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Show HN: A zoomable timeline of 4M Wikipedia events (app.everything.diena.co)

118 points by lortex ↗ HN
I'm building a journal app in Kotlin Multiplatform and for this purpose I have created a zoomable timeline interface.

This is a side-project where I reuse the timeline interface to display 4 million events imported from Wikipedia / Wikidata, scored using PageRank. There is more information on the about page.

If you're interested in the stack: I use Kotlin Multiplatform extensively, with Compose Multiplatform for the UI, communicates with the backend using Kotlinx-RPC and behind the hood a simple Postgres database on a Hetzner machine.

29 comments

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Jtarii
Instantly freezes the moment I try to interact with it on firefox.
0gs
yeah, borked on Chrome Android too. too bad, i want to see it!
ss2f
Fantastic! Testing this on linux-gnome-firefox is smooth.
maxlin
Cool, though I assume there's some accuracy shortfalls, when not close to zero the UI breaks when years are ~1 pixel in size.

Probably doesn't matter for much of the content, though immediately comes to mind that for after big bang there is "known events" that happened at second-scale. Don't know if there's exact Wikipeida articles of those, but with an appropriately accurate timestamp storage & handling (128bit? more?), one could well zoom in to those if they did exist.

maeril
This is so cooooool
UltraSane
Very nice, I would like a similar tool for analyzing system logs and metrics.
Frog1230
Works, its cool to look at but might there be a use case?
ks2048
You need some visual feedback that it's loading. I see a blank screen for 30 seconds.
Unearned5161
Thank you for making this, it's very nice. I love a good timeline, everything seems to make a bit more sense when it's laid out spatially.
kingo55
Events in the future are labelled in past tense. Rather than "happened in 4.5B" you could write "forecast in 4.5B"
aayushdutt
Can you share the data, the view can be improved a lot, it's not really capturing the essence.
TealMyEal
its a very promising idea, i recently god into the Bronze age collapse and this was a nice way to look around at other events happening at that time and put context to it. a few bugs to iron out but yeah good work
keynha
This is really nicely done, the log zoom makes 4M events feel navigable instead of like a wall. How are you serving a viewport at that scale: precomputed levels of detail, or a query against the raw events on each pan and zoom?
tomthe
Cool! I made something similar with the same datasets a year ago, but with geocoordinates instead of timestamps: https://theilemail.de/wikipage/ It shows a zoomable map with the "most important" wikipedia entries at specific locations.

It was very hard to get the parameters right so that the text is always displayed in a good size, while showing not too few or too many entries. I never published it until now, I think.

Morhaus
Congrats on shipping :)
est
It feels a little strange on macbook touchpad, otherwise it's a cool project