6 ms·

Was it an indicator of the quality of the comments section? Looks like the percentages appeared, then HN went down briefly (server restart, sorry @dang), and n

by pshc 11y ago

Was it an indicator of the quality of the comments section? Looks like the percentages appeared, then HN went down briefly (server restart, sorry @dang), and now the percentages are gone.

dang 11y ago
> then HN went down We prefer to call that "restarting the server" :)
- spydum 11y ago
  I really admire you guys for keeping it simple. I have seen too many outages due to piss poor "high availability" design, which would have simply been avoided by not trying to be highly available! Damn, we really need a catchy term/phrase for that (besides ironic)
  - dang 11y ago
    Thank you. Praise for simplicity is high praise.
    - dredmorbius 11y ago
      As simple as possible. But no simpler.
      - dang 11y ago
        That's not usually the side anyone has trouble with.
        dredmorbius 11y ago
        In which case I'm nobody. I've criticised a number of projects for overcompressing the problem domain. Larry Wall's written on this eloquently. And I'm not criticising HN's server infrastructure. Earlier discussion of style/presentation somewhat. Though for that I'm as inclined to criticise overdesign as well -- mostly on other sites, though arguably table-based layouts are a kludge.
brudgers 11y ago
I think it may have been sentiment analysis. The low ranked threads appeared to have a more negative tone, at least during my quick anecdotal survey, and this thread was high ranked perhaps because people hadn't had time to create really long complaints.
- faizshah 11y ago
  It can't be sentiment analysis because some items didn't have any comments but still had a percentage. Some other clues that we have is that the percentage didn't correlate with the color and that pretty much all the recently submitted links didn't have percentages.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
jeo1234 11y ago
Seems unlikely, pretty hard to attached a computer created value to something like that.
- other_herbert 11y ago
  That's why you need debug output to see how it's doing :)
- adventured 11y ago
  In this case, you'd do it based on the upvoting and downvoting ratios of comments. 50 comments, with 15 grey comments = bad sentiment, lots of negativity, non-productive conversations etc. Then come up with a scoring algorithm, with red being volatile or bad sentiment so the moderators can spot them instantly visually.
codezero 11y ago
nope, there are examples of posts with a percentage that have no comments. Some of the percentages appear related to upvoter count. There is one with 9 upvoters and a percentage of 33. My guess is it's a measure of clique voting. X% of people voted on another story together. Not sure, that may be more complicated than needed, but it seems to be a percent measure of the upvoters.

by pshc 11y ago

Was it an indicator of the quality of the comments section? Looks like the percentages appeared, then HN went down briefly (server restart, sorry @dang), and now the percentages are gone.

dang 11y ago

> then HN went down We prefer to call that "restarting the server" :)

spydum 11y ago
I really admire you guys for keeping it simple. I have seen too many outages due to piss poor "high availability" design, which would have simply been avoided by not trying to be highly available! Damn, we really need a catchy term/phrase for that (besides ironic)
- dang 11y ago
  Thank you. Praise for simplicity is high praise.
  - dredmorbius 11y ago
    As simple as possible. But no simpler.
    - dang 11y ago
      That's not usually the side anyone has trouble with.
      - dredmorbius 11y ago
        In which case I'm nobody. I've criticised a number of projects for overcompressing the problem domain. Larry Wall's written on this eloquently. And I'm not criticising HN's server infrastructure. Earlier discussion of style/presentation somewhat. Though for that I'm as inclined to criticise overdesign as well -- mostly on other sites, though arguably table-based layouts are a kludge.

brudgers 11y ago

I think it may have been sentiment analysis. The low ranked threads appeared to have a more negative tone, at least during my quick anecdotal survey, and this thread was high ranked perhaps because people hadn't had time to create really long complaints.

faizshah 11y ago
It can't be sentiment analysis because some items didn't have any comments but still had a percentage. Some other clues that we have is that the percentage didn't correlate with the color and that pretty much all the recently submitted links didn't have percentages.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]

jeo1234 11y ago

Seems unlikely, pretty hard to attached a computer created value to something like that.

other_herbert 11y ago
That's why you need debug output to see how it's doing :)
adventured 11y ago
In this case, you'd do it based on the upvoting and downvoting ratios of comments. 50 comments, with 15 grey comments = bad sentiment, lots of negativity, non-productive conversations etc. Then come up with a scoring algorithm, with red being volatile or bad sentiment so the moderators can spot them instantly visually.

codezero 11y ago

nope, there are examples of posts with a percentage that have no comments. Some of the percentages appear related to upvoter count. There is one with 9 upvoters and a percentage of 33. My guess is it's a measure of clique voting. X% of people voted on another story together. Not sure, that may be more complicated than needed, but it seems to be a percent measure of the upvoters.