11 ms·
So I made something that's pretty stupid but had fun doing it
I really wanted a project that I could use map reduce on and this idea came up amongst a group of friends as a joke.
Unfortunately the link graph was really stale when I ran it so it is not always correct. Also dates make it boring sometimes.
- gdl 16y agoIt 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 :-)
- cnlwsu 16y agoits because its using an older record of Godwin's law: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Godwins_law&oldid=245053652 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Godwins_law&ol... where it actually doesn't actually link to hitler. I would like to update the records but it takes forever to upload 5gb of entries into app engine :)
- bittermang 16y agoI 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 16y agoI 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 16y agoJewish -(redirect)-> Jews -> Adolf Hitler. Both are 3 but December is first in alphabetical so it was the first one recorded.
- mahmud 16y agoI find it viscerally painful to see the casual association. 6000 years of culture and all you can think of is some delusional scumbag.
- mgrouchy 16y agoThere 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 16y ago"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 16y agoFWIW, 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 16y agoOn The Internet? Yes.
- aw3c2 16y agoDisclaimer: 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.
- klbarry 16y agoYes, please take away all dates!
- thinkalone 16y ago> 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 16y agoDefinitely, 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 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-search-using-iterative-map-reduce-algorithm 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 16y agoCool. How long did it take and how big is it? Also, what's the longest path?
- seancron 16y agoInteresting result for "Facebook": Facebook -> April 30 -> Adolf Hitler
- pbourke 16y agoThis is a fun hack. Strangest path that I've found so far: Sitar -> Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band -> Adolf Hitler
- nostrademons 16y agoLady Gaga -> Electropop -> Adolf Hitler
- iacvlvs 16y agoThe Degree of Hitler for Kevin Bacon is: 2 The Path: Great Depression Adolf Hitler
- petercooper 16y agoIt 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 16y agoI 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 16y agoI think his dataset is out of date and so the Justin Bieber article doesn't exist.
- JustinSeriously 16y agoI'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 16y agoI think that means there are no hops to be made. Draw your own conclusion.
- p0ppe 16y agoFive: APPL -> Area Police/Private_Security_Liaison -> Police science -> Jurisprudence -> 1940 -> Adolf Hitler.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- anigbrowl 16y agoIt 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 16y agoFor 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 16y agoYou should remove the dates & years from the possible matches. Would be more interesting.
- makmanalp 16y agoHaha. 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 16y agoFinding the longest path is computationally impossible.
- zck 16y agoThere 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.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- nostromo 16y agoI'm pretty sure he meant the article with the longest optimal path.
- tomjen3 16y agoThere 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.
- kitchen 16y agoVagina -> Sex Doll -> Hitler what?
- slapshot 16y agoIt 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 16y agowould be very helpful actually... especially since the data is very old and you sometimes have to look at the revision history.
- dreyfiz 16y agoThis is awesome, but I wish you would eliminate the hops that consist only of dates because they aren't very interesting.
- hxr 16y agohttp://xkcd.com/214/ http://xkcd.com/214/ Congrats. You've just automated the whole thing :)
- mikeflynn 16y agoYou really need to give people a way to link to a result set.
- xilun666 16y agoYou should exclude days of the year if possible, hitler seems to be directly related to most :/
- ScotterC 16y agoFacebook -> April 30 -> Adolf Hitler However it would seem that it's only matching April and not April 30th. Enjoyed the images though
- s3graham 16y agoThe 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 16y agoIt's an older dataset, so that link may not be in the latest revision.
- moultano 16y agoAm I correct that Kullback–Leibler_divergence has no path to Hitler?
- alexophile 16y agoWorth noting: Kevin Bacon -> The Great Depression -> Adolf Hitler
- whimsy 16y agoI don't know why this got downvoted - Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon seems highly relevant to me.
- gibeson 16y agoI'd like to formally propose the hoplist law, which dictates Hitler is at most 3 degrees of separation from anything.
- TheEzEzz 16y agoEvery law has its exception: Adolf Hitler --> Anabolic steroid --> Peliosis hepatis --> Fecal enema
- Someone 16y agoThis 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 16y agoAh, 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 16y agoNow I know that Jackboots has to go through Fascism to reach Hitler, but Sam Browne Belt has a direct link.
- EGreg 16y agoso far the furthest away one I've found is lice
- araneae 16y agoYeah, but it's kind of cheating because it goes through "louse" which is the singular of lice.
- zalew 16y agoawesome :) 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 16y agoI 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 16y agoThat 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 16y agoYou 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 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...
