Recently, I went to my boss and told him, "Screw this, I'm going to spend the next month refactoring our messy code, rather than adding new functionality". Messy code got deleted, known bugs were fixed, previously unknown bugs were found and fixed, and performance improved significantly. I fucking love working in a startup.
I did start to work it out, but it's really not interesting at all. There are these giant long linked-lists of articles, e.g. about 70 articles on subpages of List of asteroids, each only linked to by the previous one. I updated the webpage with a better explanation of why I didn't bother doing this.
Yes, there are disjoint partitions. But they're all really small, only about 1-3 articles at most. When I said "any other", I meant "any other reachable article", but sacrificed some precision for brevity (not acceptable on/., I realise too late...:P).
Anyway, I've since updated the site to clarify this and a few other matters/.-ers were wondering, so check back!
I know! It was so disappointing. Awesome doesn't really have anything linking to it, so you can't find paths from anything to awesome. There is a path from Awesome to Chuck Norris, though. It goes through 1980s, fittingly enough.
It turns out that you run into problems defining "List pages", e.g. "Deaths in 2004" is definitely a big list, even though it doesn't match/List of.*/. I've updated the website to better explain this, but the gist is that any change to the dataset reflects more about the details of the change than about Wikipedia, so I just left the whole thing in to maintain some semblance of data integrity.
Stephen Dolan, aka mu
Re:Why wouldn't there be disjoint partitions?
on
Six Degrees of Wikipedia
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Those both link to the article "Ossa (motorcycle)", which isn't what the original poster had. In that case, the shortest path is Nikon D300->August 23->Rik Smits->Motocross Ossa (motorcycle). There is no path to the article "Ossa" (a disambiguation page), staying within the main namespace (no Wikipedia: or User: links).
No, it's just the English Wikipedia. There aren't that many links between the English and Japanese Wikipedias anyway, so it wouldn't make much difference. I might do it again later with other Wikipedias.
Yeah, that kind of thing does bias the results a bit. If you go to the bother of downloading the full results (I think the server may be a bit slashdotted atm, so don't do this immediately), then it turns out that a lot of music group's tours place unusually highly because they have a lot of sentences like "In [[2007]], they toured the [[United Kingdom]]".
Unfortunately, yes. The original project was to find the diameter of wikipedia, i.e. the biggest such number of links. That approach was abandoned when I found giant "tails" in wikipedia, almost linear linked lists of articles that stretch out for 70 links. The worst offenders were the subpages of List of named asteroids as each is only linked from the previous one, and it takes about 70 links to get from anywhere to the last one.
I just took it as distance outwards. The "center" I came up with is the article from which it is easiest to get to all others.
Re:Why wouldn't there be disjoint partitions?
on
Six Degrees of Wikipedia
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Yes, there are. Read the rest of TFA for exactly how this is handled, but the gist is: closeness of an article = [total length of all shortest paths from this article]/[number of articles reachable from here]. There are a couple of disjoint sets, but they don't actually affect the results much as they're all tiny (disambig pages, etc)
This isn't the worst post ever, it's not even close. This is a lot closer, and there's probably even worse (having read the above link, that's a scary thought).
WDYJUAULAAATIEIATDTPOTAESYKIWNBUA? - Why did you just use an unnecessarily long abbreviatory acronym and then immediately expand it and thus defeat the purpose of the abbreviation, especially since you know it will never be used again? It's called redundancy!
In earlier decades, it was tossed at people who disagreed with the presumed moral superiority of communism.
And that is an even more standard pseudo-intellectual put-down, much favoured by the pseudo-intellectuals here on Slashdot. Surely there must be some corollary to Godwin's Law for communist comparisons?
Well, one difference here is that the person sitting outside a baseball stadium isn't detracting anything from those who paid to get in, whereas the guy on the wifi outside the coffee shop is using up some proportion of the coffee shop's bandwidth, and reducing the bandwidth available to the coffee shop's paying customers.
Sorry, no. The poster's comment does not imply that he thinks of "Microsoft" as a plural; it is clearly singular. The poster is using the subjunctive mood, and dialect is irrelevant. (See my reply to GP)
No, it is using the subjunctive mood. Many native English speakers are actually unaware that English has a subjunctive, but it does. The subjunctive is usually just the infinitive, except for the verb "to be", whose subjunctive is "were" (e.g. "if I were to go to town tomorrow, I would buy something"). The subjunctive is used to express doubt, hypothesis, etc. rather that actual fact, so the phrase "If Microsoft buy them" is perfectly correct, and implies that the poster doubts that Microsoft will actually buy them (as is clear from context anyway). The fact that Microsoft is the name of a company is irrelevant. The sentence "It is necessary that Bill Gates buy the company" also makes sense. See here for common examples of the use of the subjunctive in English.
Slashdot Mirror
Diaspora sounds like a cuil idea!
