Show HN: The Timeline of Everything – see the history of any topic

Show HN: The Timeline of Everything – see the history of any topic(timeline-of-everything.milst.dev)

5 points by milst 361 days ago | 8 comments

When learning about history, I like to visualize when certain events happened relative to other events to better understand the context.

I started working on this idea of using AI to take an input topic and generate an interactive timeline of important events within the topic.

Some topics to try:

"Tell me about the history of space exploration" "When were important fossils discovered?" "Show me when all the nintendo consoles were released"

For now the generated events must be "known" by the LLM. One idea to improve event generation is to hook the AI up to a Wikipedia MCP server or something.

Also interested in adding features like 'expand on this event' or 'show more events between these two'

Help build it: https://github.com/MichaelMilstead/timeline-of-everything

mdp2021 360 days ago |

Suggestions:

-- Improve the timeline marks for readability (use one row with a rounded scale - ...700, 800, 900, 1000, 1100... - and another row for the shown events - ...711, 960, 1112...; ditch the comma and the "CE/BCE". Or, create visualization options).

-- Also improve text readability - event titles should not overlap.

-- Avoid page layout jerks when clicking on items (depending e.g. on amount of rows in the "event description" box.

-- Add granularity of details ("most important events" vs "important events" vs "interesting events"...).

-- Add a mode in which all the "description" texts are listed in a table (instead of being constrained in a box, one at a time).

...

Very good job.

mdp2021 360 days ago | |

Update:

-- the «Let's explore the fascinating history [etc.], from its early beginnings to the next era. I'll create a timeline to illustrate the key events». Is fully redundant

milst 360 days ago | | |

True, and it says that almost every time... I'll do some prompting to stop that

milst 360 days ago | | |

updated the 'overview' generation

milst 360 days ago | |

thanks! Any ideas on how to get around overlapping titles? Was thinking maybe truncate with ellipses like "Some long titl..." but often there are too many events too close together for that to make a difference

JamesHist 353 days ago | | |

I feel your pain on the overlapping titles. When creating a timeline application, there's usually only a short time between 'let's connect to Wikidata' and needing to deal with live label clustering and deconfliction.

mdp2021 360 days ago | | |

A first idea could be, if you are using "nowrap", to have two event title rows. So it could be, top to bottom: event_year, event_rowabove, event_rowbelow, event_bullet, rounded_years.

optinghost 361 days ago |

interesting