So I made something that's pretty stupid but had fun doing it | Hacker News Reader

So I made something that's pretty stupid but had fun doing it

hitlerhops.com

179 pointscnlwsu142 comments

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.

Open articleView on HN

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 :-)

its because its using an older record of Godwin's law: 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 :)

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.

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)

Jewish -(redirect)-> Jews -> Adolf Hitler. Both are 3 but December is first in alphabetical so it was the first one recorded.

I find it viscerally painful to see the casual association.

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

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.

"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.

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?

On The Internet? Yes.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!"

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.

Yes, please take away all dates!

Ok, 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

> 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).

I 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.

I'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

That's a pretty big claim to throw out there. What evidence do you have to support it ?

Read up about the British Empire and its history (it really is no secret).

Examples include favouring certain classes in Sri Lanka (creating strife that lasted to this day in Sri Lanka and Malaysia). Overseeing immense famine (while British landowners exported food) in India and Ireland. Putting (and killing) people in concentration camps (e.g. South Africa and Kenia). Letting certain businessmen (e.g. Cecil John Rhodes) basically own countries (with all the abuse and rape that this entails).

Did you learn in history books that the British Empire was a divine and enlightened entity that existed for the benefit of mankind?

(Because it basically enslaved 400 million people for the benefit of an Island of less than 40 million).

I agree that the examples you give are terrible and inexcusable, however they don't support your assertion that the British Empire was more evil than the Third Reich, given what we know about the sheer scale of systematic extermination during the Holocaust. It just doesn't compare I'm afraid.

Also, the British Empire, whilst causing harm, did bring benefits to some countries (something it would be hard to argue the Third Reich did). For instance:

  * Infrastructure improvements (railways, roads, canals, industrialisation)
  * Improvements in education
  * Parliamentary democracy
  * A professional civil service
  * Free trade
  * Medicine (hospitals, vaccinations)

.. and of course cricket :)

Sounds like you're saying the British Empire was more similar to the Romans than to the Third Reich. I don't necessarily disagree, since I consider myself ignorant on large swathes of history to make a confident judgment, but doing a little searching brings up a couple numbers. The Holocaust killed ~15 million (which includes non-Jews too). In the late 19th century, the British Empire was directly responsible for ~30 million deaths from starving people in India. ( http://archive.arabnews.com/?page=7&section=0&articl... ) The Empire did a lot of good things, but do you think their good outweighs their bad over 250 years? I think it's part of human psychology to say a short, painful event (like the Holocaust) is worse than a prolonged, perhaps even more painful event ( http://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_kahneman_the_riddle_of_exper... ), especially if the ending is a peak or decay (Nazis were still evil in the end, British Empire hasn't been very "empirical" after WW2).

The Third Reich killed 15 million people within barely over a decade, plus a few more dozen million in the wars it started, with virtually no redeeming characteristics. The British empire killed more people than that, yes, but over the course of centuries and with enough redeeming characteristics that they likely saved tens of millions of lives as well, by enriching their empire through infrastructure improvement, free trade, and good government.

It's quite notable that of all the countries Britain supposedly oppressed in their empire, many of them freely choose to remain part of the Commonwealth today.

If you judge any regime by the worst thing it's done, every regime is evil.

I agree that human psychology seems to pre-dispose us to being more shocked by tragic events that occur within a shorter timeframe (this has been even more amped-up since the advent of 24 hour rolling news of course). However, as I've mentioned below I don't think body counts are a useful indicator of the evil intent of a regime (it opens up a can of worms for many modern states).

In terms of the "balance sheet" for the British Empire, ultimately it's hard to argue for more good than bad in the forced imposition of power from one state on another. The legacy of territorial conflicts birthed by Britain's hasty withdrawal have not helped either.

However, my point was not to try and write a defence of British imperialism, but to try and discredit this notion that the British Empire was more evil than the Third Reich, a state that more than any other plumbed the depths of human misery. It seems strange to argue that Nazi Germany had any benefit to it.

> more evil than the Third Reich, given what we know about the sheer scale of systematic extermination during the Holocaust.

Six million people died during the Holocaust. Probably many more died because of the British Empire's policies. The biggest causes of this was probably the policies of the British Empire that caused famines (by letting British landowners export food while the native population starves) and the British stoking of ethnic conflict in a strategy of “divide and conquer”. Two examples of this was the series of Indian famines in the late 19th century and of course the Great Famine in Ireland.

