Show HN: The Timeline of Everything – see the history of any topic
5 milst 4 5/22/2025, 10:58:59 PM timeline-of-everything.milst.dev ↗
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
-- 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.