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jwngr
sdow
TypeScript2018–2023
jwngr / sdow

sdow

Six Degrees of Wikipedia

5Distinct people
28Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
1.9KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

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What it is

Six Degrees of Wikipedia

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

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This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 12:54:37 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year28 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2018-02-26 20:01:26 UTC to 2023-12-21 03:17:06 UTC.

05101520252018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 24 mentions; 0 submissions, 24 comments20182019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments20202021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2023

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC24024
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303

What Hacker News says

28 sources
Creator here. Glad that HN rediscovered my old side project. All the code is freely available on GitHub [1]. It's running on a tiny f1-micro GCE instance which is currently down due to the traffic. I don't have time to fix it right now, but it should resolve itself once traffic dies down. The data source is also several years out of date at this point, so the links it returns may not match current reality. Other than that, it should still work! I'm currently building an AI email app called Shortwave [2]. I promise that has much better uptime and more consistent updates! [1] https://github.com/jwngr/sdow [2] https://shortwave.com
In Six Degrees of Wikipedia
Hey everybody, my "Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia" [1] from two weeks ago was really popular with this crowd and I enjoyed all the comments and discussion that resulted. Now that the site has handled half a million search results, there is a lot of interesting data which I know you will also enjoy seeing. So I put together this blog post and I plan to make a series of them on different aspects of this side project. All the code for my project is open source [2] and I'm happy to answer any questions or hear any suggestions you've got. If you want to get notified of future blog posts in this series, I have a low-volume personal newsletter [3] you can sign up for. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16468196 [2] https://github.com/jwngr/sdow [3] https://jwn.us15.list-manage.com/subscribe/post?u=d19fa80c86...
In Insights on Hitler and More from the First 500,000 Searches
Hey everybody, my "Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia" [1] from two weeks ago was really popular with this crowd and I enjoyed all the comments and discussion that resulted. Now that the site has handled half a million search results, there is a lot of interesting data which I know you will also enjoy seeing. So I put together this blog post and I plan to make a series of them on different aspects of this side project. All the code for my project is open source [2] and I'm happy to answer any questions or hear any suggestions you've got. If you want to get notified of future blog posts in this series, I have a low-volume personal newsletter [3] you can sign up for. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16468196 [2] https://github.com/jwngr/sdow [3] https://jwn.us15.list-manage.com/subscribe/post?u=d19fa80c86...
In Insights on Hitler and More from the First 500,000 Searches
I'd prefer you not send any additional load to my server (this is just a side project I'm paying out of pocket for), but you are welcome to download the data yourself. There are instructions in the project README[1] to download the SQLite files I use in the project and I should have documented enough about the schema for you to know what queries to make. I am happy to answer questions via GitHub issues if you have them. [1] https://github.com/jwngr/sdow#get-the-data-yourself
In Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia
The resulting SQLite database file is currently 8.3 GB, most of which is taken up by the `links` table. The big performance wins are having a handful of indexes (see the .sql files[1] for the database's schema) and preprocessing a lot of data so I don't have to do duplicate work every time a query occurs. For example, instead of the `links` table going from `source_id` to `target_id` and having a ton of rows which have the same `source_id`, I go from `id` to `outgoing_links` (which is a |-separate string of all source page IDs). Computing each page's incoming and outgoing links is the really heavy work and I only do that at database creation time, using a beefy GCP machine with 8 vCPUs, 52 GB RAM, and a 256 GB SSD. It still takes about an hour, but it's a one time cost and means I can run the actual service on a much smaller machine which
Read the rest
won't cost me a fortune to maintain. Also, SQLite is just very fast and performant out of the box, so as usual, it's a matter of choosing the right tools for the job. [1] https://github.com/jwngr/sdow/tree/master/database
In Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia
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 did notice that someone pointed out that they get different results by swapping the order of X and Y. This seems pretty surprising? This is expected, because it is a directed graph, with the links on Wikipedia being in one direction. Just because page A links to page B doesn't mean page B links to page A. [1] https://github.com/jwngr/sdow/blob/master/sdow/breadth_first...
In Show HN: Six Degrees of Wikipedia

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