Examples of the latter are probably too many to mention. Should wars basically caused by the British (between native populations) not also be counted?

There are however other cases where the British simply killed people in concentration camps (by destroying the rural areas through a scorched earth policy and imprisoning the civilian population in camps and denying them food, e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:LizzieVanZyl.jpg).

> Also, the British Empire, whilst causing harm, did bring benefits to some countries (something it would be hard to argue the Third Reich did).

The benefits that you mentioned was simply benefits of an industrial society. The general population in the victim countries did not share in the advantages of it, yet they paid for it (with their natural resources and the sweat of their brow).

In general not all people were allowed the benefits of education. The Catholic Irish were for long prevented from obtaining an education. In countries such as Sri Lanka, a ruling class was imported who received education. The aim of this was simple – to benefit Britain (not the local population). For Britain to develop to a high level at that time, required the work of many people in colonies (out of sight and out of mind) that was screwed in the deal.

---

Probably the worst thing that the British Empire did was large scale ethnocide (destruction of indigeneous cultures and forcing native populations to use English).

But yeah. At least the Germans owned up and agreed that the 15 years of the German Reich was a mistake (and abandoned the symbolism and nationalistic tendencies). People in Britain still live with the mindset that colonialism and their colonial empire was a good thing.

> Probably many more died because of the British Empire's policies

I don't think body counts are a useful indicator of the level of evil intent of a government or a regime. On that basis the U.S. would fare significantly worse than Nazi Germany, based on the 10-16 million killed as a result of U.S. foreign policy since 1945 alone (see http://nottheenemy.com/index_files/Death%20Counts/Death%20Co...) It would take a crackpot to declare the U.S more "evil" than Nazi Germany.

> The benefits that you mentioned was[sic] simply benefits of an industrial society

Not true. China is increasingly a heavily industrialised society yet still maintains an autocratic system of government with no democracy. It doesn't follow that just because a society embraces industrialisation it implements a fair system of government or invests heavily in infrastructure programs - just look at the crumbling roads and transport in North Korea alongside their hi-tech nuclear ambitions.

> The general population in the victim countries did not share in the advantages of it

To quote Manmohan Singh (the current Prime Minister of India):

"Today, with the balance and perspective offered by the passage of time and the benefit of hindsight, it is possible for an Indian Prime Minister to assert that India's experience with Britain had its beneficial consequences too. Our notions of the rule of law, of a Constitutional government, of a free press, of a professional civil service, of modern universities and research laboratories have all been fashioned in the crucible where an age old civilisation met the dominant Empire of the day."

(see http://www.rediff.com/news/2005/jul/12spec.htm)

> Probably the worst thing that the British Empire did was large scale ethnocide

This is undeniable, and indefensible. However, unlike Nazi Germany it appears this wasn't the Raison d'être for the empire.

> People in Britain still live with the mindset that colonialism and their colonial empire was a good thing.

Not true. I don't know what evidence you are basing this opinion on, but the brutal effects of Colonialism are taught throughout the British national school curriculum and in various British museums. No punches are pulled. (see http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:zPJS4o3...)

> China is increasingly a heavily industrialised society yet still maintains an autocratic system of government with no democracy.

So? The Chinese government is arguably more responsible than many democratic countries (as far as foreign policy is concerned). It is not involved with any foreign wars (whilst democratic countries such as the USA are involved in 2).

China (as an autocratic country) is arguably better governed than democratic countries in the same position (e.g. India). So I don’t really get the point of what you are trying to say.

PS: Note that Britain tried to destroy the very fabric of Chinese society by flooding the country with Opium (see for example the Opium Wars). Trying to create a captive market by flooding a country with drugs (enforced by a navy) is pretty evil, IMHO.

> but the brutal effects of Colonialism are taught throughout the British national school curriculum and in various British museums.

Yet the symbolism remains. A good example is Cecil John Rhodes who basically raped the 3rd world (he owned the country of Zimbabwe). Yet a lot of things are still proudly named after him. Another example is the continued British reverence of the Royal Family (which was basically a hereditary dictatorship). So, the German equivalent would be naming things after Himmler and revering the Nazi Party.

The British did a lot to modernise he primitive cultures of the world. Even the nobel peace prize winner this year claims that another 200 years of British colonialism is what china needs to uplift itself out of totalitarianism. Sadly, we will never know. Instead we just get dumbfucks like you equivocating Nazis with the british, when they really have more in common with the current Chinese administration.

