HN Explorer

147 comments

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gdl
It seems too eager to go through year and day pages, and doesn't always hit the optimal path:

  Mike Godwin -> Godwin's law -> Adolf Hitler
it gives:

  Mike Godwin -> 1956 -> 1889 -> Adolf Hitler
Also strange is that the "1956" it follows is in the text of, but not linked from "Mike Godwin".

Either way, I like the Web 2.0-style Hitler drawings :-)

bittermang
I would concur about the date thing. It makes it a lot less fun when your path looks like:

  Polycephaly -> August 18 -> Adolf Hitler
When I was able to get their manually by:

  Polycephaly -> Freak Show -> Cannes Film Festival -> France -> Germany -> Hitler
I think just dropping dates from contention, apart from any other contextual algorithm improvements, would put a lot of the fun and discovery back in to it.
chc
I agree wholeheartedly. Not only is it far too easy to link dates to Hitler, but dates are also likely to be connected to other dates, thus getting even further way from a real connection to the original page and giving two chances at the heightened chance of a hit that dates have. I tried "Mark Zuckerberg", and the path from him to Hitler was:

  December 5th -> 1889 -> Adolf Hitler
When there's a perfectly obvious connection at:

  Jewish -> Adolf Hitler
(which did exist in October 2008, just so nobody else wastes their time checking)
cnlwsu
Jewish -(redirect)-> Jews -> Adolf Hitler. Both are 3 but December is first in alphabetical so it was the first one recorded.
mahmud
I find it viscerally painful to see the casual association.

6000 years of culture and all you can think of is some delusional scumbag.

mgrouchy
There might be 6000 years of culture, but this app finds degrees of separation(i guess) between wikipedia articles and adolf hitler(that is its purpose). So the association isn't casual and in relation to Adolf Hitler its pretty on topic.
knieveltech
"3000 years of beautiful tradition from Moses to Sandy Cofax, you're goddamn right I'm living in the past!" - Walter Sobchak

First thing that popped in my head. Yeah, here come the downvotes.

mahmud
FWIW, it pisses me off that this Hitler character is so closely identified with Jews. Must every mention of Judaism be associated with this monster, and vice versa?
Groxx
On The Internet? Yes.
aw3c2
Disclaimer: I am a young german.

Apparently yes, jewish associations and/or Israel remind us all the time about it. The only other thing about Jews I know are the terrible crimes they do in Palestine. But obviously that's not what they shout from the rooftops.

mahmud
Holding all Jews accountable for the actions of Israel is almost as conscionable as holding you responsible for Hitler's actions, or holding me responsible for Bin Laden's. I.e. it's utter bullshit.
aw3c2
Misunderstanding: I simply meant that every time I hear the word "jew" (for example in the news) it is either about the holocaust or Israel.
Jach
While it could be a subset of Israel, various forms of Zionism also come to my mind. It's interesting how the Israeli PR is so effective in some cases (like in US government) and so ineffective in others. Of course I have to remind myself that P(bad person | jewish) isn't significantly different from P(bad person | not jewish), we're all human.
chc
Not every mention of Judaism is associated with Hitler, so I'm not sure why you ask. Most of the times I hear Judaism mentioned, it is not in the context of Adolf Hitler. I think you're the first person I've ever heard draw a universal connection between the two.

As for Hitler, he is most famous (at least in America) for his violent hatred of the Jewish people, so it is likely that mentioning him will bring it to mind. I mean, what are we supposed to think of? Complaining that Hitler is associated with Jews seems like saying, "Good grief, every time I mention Picasso, people think of Cubist art!"

mahmud
To keep things in perspective: this is a thread about a "cute" rendering of Hitler, complete with innocent Anime eyes, and the mention of Jews is done in a jovial, playful manner, almost game-like.

We're not talking about an internet meme here, we're talking about mass murder of innocent people, not too long ago. There are still living survivors. So excuse me if I refuse to play along, and slap my knees all the way to the cemetery.

klbarry
Yes, please take away all dates!
thinkalone
> but had fun doing it

Well, that's more than a lot of people can say about certain projects!

Want to give us a run-down of how you put it together?

cnlwsu
Definitely, it was actually pretty simple once I figured out what I was going to do. I started from the link graph put together by Henry Haselgrove (http://users.on.net/~henry/home/wikipedia.htm) that I found when looking through the EC2 public datasets. I then had a few easy steps.

1) flip the link graph from outgoing to incoming, so from any page I can see what links to it.

2) I found all the distances and paths iteratively by exploding out from Adolf_Hitlers page. http://www.johnandcailin.com/blog/cailin/breadth-first-graph... and blogs like it were very helpful.

3) loaded the data into a large binary file that I divided into indexed parts that I compressed and uploaded to appengine to extract and load into bigtable (this took the most amount of time! both to run and to write the code to make it work)

4) ??

5) profit

kenjackson
Cool. How long did it take and how big is it?

Also, what's the longest path?

seancron
Interesting result for "Facebook":

  Facebook -> April 30 -> Adolf Hitler
pbourke
This is a fun hack. Strangest path that I've found so far:

  Sitar -> Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band -> Adolf Hitler
iacvlvs
The Degree of Hitler for Kevin Bacon is: 2

The Path: Great Depression Adolf Hitler

petercooper
It seems the real challenge here is coming up with the highest number of hops. I have two 4s so far with "pro plus" and "smallholder" but haven't been able to eek out a 5 or higher..
kerkeslager
I wasn't able to find more than four until I tried "Justin Bieber", which returned no results. I guess that means it hasn't found a path for Justin Bieber yet?
seancron
I think his dataset is out of date and so the Justin Bieber article doesn't exist.
JustinSeriously
I'm not getting no results for "Debug port", which should be no more than 3 (since it links to Xbox, which is 2).