Recently, I went to my boss and told him, "Screw this, I'm going to spend the next month refactoring our messy code, rather than adding new functionality". Messy code got deleted, known bugs were fixed, previously unknown bugs were found and fixed, and performance improved significantly. I fucking love working in a startup.
So what's a newton? Last I heard, it was the force that could effect an acceleration of 1m/s/s on a 1 kilogram body.
I did start to work it out, but it's really not interesting at all. There are these giant long linked-lists of articles, e.g. about 70 articles on subpages of List of asteroids, each only linked to by the previous one. I updated the webpage with a better explanation of why I didn't bother doing this.
Stephen Dolan, aka mu
Yes, there are disjoint partitions. But they're all really small, only about 1-3 articles at most. When I said "any other", I meant "any other reachable article", but sacrificed some precision for brevity (not acceptable on /., I realise too late... :P).
/.-ers were wondering, so check back!
Anyway, I've since updated the site to clarify this and a few other matters
Stephen Dolan, aka mu
I know! It was so disappointing. Awesome doesn't really have anything linking to it, so you can't find paths from anything to awesome. There is a path from Awesome to Chuck Norris, though. It goes through 1980s, fittingly enough.
Stephen Dolan, aka mu
It turns out that you run into problems defining "List pages", e.g. "Deaths in 2004" is definitely a big list, even though it doesn't match /List of.*/. I've updated the website to better explain this, but the gist is that any change to the dataset reflects more about the details of the change than about Wikipedia, so I just left the whole thing in to maintain some semblance of data integrity.
Stephen Dolan, aka mu
Those both link to the article "Ossa (motorcycle)", which isn't what the original poster had. In that case, the shortest path is Nikon D300->August 23->Rik Smits->Motocross Ossa (motorcycle). There is no path to the article "Ossa" (a disambiguation page), staying within the main namespace (no Wikipedia: or User: links).
Stephen Dolan, aka mu
I should have included that in the article. I'll update it sometime, but it's 1.30 now and I'm busy writing load-balancers :P
The most displaced article is "Credit Administration Program", closely followed by "Relock trigger", "Deblando" and "Chutz".
Stephen Dolan, aka mu
Hehe. I'm quite honoured, I think.
Stephen Dolan, aka mu
Paths aren't commutative.
No, it's just the English Wikipedia. There aren't that many links between the English and Japanese Wikipedias anyway, so it wouldn't make much difference. I might do it again later with other Wikipedias.
Stephen Dolan (aka mu)
Yeah, that kind of thing does bias the results a bit. If you go to the bother of downloading the full results (I think the server may be a bit slashdotted atm, so don't do this immediately), then it turns out that a lot of music group's tours place unusually highly because they have a lot of sentences like "In [[2007]], they toured the [[United Kingdom]]".
Stephen Dolan, aka mu
Actually, it's more "United Kingdom leads to All Wikipedia Articles".
Stephen Dolan, aka mu
Unfortunately, yes. The original project was to find the diameter of wikipedia, i.e. the biggest such number of links. That approach was abandoned when I found giant "tails" in wikipedia, almost linear linked lists of articles that stretch out for 70 links. The worst offenders were the subpages of List of named asteroids as each is only linked from the previous one, and it takes about 70 links to get from anywhere to the last one.
Stephen Dolan, aka mu
Thanks!
I just took it as distance outwards. The "center" I came up with is the article from which it is easiest to get to all others.
Yes, there are. Read the rest of TFA for exactly how this is handled, but the gist is: closeness of an article = [total length of all shortest paths from this article]/[number of articles reachable from here]. There are a couple of disjoint sets, but they don't actually affect the results much as they're all tiny (disambig pages, etc)
This isn't the worst post ever, it's not even close. This is a lot closer, and there's probably even worse (having read the above link, that's a scary thought).
No, he really did get it right, as did Wikipedia. He was talking about the conception of Mary by her mother and father
Well, one difference here is that the person sitting outside a baseball stadium isn't detracting anything from those who paid to get in, whereas the guy on the wifi outside the coffee shop is using up some proportion of the coffee shop's bandwidth, and reducing the bandwidth available to the coffee shop's paying customers.
Sorry, no. The poster's comment does not imply that he thinks of "Microsoft" as a plural; it is clearly singular. The poster is using the subjunctive mood, and dialect is irrelevant. (See my reply to GP)
No, it is using the subjunctive mood. Many native English speakers are actually unaware that English has a subjunctive, but it does. The subjunctive is usually just the infinitive, except for the verb "to be", whose subjunctive is "were" (e.g. "if I were to go to town tomorrow, I would buy something"). The subjunctive is used to express doubt, hypothesis, etc. rather that actual fact, so the phrase "If Microsoft buy them" is perfectly correct, and implies that the poster doubts that Microsoft will actually buy them (as is clear from context anyway). The fact that Microsoft is the name of a company is irrelevant. The sentence "It is necessary that Bill Gates buy the company" also makes sense. See here for common examples of the use of the subjunctive in English.