It reminds me of that old xkcd: https://xkcd.com/214/
Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia
321–330 of 354 posts
Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia
#322Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
That’s not off-topic at all! Honestly, I’m ashamed that I hadn’t considered the possibility of a non-native speaker’s linguistic quirks, and what this tells me is that I need to continue to work on my snap-judgements. Thank you for reminding me that languages don’t handle courtesy the same way.
Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia
#323This is wonderful, thanks for sharing!
I know you're getting swamped by feature requests, but a button to swap the endpoints would be great. In searching for ever bigger degrees of separation I found myself manually swapping them a lot to see the difference. It could also lessen some of the confusion expressed in this thread about whether these should be different at all.
As for how far I've gotten: I've found finite degrees all the way up to seven [1] and also pages with no path from one to the other [2]. I have yet to find a doubly-untraversable path or anything with a degree between seven and infinity, and I suspect the latter to be impossible, especially considering Goldbach's Extremely Strong Conjecture [3].
[1] https://www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/?source=Ramjohn&target...
[2] https://www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/?source=Coln%20Rogers&...
Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia
#324Creator 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…
Great project! I wonder if you might be willing to go into more details about what made it an "interesting technical challenge"?
The sheer scale of Wikipedia (5 millions pages, half a trillion links) made it difficult to make the searches fast. Simply downloading the Wikipedia database dumps and parsing them into my own database took over a day on my first successful attempt. The site returns most results in just a few seconds despite the giant graph size.
Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia
#325Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks, glad you enjoyed it! > I was expecting the site to tell me how to start at page X and get to page Y with the min number of clicks. Yup, this is exactly what the site does, and a bi-directional BFS is an efficient way to do it. The special thing about my bi-directional BFS is that I follow outgoing links when searching from the source page while following incoming links when searching from the target page[1].…
I just realized what my confusion was over! https://www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/?source=Carnegie%20Mel... I was looking at the results of going from CMU to my little secondary school in Dublin, Ireland. I saw the results and saw that the last page before my Irish school was "College" and assumed it must be wrong, because how could my tiny secondary school be on the Wikipedia page for "College"? But alas, I was wron…
Check out an earlier comment I made[1] which has some information about this. It also includes links to the relevant code, which is all open source.
Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia
#326I'm confused and can't find the final link in this chain. https://www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/?source=Late%20capital... I'm guessing it's part of an older copy of the page? Is there an easy way to search revisions?
So the reason is that "Theodore Roosevelt" links to "Freddy Fazbear" (ctrl+f for "Articles related to Theodore Roosevelt" and then click it and then click "Teddy Bears") which redirects to "Friday Night at Freddy's". So, technically, there is a direct link there, albeit through the categories dropdowns. Unfortunately, Wikipedia doesn't have anything in their database dumps identifying if a link is in the article itself versus the categories dropdowns or sources, so I include them all.
Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia
#327After spending way too much time I got 9 degrees of separation. I did piggyback off of someone else's work with "Phinney". https://www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/?source=Lion%20Express... I found a ton of 5 degree paths and only a couple of 6 degree ones. Then I pulled out the "big guns" (the dead-end pages category). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Dead-end_pages_from_F...
I don't know if this is legit. The Lion Express node only connects to a couple of Wikipedia's generic help pages, which I'm pretty sure don't link back to Lion Express. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Searching
Here's one with 7 hops and not using The Lion Express. https://www.sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/?source=Zevenhoven&tar...
Like I said I spent too much time on this yesterday.
Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia
#328Earlier quoted context omitted.
The downside of bidirectional seems to be that things like place names are linked via short paths through boring articles like "Census designated place" or "City"
The bi-directional nature of the search does not change the end result. It is simply a performance improvement.
Still - It can be annoying. Maybe there could be an option to exclude articles with specific text/link ratios?
Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia
#329Creator 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…
How big does the SQLite database get? How do you maintain such great performance? (Other than indexes?)
Re: Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia
#330Earlier 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.
I found Alt-Right -> Ganguro to have interesting connections.