OK this is amazeballs. Can you expound on technical implementation? Relying on Wikidata, then it relies on whatever Wikidata editors' internal governance system is for inclusion, exclusion, quality control of entries, correct?
I see you submitted this to HN almost a decade ago. How has it not gotten picked up for discussion??
Thanks for the compliment! The larger graph is basically built by extracting all relationships of certain types (e.g. parent/child, teacher/student, cause/effect) from Wikidata, along with the earliest known date for the items (e.g. date of birth, time of invention/discovery). The layout started as a 3D force-directed layout, but I turned one axis into the timeline. For the visualization, I used (forked) https://github.com/anvaka/pm (which did get some deserved attention here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40817852 ) and the related ngraph.offline.layout repo.
Trying to answer your final question: there are a lot of things that I should probably improve here, but I've also wondered if this kind of giant graph visualization just doesn't really work for most people.
Speaking of Burke, I believe his book The Pinball Effect has notations in the margins directing the reader to other pages that mention the same node in the graph (whether that's exactly how he thought of it or not). It seems like an interesting attempt to express this non-linear structure in the form of a book.
3c here as well. The doctors were surprised that it had spread to my bones, and it didn’t show up on the CT scans that they were using for surveillance.
People have spent some time entering programming languages, their publication/release dates, and their relationships (e.g. "influenced by", "based on") in Wikipedia and Wikidata. I like the latter, because it makes it easier to keep track of specific claims and their references. If people did more work on that, those relationships could be used to generate larger diagrams/histories like this and keep them up to date.
There's a strong implication that Sesame Credit and the Social Credit System idea follow the example of FICO scores. Has anybody in the Chinese government explicitly stated this?
Why would the Chinese government need to explicitly state this? The parallels are clear. The inventors of Sesame Credit and the Social Credit System have access to the same history we do about the FICO system.
Everytown is funded by wealthy people like Michael Bloomberg and Warren Buffett. If there aren't enough other donors to give them the resources that the NRA has, it might be that there aren't enough people who support their agenda enough to donate. They are not "the little guy".
This article seems to be missing something important: the postal service is still subsidized by the federal government, even if there isn't a direct transfer of taxpayer money.
The mail I receive through USPS is ~90% unwanted (maybe more, if you go by weight), despite my ongoing efforts to "go paperless" and opt out of marketing mail. If I could stop this constant flow of junk, I would gladly pay UPS/FedEx twice as much money to deliver the small amount of mail that I actually care about.
The USPS is greatly subsidized because of these print advertisements. If they did not exist, you would not get your mail, or it would cost like 10 bucks to send a letter. Priority Mail for 5.95? Try 25.95.
There's a reason why it costs 11 dollars and some change to ship a small box with UPS/FedEx -- that's just the cost of shipping.
We are so blind to the true cost of shipping. What would be better is if we got rid of UPS and FedEx, in my opinion.
I was with you until the last sentence. Why on earth would we want to get rid of competition that has driven a lot of the innovation in the shipping/logistics space?
Well, I will preface and just say it's my own opinion, and I don't know too much, but my thinking goes something like this -- as you said, the innovation has already happened. There's really nothing left to innovate. As far as I see, FedEx and UPS aren't working on driverless technologies or drone delivery, that would be Google, Amazon, etc. Also, because we have 3 or 4 select giant online retailers, and then the giant big box stores that have the onus to pressure the USPS to innovate. It would drive down costs for everyone on a whole, as well as the retailers. Anywhere up to 80% of the cost of physical goods is transportation, and about half of that is on that last mile. The added benefit of the USPS being a federal agency (well maybe not so much with Trump), we could pressure the politicians to ensure customers are getting good service.
"The added benefit of the USPS being a federal agency (well maybe not so much with Trump), we could pressure the politicians to ensure customers are getting good service."
No, the innovation hasn't already happened. Just because UPS and FedEx aren't doing PR stunts like Amazon's 60 minutes advertorial built around drone delivery the day before Cyber Monday doesn't mean they're just sitting still.
As for autonomous vehicles. Lots of people are working on the tech and once it becomes interesting for last 100 feet delivery in a few decades UPS and FedEx will have plenty of options to deploy it.
>The added benefit of the USPS being a federal agency (well maybe not so much with Trump), we could pressure the politicians to ensure customers are getting good service.
When you start being cynical and think democratic processes are a joke, then yes, they won't work. But I refuse to give in to cynicism. These agencies are to operate for the public benefit.
To make a different argument - because Fedex and UPS cherry-pick the profitable routes and leave USPS to handle the undesirable markets they are required by law to serve. This would be highly problematic if the USPS didn't exist on those routes as a very subsidized backstop.
That's about the only argument you can make, and I'm not certain it's a great one. Additionally one giant national parcel company in theory should have scale working for them and thus lower per unit costs - in practice I think the opposite holds true for large monopolies. But reasonable minds could disagree here.
In contrast to the author's decisions here, I decided to
-go for an "everything tree" even if that will contain many more errors
-use DBpedia/Wikidata, and address issues discovered by editing Wikipedia/Wikidata
-use a 3D visualization tool, due to the size of the graph
I think it reveals an interesting overall structure, and some interesting details for those who zoom in despite the issues with the data.