- patrickaljord 16y agoOr you can just download an RDF dump of wikipedia and make your queries using sparql http://dbpedia.org/ http://dbpedia.org/
- willchang 16y agoThe number of hops for "Adolf Hitler" should be 0, not 1.
- clemesha 16y agoCheck out my app: http://thewikigame.com 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 16y agoWow! Great game - and multiplayer too. How long has it bee around?
- dmvaldman 16y agofox news channel -> adolf hitler
- csomar 16y agoI really don't have any comments about the idea, but the drawings of Hitler made my day. Thanks.
- cnlwsu 16y agoWow, I'm honored by all the feedback, Thanks! Pretty psyched everything is still responsive under the load too. The dates are pretty lame, luckily looks like Wikipedia removed all the links to dates so when I run against the latest data set they won't be there.
- tkahn6 16y agoI think you have a bug. Elliptical Curve Cryptography -> AndrU00c3U00a9 Weil -> 1906 -> Adolf Hitler 'AndrU00c3U00a9 Weil' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AndrU00c3U00a9_Weil http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AndrU00c3U00a9_Weil) doesn't exist. Very cool though.
- cnlwsu 16y agoThats a encoding bug yeah, supposed to be André Weil. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Andr%C3%A9_Weil&oldid=246294381 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Andr%C3%A9_Weil...
- decadentcactus 16y agoGot this by searching Pokemon as well
- vaksel 16y agoit seems like it uses dates to keep the # of hops to a minimum.
- anigbrowl 16y agoGood work so far. Now generalize it to find the distance between any two Wikipedia pages, then start mapping the results with a weighting algorithm.
- philwelch 16y agoDijkstra's Algorithm -> Breadth-first search -> Germany -> Hitler.
- tlrobinson 16y agoI see what you did you there...
- acgourley 16y agoNo deep links?
- lalalalala 16y agoscared me when typing happiness and seeing 2
- DrJokepu 16y agoDoesn't work properly with accented characters. As someone with English as secondary language, proper Unicode support is one of my pet peeves. It's usually easy to fix and will increase your karma infinitely. For example, try entering "düsseldorf". Otherwise, great work!
- JangoSteve 16y agoI couldn't use it on my android phone. The text box keeps jumping off my screen, making it lose focus, which makes my onscreen keyboard go away.
- tlrobinson 16y agoThere's a whole article about this kind of thing on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Six_degrees_of_Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Six_degrees_of_Wikipe... There used to be a site that would do the same thing for two arbitrary endpoints but it looks like its offline: http://www.netsoc.tcd.ie/~mu/wiki/ http://www.netsoc.tcd.ie/~mu/wiki/
- dschobel 16y agopretty cool, of course now you're obliged to tell us what tech you're using in your stack. :)
- greg 16y agoGet this thing on The Daly Show / Colbert Report.
- mrtron 16y agoBy replacing the comic of hitler with a picture of glenn beck.
- greg 16y agoGet this thing on The Daly Show / Colbert Report.
- DannoHung 16y agoiPad does not go to Hitler!
- uxp 16y agoIt appears that it uses an older dataset, which might not have had a page titled iPad. Apple Inc. and Apple Computer both link with 3 hops, so the iPad has at most 4 hops by that logic.
- geekdesigngirl 16y agoThis is my second post on HN and I, for one, think this is disgusting. How is this right? Most of the comments on this thread are defending this app and yes, it does what it sets out to accomplish. However, are we so much in an echo chamber that we don't realize how the things we build affect other humans?! We deal in a world of systems, where point A leads to point B. But the systems we put in place are interpreted by human minds and human emotions, all of which don't have a point A or point B. I have a friend whose family doesn't go back more than 2 generations because they were all murdered by Hitler's regime at Auschwitz. It's easy to make stupid apps (your word) but, in a post earlier today about creating apps for the greater good (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1770435 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1770435), this is just blatantly adding bad. I mean, come on, do something worthwhile with your talents. What's the point of this app? Is it just to get a rise out of people? I put in Dalai Lama and there's a separation of 3. I expected more from this community.
- araneae 16y agoOver-react much? Also, what is the point of this statement: "I put in Dalai Lama and there's a separation of 3." Are you complaining that it's a short connection? I mean, obviously, this is simply demonstrating the small world effect, which is a pretty amoral concept as far as concepts go.