> Even the nobel peace prize winner this year claims that another 200 years of British colonialism is what china needs to uplift itself out of totalitarianism.

The Nobel Peace Prize winner of this year is a fairly obscure writer in China. It is nothing more than the Nobel Prize committee giving the middle finger to China. IMHO it was a worse choice than Al Gore, Obama, Kissinger or Arafat.

> Instead we just get dumbfucks like you equivocating Nazis with

Nice ad hominem. Do you seriously wanted British Colonialism to last another 200 years? Maybe I am not as objective, since the British killed my people in concentration camps. Destroying all industry and putting people in concentration camps sure did a lot to uplift people!

> when they really have more in common with the current Chinese administration.

Really? The current Chinese administration is only involved in the ethnicide in one other country (Tibet) and has no ambitions to control other countries for its own benefit.

How many countries did the British Empire control?

Twelve million people were systematically murdered, about 60 million people died in WW II for which Germany is solely responsible (at least for the European dead). That all in twelve years.

So because the british committed atrocities through policy decisions over the course of several centuries, I shouldn't be offended by cuddly representations of hitler - a man that presided over the slaughter of several generations of both my jewish and non-jewish extended family? Is that what you're saying?

Agree on #2 - it's an interesting idea, but cuddly Hitler is in poor taste.

I'm originally from Europe, and with family members lost during the war, I don't consider it something that's already lost in the fog of history.

<soapbox> I think Americans generally have a different sense of what the war felt like afterwards. There are many American vets who suffered great trauma, and I don't mean to detract from that in any way. They made real sacrifices that we should be aware of and respect.

That said - when the war was over, Americans came home to a country that was largely intact. In much of Europe, everything had been completely destroyed (by bombs or otherwise). So it's taken longer for those memories to fade. </soapbox>

Anyway, that's not to say that the effort put into this wasn't worthwhile! Good job on the wikipedia searching - cool idea. : )

Not to be rude but on your #2 point that's not really a bash at his application or programming talents. If you have a problem with Hitler being displayed as a cartoon then don't use the application

> I mean for 10 years he controlled most of europe

It wasn't nearly 10 years. The Anschluss was in 38, by May 45 Hitler was dead, and Europe was for the most part free again (except for those parts that happened to find themselves under the Soviet boot).

The German expansion in Europe was at it's peak by August 1942, when the Russians fought off the Germans in and around Stalingrad, one month later allied forces successfully established a beach-head in Italy, from then onwards it was down all the way, even if the situation was more or less stagnant until D-Day.

Well he was a major player in european politics for over 10 years. I know my history - the point is that hitler had an overwhelming influence on the 30's and 40's in europe and touched a disproportionate number of topics from 1933-1945

This is awesome, but I wish you would eliminate the hops that consist only of dates because they aren't very interesting.

Ditto. Although I was interested to learn that Donald Duck has a direct connection to Adolf Hitler.

"Der Fuehrers Face" is a fascinating watch.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iumEGAUceDg

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.

would be very helpful actually... especially since the data is very old and you sometimes have to look at the revision history.

Worth noting:

Kevin Bacon -> The Great Depression -> Adolf Hitler

I don't know why this got downvoted - Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon seems highly relevant to me.

Kevin Bacon has a Hitler number of 2

More appropriately, Hitler has a Kevin Bacon number of two

No, 4.

http://oracleofbacon.org/cgi-bin/movielinks?a=Kevin+Bacon...

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).

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 ;)

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...

Or you can just download an RDF dump of wikipedia and make your queries using sparql http://dbpedia.org/

Dijkstra's Algorithm -> Breadth-first search -> Germany -> Hitler.

I see what you did you there...

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..

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?

I think his dataset is out of date and so the Justin Bieber article doesn't exist.

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".

I think that means there are no hops to be made. Draw your own conclusion.

Five: APPL -> Area Police/Private_Security_Liaison -> Police science -> Jurisprudence -> 1940 -> Adolf Hitler.

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.

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.

Wow! Great game - and multiplayer too. How long has it bee around?

> 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?

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

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

Also, what's the longest path?

Wow, 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.

Awesome! When will you?

Also should exclude the Wiktionary link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiktionary

(e.g., "startup" = Wiktionary, December 12, Adolf Hitler)

You should remove the dates & years from the possible matches. Would be more interesting.

The number of hops for "Adolf Hitler" should be 0, not 1.

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.

Finding the longest path is computationally impossible.

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.

I'm pretty sure he meant the article with the longest optimal path.

