just test with the fun suggestions that scroll through?
Just implemented this with a quick hot fix[1]. Hopefully I didn't break anything else in my hurry to get out. [1] https://github.com/jwngr/sdow/commit/6e42e06488a592784e5d3d2...
Thanks! Cool project :)