- geekdesigngirl 16y agoI suppose I did over-react. My apologies. Perhaps I am in the wrong since I seem to be the only voice that opposes this application. Before coming to the web development world, I was a counselor for troubled youth and adults with mental disabilities (2 separate jobs); our words were important in those positions and I think I'm carrying that over into this current space. And, I wasn't complaining about the short connection. Everything's inter-related. But I feel that instead of using Hitler as the constant, some other object/person might have been more considerate; I still believe in the power of words. We have those little 'karma' points next to our usernames on this list, don't we? Is the karma just meant to indicate that what we say jives with the collective whole? Like I said, that was my second post; I may have misunderstood what the community 'rules' are.
- icegreentea 16y agoI'm loving this. I just showed this to my friend, and there's beer coming out his nose right now. On the side, where did the art from this come from?
- rwhitman 16y agoOk, I get it. But I'm not amped by it. 2 reasons: 1) Hitler is associated with way too many entries, I mean for 10 years he controlled most of europe, there isn't a topic in 20th century history he doesn't touch at some point. Its too easy to get to hitler through wikipedia. I'd like to see it with someone less obvious (and funnier) - like Ted Nugent 2) I'm kind of disturbed by the cutesy drawings of Hitler. I dunno, I normally have a thick skin and a good sense of humor, but having been raised jewish its hard for me to look at cuddly hitler and not cringe a little
- Untitled 16y ago> I dunno, I normally have a thick skin and a good sense of humor, but having been raised jewish its hard for me to look at cuddly hitler and not cringe a little Maybe you should grow a thicker skin? The British Empire was arguably more evil than the German Reich (and did evil for quite a few centuries). Yet the Union Jack is displayed everywhere (even on shirts) and the same hateful institutions are still there (e.g. the royal family).
- philwelch 16y agoI get into the same arguments with kids wearing Che shirts. It's not worth it. Being evil is one thing, being evil and losing a war against us makes you the villain forever.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- rwhitman 16y agoI'm sure people would be equally offended as I am if the app had cutesy pictures of Pol Pot, or Stalin or any other brutal dictator known for mass genocide
- whyleyc 16y agoThat's a pretty big claim to throw out there. What evidence do you have to support it ?
- mkramlich 16y agoSix Degrees of Wikipedia
- waterhouse 16y agoAt my middle school, some of us used to play Wikiracing. Pick an arbitrary starting point and an endpoint and try to get there by clicking links as quickly as possible. The constraint was time used, not number of links clicked.
- RyanMcGreal 16y agoKevin Bacon -> Great Depression -> Adolf Hitler Nice.
- nightlifelover 16y agoThe Degree of Hitler for asdf is: 3 Keyboard layout Austria Adolf Hitler lol looks like I can't find anything with a hitler degree of more than 3
- nightlifelover 16y agoDid u do the cute hitler drawing urself? :D
- paul9290 16y agoIs there adoration for Hilter these days? The hilter videos are crazy popular and this a cutesy drawing of man who massacred thousands; marched thousands of innocent people into gas chambers and terminated them. He seems to have become more hero then villan these past few years!
- maxawaytoolong 16y agoIt's just another manifestation of acute tastelessness, which seems to be the predominant theme in mass entertainment these days.
- philwelch 16y agoIt's an interesting question. Before and during WWII, it was very popular to mock Hitler, because of the general over-the-top pompousness of his oratorical style and public image. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Dictator http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Dictator, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Der_Fuehrers_Face http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Der_Fuehrers_Face) Afterwards, the general attitude was one of somber, shocked horror. I'm not overly bothered by the fact that people have gone back to laughing at Hitler. I don't think people have forgotten the gravity of his crimes so much as they've become willing to use that as a backdrop for juxtaposition.
- nightlifelover 16y agoSo I googled for hitler doll.. http://failfun.com/funny-pictures/what-a-creepy-little-girl/ http://failfun.com/funny-pictures/what-a-creepy-little-girl/
- c1sc0 16y agoNice job! I like how un-PC it is. You could probably even get it banned in Germany if you added a swastika.
- stesch 16y agoHow many millions must die before a topic stops being funny?
- bambax 16y agoThis is the ultimate Glenn Beck machine. Look, everything is ultimately connected to Hitler! You should try to approach Jon Stewart with it, it would make for excellent satire.
- swankpot 16y agoFun, fun. Some characters aren't displaying properly: try entering fahrvergnugen. (The u-umlaut gets escaped.)
- android2 16y agoFun. But the page is really hateful in the Android browser. The text box is jumping around all over the place.
- mhluongo 16y agoEndoplasm -> Cytoplasm -> Mitoochondrion -> Cyanide -> Adolf Hitler
- sgt 16y agoHahahaha - this is hilarious!
- sgt 16y agoYou should remove the date/year hops.