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.

I'd like to formally propose the hoplist law, which dictates Hitler is at most 3 degrees of separation from anything.

Every law has its exception:

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

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.

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.

    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.

It's an older dataset, so that link may not be in the latest revision.

You should exclude days of the year if possible, hitler seems to be directly related to most :/

You really need to give people a way to link to a result set.

There's a whole article about this kind of thing on 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://xkcd.com/214/

Congrats. You've just automated the whole thing :)

Vagina -> Sex Doll -> Hitler

what?

it was the case... http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sex_doll&oldid...

just the most recent article doesnt seem to have it

ahh, weird :)

This 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.

I'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?

I 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.

Nice job! I like how un-PC it is. You could probably even get it banned in Germany if you added a swastika.

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

Is 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!

It's just another manifestation of acute tastelessness, which seems to be the predominant theme in mass entertainment these days.

It'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/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.

I really don't have any comments about the idea, but the drawings of Hitler made my day. Thanks.

Doesn'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!

Interesting result for "Facebook":

  Facebook -> April 30 -> Adolf Hitler

This is a fun hack. Strangest path that I've found so far:

  Sitar -> Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band -> Adolf Hitler

Lady Gaga -> Electropop -> Adolf Hitler

At 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.

So I googled for hitler doll.. http://failfun.com/funny-pictures/what-a-creepy-little-girl/

The Degree of Hitler for Kevin Bacon is: 2

The Path: Great Depression Adolf Hitler

Good work so far. Now generalize it to find the distance between any two Wikipedia pages, then start mapping the results with a weighting algorithm.

The 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

Fun. But the page is really hateful in the Android browser. The text box is jumping around all over the place.

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

Facebook -> April 30 -> Adolf Hitler

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

Enjoyed the images though

Fun, fun.

Some characters aren't displaying properly: try entering fahrvergnugen. (The u-umlaut gets escaped.)

Endoplasm -> Cytoplasm -> Mitoochondrion -> Cyanide -> Adolf Hitler

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 ;)

    Kevin Bacon -> Great Depression -> Adolf Hitler

Nice.

Am I correct that Kullback–Leibler_divergence has no path to Hitler?

so far the furthest away one I've found is lice

Yeah, but it's kind of cheating because it goes through "louse" which is the singular of lice.

Did u do the cute hitler drawing urself? :D

You should remove the date/year hops.

fox news channel -> adolf hitler

pretty cool, of course now you're obliged to tell us what tech you're using in your stack. :)

Hahahaha - this is hilarious!

it seems like it uses dates to keep the # of hops to a minimum.

scared me when typing happiness and seeing 2

How many millions must die before a topic stops being funny?

No deep links?

Get this thing on The Daly Show / Colbert Report.

By replacing the comic of hitler with a picture of glenn beck.

iPad does not go to Hitler!

It 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.

I think you have a bug.

      Elliptical Curve Cryptography -> AndrU00c3U00a9 Weil -> 1906 -> Adolf Hitler

'AndrU00c3U00a9 Weil' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AndrU00c3U00a9_Weil) doesn't exist.

Very cool though.

Thats a encoding bug yeah, supposed to be André Weil. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Andr%C3%A9_Weil...

Got this by searching Pokemon as well

Six Degrees of Wikipedia

This 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), 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.

Over-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.

I 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.

Well, if it hadn't been for this app, I would have never learned about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerhard_Kretschmar whose name was only released in 2007.

I wouldn't have known his name, or that he died at 6 months. Or that his own parents directly petitioned to Hitler to have him killed and called him "The Monster."

Or that merely 3 weeks after his death, when Hitler realized no one would stop him, he started systematically compiling lists of children with severe disabilities to euthanize.

And that it was this systematic killing of children that led to the systematic killing of disabled adults, and then the systematic killing of entire ethnic groups.

(Insect diuretic hormones -> Evolution -> Action T4 -> Adolf Hitler, and then I read Action T4 and went to Gerhard Kretschmar)

Wonderful! I stand corrected then. This app is proving to be useful and educational.

You should watch "The Producers".

The best way to sterilize some figure like Hitler, is to make fun of them and create comedy from them.

Words don't mean much, nor does karma.

You didn't overreact. Apparently there are a lot more people on this board who are insensitive to what Hitler represents than I would have given it credit for. Very disappointing

Yes, I expected at least a separation of 5 for the Dalai Lama / Hitler pairing; just goes to show you everyone is tainted in this world....

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