

So I made something that's pretty stupid but had fun doing it - cnlwsu
http://www.hitlerhops.com
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.<p>Unfortunately the link graph was really stale when I ran it so it is not always correct.  Also dates make it boring sometimes.
======
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.

~~~
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?

~~~
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.

------
rwhitman
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

~~~
Untitled
> 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
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.

~~~
rwhitman
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

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

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

~~~
njl
"Der Fuehrers Face" is a fascinating watch.

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

------
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.

------
alexophile
Worth noting:

Kevin Bacon -> The Great Depression -> Adolf Hitler

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

~~~
k3dz
Kevin Bacon has a Hitler number of 2

~~~
ghotli
More appropriately, Hitler has a Kevin Bacon number of two

~~~
neilk
No, 4.

[http://oracleofbacon.org/cgi-
bin/movielinks?a=Kevin+Bacon...](http://oracleofbacon.org/cgi-
bin/movielinks?a=Kevin+Bacon&b=adolf+hitler)

------
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...

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

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

~~~
tlrobinson
I see what you did you there...

------
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.

------
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?

------
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...](http://www.johnandcailin.com/blog/cailin/breadth-first-graph-search-
using-iterative-map-reduce-algorithm) 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?

------
cnlwsu
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.

~~~
DavidSJ
Awesome! When will you?

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

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

------
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.

~~~
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.

------
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.

------
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.

------
xilun666
You should exclude days of the year if possible, hitler seems to be directly
related to most :/

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

------
tlrobinson
There's a whole article about this kind of thing on Wikipedia:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Six_degrees_of_Wikipe...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Six_degrees_of_Wikipedia)

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/>

------
hxr
<http://xkcd.com/214/>

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

------
kitchen
Vagina -> Sex Doll -> Hitler

what?

~~~
cnlwsu
it was the case...
[http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sex_doll&oldid...](http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sex_doll&oldid=242078943#In_culture)

just the most recent article doesnt seem to have it

~~~
kitchen
ahh, weird :)

------
bambax
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.

------
icegreentea
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?

------
JangoSteve
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.

------
c1sc0
Nice job! I like how un-PC it is. You could probably even get it banned in
Germany if you added a swastika.

------
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

------
paul9290
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!

~~~
philwelch
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.

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

------
DrJokepu
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!

------
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

~~~
nostrademons
Lady Gaga -> Electropop -> Adolf Hitler

------
waterhouse
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.

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

------
iacvlvs
The Degree of Hitler for Kevin Bacon is: 2

The Path: Great Depression Adolf Hitler

------
anigbrowl
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.

------
nightlifelover
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

------
android2
Fun. But the page is really hateful in the Android browser. The text box is
jumping around all over the place.

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

------
ScotterC
Facebook -> April 30 -> Adolf Hitler

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

Enjoyed the images though

------
swankpot
Fun, fun.

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

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

------
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 ;)

------
RyanMcGreal

        Kevin Bacon -> Great Depression -> Adolf Hitler
    

Nice.

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

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

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

------
nightlifelover
Did u do the cute hitler drawing urself? :D

------
sgt
You should remove the date/year hops.

------
dmvaldman
fox news channel -> adolf hitler

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

------
sgt
Hahahaha - this is hilarious!

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

------
lalalalala
scared me when typing happiness and seeing 2

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

------
acgourley
No deep links?

------
greg
Get this thing on The Daly Show / Colbert Report.

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

------
DannoHung
iPad does not go to Hitler!

~~~
uxp
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.

------
tkahn6
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.

~~~
cnlwsu
Thats a encoding bug yeah, supposed to be André Weil.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Andr%C3%A9_Weil...](http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Andr%C3%A9_Weil&oldid=246294381)

------
mkramlich
Six Degrees of Wikipedia

------
geekdesigngirl
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.

~~~
araneae
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.

~~~
geekdesigngirl
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.

~~~
araneae
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)

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