Same for "Index of Estonia-related articles".

ElbertF
I think that means there are no hops to be made. Draw your own conclusion.
p0ppe
Five: APPL -> Area Police/Private_Security_Liaison -> Police science -> Jurisprudence -> 1940 -> Adolf Hitler.
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anigbrowl
It started as a game on 4chan or someplace similar - pick a random article and see how quickly you could get there, or alternatively think up the one that would require the most connections. That in turn has origins going back to the days of aristocracy, when degrees of (blood) relatedness in books like Debrett's peerage were of great importance for evaluating marriage proposals among the gentry.
powrtoch
For the record, I love it.

You should look into character encoding issues though. I put in "Church–Turing thesis"and got:

ChurchU00e2U0080U0093Turing thesis

Kurt GU00c3U00b6del

1906

Adolf Hitler

drgath
You should remove the dates & years from the possible matches. Would be more interesting.
makmanalp
Haha. So given the graph of all article links, maybe you should figure out the articles with the longest shortest paths (shortest paths that are the longest) from hitler. Or maybe to make it funnier you can find the longest path between any article and hitler.
kerkeslager
Finding the longest path is computationally impossible.
zck
There are two ways to do it: the first is to consider the "longest shortest path", as makmanalp said, and find the longest path among the set of shortest paths from an article to Hitler. The second is to not travel to any node twice in a given path.
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nostromo
I'm pretty sure he meant the article with the longest optimal path.
tomjen3
There is no defined longest path, since the graph has a ton of loops.

Finding the longest shortest path (that is finding the minimum number of nodes from each wikipedia entry to the entry for Hitler) and then finding the longest is, however, rather easy.

slapshot
It would be cool to display the excerpts where the links occur. I'm confused by several of them and too lazy to read through each entry to find out why they are linked.
cnlwsu
would be very helpful actually... especially since the data is very old and you sometimes have to look at the revision history.
dreyfiz
This is awesome, but I wish you would eliminate the hops that consist only of dates because they aren't very interesting.
mikeflynn
You really need to give people a way to link to a result set.
xilun666
You should exclude days of the year if possible, hitler seems to be directly related to most :/
ScotterC
Facebook -> April 30 -> Adolf Hitler

However it would seem that it's only matching April and not April 30th.

Enjoyed the images though

s3graham 

    The Cure -> April 22 -> Adolf Hitler
It's not clear how to me The Cure are associated with the 22Apr. The best I can find is mentions of April, and footnote #22.
varaon
It's an older dataset, so that link may not be in the latest revision.
moultano
Am I correct that Kullback–Leibler_divergence has no path to Hitler?
gibeson
I'd like to formally propose the hoplist law, which dictates Hitler is at most 3 degrees of separation from anything.
TheEzEzz
Every law has its exception:

Adolf Hitler --> Anabolic steroid --> Peliosis hepatis --> Fecal enema

Someone
This law never will have exceptions that last long. Once its Wikipedia entry lists an exception, it no longer will be an exception, as the listing creates a path of length 2.
TheEzEzz
Ah, but then the article would have to be edited to remove the false exception, thus making the exception valid again.

It seems we've arrived at a proof that Wikipedia in fact can not have perfect, comprehensive knowledge of the world.

aidenn0
Now I know that Jackboots has to go through Fascism to reach Hitler, but Sam Browne Belt has a direct link.
zalew
awesome :)

but it raises 500 (Iresult from ajax call) when I type unicode f.ex Polish letters: ńżźśąć etc., so I can't make fun of people :)

UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc5 in position 8: ordinal not in range(128)

btw turn debug off ;)

darklajid
I was tempted to say "NSFW in Germany", but then again - that would be provoking havoc. :)

Living in Germany I find of find the idea mildy irritating (and the Graphics - erm - far too "comical"), but I love the technical side of the project.

Would be interesting to have a way to show the hops between arbitrary two words (but, yeah, the domain name gives away that this is not planned).

cnlwsu
That was actually the original idea but the CPU behind it (requires a lot of ram and multiple systems the way I worked it) was too expensive to swing by the wife for a goof off project ;)
swolchok
You can't pre-compute it with the Floyd-Warshall algorithm in C or something?

EDIT: to try to answer my own calculation on the back of the envelope...

We're going to need n^2 space and n^3 time, where n is the number of nodes. There are about 3.5 million articles (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia), and if we assume that the diameter of the Wikipedia graph is 255 or less, we need 1 byte * 3.5 million * 3.5 million = 12.25 TB just to store path lengths for all pairs. It's also going to take a while because locality is going to be hosed. You might be able to do something smarter, like do the all-pairs solutions for something that will fit in memory (top 30000 pages or so), and hope that queries match a long-tail distribution...

willchang
The number of hops for "Adolf Hitler" should be 0, not 1.
clemesha
Check out my app: http://thewikigame.com that is of a "similar" type. The "Hitler Wikipedia Game" is a "game type" that is a favorite of a lot of people. Another instance of that type is "N clicks to Hitler / N clicks to Jesus", etc.
Multiplayer
Wow! Great game - and multiplayer too. How long has it bee around?
dmvaldman
fox news channel -> adolf hitler