Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

War Atlas: An interactive cartography of every named war in human history

waratlas.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 86 posts

Re: War Atlas: An interactive cartography of every named war in human history

#51

Post by id00 »

nicbou wrote: post #43
id00 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you talking about? Mediazone already has 230k confirmed! russian deaths with names. Current confirmed rate of ~30k/month casualities for Russia couldn't be sustainable for much smaller population of Ukraine if they were trading 1:1 or even worse

Casualties do not mean deaths. A wounded soldier can return to combat later. I can't find numbers or more information about this because Google has stopped returning results that match my queries.

In the modern warfare with drones that made "killzone" to be 30-40kms from the frontline, with current russian tactics of infiltration by small groups and inability of them running medivac groups, the ratio of wounded vs dead in casualities are nowhere near to what it was in previous wars. Don't have the exact number but some estimates were 1:1 wounded:dead ratio on Russian side

Re: War Atlas: An interactive cartography of every named war in human history

#52

Post by hunterpayne »

rebolek wrote: post #24
WesleyLivesay wrote: post #10

Cool visuals, as with everything like this where the creator probably just churned open datasets through LLMs there are many inaccuracies particularly around borders. An interesting effort though, and at least this one has a decent page about sourcing.

cool visuals but the result is totally random

[flagged]

Re: War Atlas: An interactive cartography of every named war in human history

#53

Post by hunterpayne »

yorwba wrote: post #22
4ndrewl wrote: post #16

I guess the (war?) elephant in the room is that written history as something that attempts to record a somewht balanced, comprehensive account of an event is a modern, western, anomaly.

There are a lot of very old written histories recording various battles. For example, the Spring and Autumn Annals have a somewhat detailed account of the Battle of Chengpu and its aftermath: https://ctext.org/chun-qiu-zuo-zhuan/xi-gong#comm18160 This map actually briefly flashes a red dot at 632 BC, but since it's not part of any named war, you could easily miss it. The areas where you see fewer wars don't necessari…

China is the one exception actually. India, Africa and the New World civilizations didn't really like focusing on the past and didn't record it. Europe and China did. In China that's probably about the strength of the bureaucracy. In Europe its probably more about kings establishing legitimacy.

Re: War Atlas: An interactive cartography of every named war in human history

#54

Post by hunterpayne »

a3w wrote: post #41
4ndrewl wrote: post #16

I guess the (war?) elephant in the room is that written history as something that attempts to record a somewht balanced, comprehensive account of an event is a modern, western, anomaly.

Wikipedia has a known bias of having mostly the historical events present that western world has written down. This map seems almost balanced, how come it used a better or at least perhaps fairer datasource?

Sigh, because certain civilizations wrote things down more than others. Also, some environments don't lend themselves to preserving things, others are. These will naturally create biases because if you are studying somewhere wet, almost nothing not made of stone will survive, even and especially things that are written upon. In the desert, things will be preserved for centuries, including things made of clay, leather or paper.

Re: War Atlas: An interactive cartography of every named war in human history

#55

Post by hunterpayne »

a3w wrote: post #37
senderista wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is the Western media narrative anyway. The casualty rate for the current mode of offensive warfare with small infantry teams infiltrating under cover of darkness (e.g. Ukraine for the latter part of the 2023 counteroffensive, Russia in its more recent offensive in the Donbas) has been extremely high on both sides. But I'm pretty sure Russia had a favorable kill ratio during their 2022 summer offensive in the Don…

Numbers range from 323 k to 2 mio. total war deaths since 2022. Hugh leap. But the numbers for Ukraine and russian federation seem to be swapped: Ukraine does not even have 600 k soldiers, so probably in 10-20 or so years cannot have these many loses without front collapse.

You are counting wounded (as in missing limbs). The map is only counting deaths.

Re: War Atlas: An interactive cartography of every named war in human history

#56

Post by hunterpayne »

tokai wrote: post #39
id00 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you talking about? Mediazone already has 230k confirmed! russian deaths with names. Current confirmed rate of ~30k/month casualities for Russia couldn't be sustainable for much smaller population of Ukraine if they were trading 1:1 or even worse

With Western media narrative and both sides it's clear he is completely lost in propaganda. Every single method of analyzing the numbers points to well about 1 million casualties to be most realistic guess. Even the Russian MOD own numbers for recruitment and numbers stationed in Ukraine shows that there is at least ~1.1 million personal missing.

Again, you are confusing causalities (wounded and dead) with KIA (just the dead). That's why you are getting such different numbers. Its a pretty easy mistake to make and there are lots of media reports that make the same mistakes.

PS Also, some numbers count civilians and others just count military. And usually civilian dead > military dead in most wars.

Re: War Atlas: An interactive cartography of every named war in human history

#57

Post by sombragris »

vova_hn2 wrote: post #13
andrewmutz wrote: post #7

Interestingly, this website reliably crashes my firefox on linux while consuming 55GB of memory. Claude's TLDR of what's causing the problem (may or may not be accurate): "That animation loop is almost certainly leaking memory: each time-step it draws new border geometry (GeoJSON/vector shapes) but doesn't free the old frames, so RAM climbs without bound. When you interact — especially auto-playing the timeline — the…

I can confirm, my firefox on linux crashes immediately as well. Curiously, the website works just fine in chrome on android. Blink monopoly strikes again, I guess.

No issues here on Linux, using Firefox 140.12.0esr under Slackware and Plasma 6.7.2 / Wayland

Re: War Atlas: An interactive cartography of every named war in human history

#59

Post by senderista »

hunterpayne wrote: post #56
tokai wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With Western media narrative and both sides it's clear he is completely lost in propaganda. Every single method of analyzing the numbers points to well about 1 million casualties to be most realistic guess. Even the Russian MOD own numbers for recruitment and numbers stationed in Ukraine shows that there is at least ~1.1 million personal missing.

Again, you are confusing causalities (wounded and dead) with KIA (just the dead). That's why you are getting such different numbers. Its a pretty easy mistake to make and there are lots of media reports that make the same mistakes. PS Also, some numbers count civilians and others just count military. And usually civilian dead > military dead in most wars.

That last point (fortunately) does not apply to this conflict. In fact, the fraction of civilian deaths might be the lowest for any conflict with comparable casualties. I haven’t verified this, but would be interested if someone did.

Re: War Atlas: An interactive cartography of every named war in human history

#60

Post by senderista »

nicbou wrote: post #38
senderista wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is the Western media narrative anyway. The casualty rate for the current mode of offensive warfare with small infantry teams infiltrating under cover of darkness (e.g. Ukraine for the latter part of the 2023 counteroffensive, Russia in its more recent offensive in the Donbas) has been extremely high on both sides. But I'm pretty sure Russia had a favorable kill ratio during their 2022 summer offensive in the Don…

You said human waves, not the person you are replying to. Russian did throw bodies at the problem and has shown callous disregard for the welfare of its soldiers. I feel like you're not really replying to the comment above.

At the start of the war there was plenty of meat being thrown into the trenches on the Ukraine side. Have you not seen any videos of men being press-ganged off the streets or in their homes? Or of the protesting wives of TDF units thrown into the trenches with virtually no training and only token weapons and ammo? (You can find plenty of both on Ukrainian Telegram channels.)

If Ukraine is treating their soldiers better now, it’s at least partly because they’re running out of them.

Post reply on HN