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Show HN: I ran sentiment analysis on Show HN comments and got the meanest ones

78 points by walz 8y ago

michaelmior 8y ago
It would also be great to see the most positive comments!
kunimi 8y ago
Quick question. How does your sentiment analysis treat the following two sentences? I fucking hate this thing. VS I fucking love this thing.
- anoncoward111 8y ago
  It would have to somehow know that "fucking" in this case is being used as an adverb similar to "really", e.g "I really love dogs". Another tough one would be "I don't fucking hate dogs", which actually means you like them. The sentence needs to be parsed together, not word for word :)
  - yeleti 8y ago
    "I don't fucking hate dogs" A double negative is a positive.
    - anoncoward111 8y ago
      Technically this isn't a double negative, but you are right that the negative connotation of "hate" is reversed by "don't". "I don't have nothing" is a double negative. In "proper" English (whatever that means ;p) , the correct phrasing would be "I don't have anything" or "I have nothing".
    - rectangletangle 8y ago
      This does kind of start to adopt a counter-accusative tone, which could be interpreted as negative. Though it would entirely depend on context. The expletive just makes it sound angry overall.
      - blattimwind 8y ago
        "I don't fucking hate dogs!!" sounds like something yelled with a raised fist-finger in a dispute about dog shit on the lawn between neighbours in some lowly apartment complex.
- qbrass 8y ago
  >this shit is wayyy too fucking cool....next snapchat! >-8 sentiment, gailees 5 years ago in reply to "Show HN: Vinepeek - watch the world in realtime in 6 second snippets" Like that?
- supermdguy 8y ago
  Looks like it's using hardcoded word/phrase scores based on AFINN-165[0] Your example is actually built in: https://github.com/thisandagain/sentiment/blob/251bea96190ec347e789a4bba1f50360f7c7a04b/languages/en/labels.json#L1395 https://github.com/thisandagain/sentiment/blob/251bea96190ec... [0]: http://www2.imm.dtu.dk/pubdb/views/publication_details.php?id=6010 http://www2.imm.dtu.dk/pubdb/views/publication_details.php?i...
- walz 8y ago
  I just ran this though and "I fucking hate this thing" has a -7 score, and "I fucking love this thing" is -1. "Fucking" and "hate" is negative, but "love" is positive and adds to the score. It would be improved if it could tell the difference, "fuck" itself definitely sounds negative but "fucking" can almost mean anything
brudgers 8y ago
Looks like a cool project, but I can't scroll very far down the site before my browser crashes. I've reproduced this several times, here's the terminal output if it helps: $ conkeror https://alpha.trycarbide.com https://alpha.trycarbide.com ...... JavaScript strict warning: https://alpha.trycarbide.com/ https://alpha.trycarbide.com/, line 603: SyntaxError: test for equality (==) mistyped as assignment (=)? fault.... To me, this is a good ShowHN comment...on the other hand, it might say something about software error messages.
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago
  The further down you scroll the more the negativity becomes hit or miss.
- NathanKP 8y ago
  It's not a good comment if you consider that the browser crash they were experiencing wasn't even the website's fault, it was the browser being buggy. The JavaScript error that they copied from the console was an error from inside the Conkeror browser itself (that browser is written mainly in JS). So the OP was complaining to the Show HN creator about the failings of a buggy, non-maintained (in the last 6 years) non-mainstream browser that they choose to use to view the website. Unfortunately I have seen that type of comment quite a bit on some of the Show HN threads: someone complains that the site doesn't work without JavaScript, or doesn't work with their bizarre non standard web browsing setup.
  - brudgers 8y ago
    Sorry for not being clear. From a sentiment standpoint, it's good, and that's the relevant context for my comment. [0] From a technical standpoint, it's gray. People land on both ends of the supported browser spectrum [1]...and all over the middle. Likewise with graceful degradation. Anyway, while Conkeror support is certainly near one end of the technical goodwill spectrum, I think discovery via "ShowHN" is probably better than via an upset customer. [1]: "Best viewed in IE6/Netscape" was standard at one point. Never mind the recent trend of jackassware "Upgrade to a modern browser" popups for anyone not using Chrome.
tmaly 8y ago
I would love to see the top nasty comments for the day similar to http://hckrnews.com/ http://hckrnews.com/ and how it ranks
deleted 8y ago
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osrec 8y ago
When I do my next Show HN, and the negativity gets too much to take, this will be a good resource to turn to, in order to feel a little better about myself (unless, of course, I end up at the top of your list)!
- stcredzero 8y ago
  The site is down now. I was going to see if I was on yet another HN leaderboard!
CodeWriter23 8y ago
Looks like your algorithm is classifying some neutral-toned problem solving type feedback as “mean”. Personally, that’s exactly why I would do a Show HN. Examples “Looks like a cool project, but I can't scroll very far down the site before my browser crashes. I've reproduced this several times, here's the terminal output if it helps: $ conkeror https://alpha.trycarbide.com https://alpha.trycarbide.com ...... JavaScript strict warning: https://alpha.trycarbide.com/ https://alpha.trycarbide.com/, line 603: SyntaxError: test for equality (==) mistyped as assignment (=)? fault.... -16 sentiment, chriswarbo 2 years ago in reply to "Show HN: Carbide – A New Programming Environment" “just filed an issue - but the error message is pretty obnoxious for a catch all- bound to the $(window) error event is a catch all error that blames me for not having enough data (56 public repos not enough?) This means that anyone who knows this url and decides to look me up will see a message accusing me of being a non-producer if anything goes wrong with the resume -14 sentiment, beezee 6 years ago in reply to "Show HN: My Github rsum" ...those were within the first 10. If this similarly neutral-toned problem solving type report makes me mean in your algorithm’s view, that is a label I shall wear with pride.
noobermin 8y ago
Even despite the false positives as pointed out in other comments, I'm delightfully surprised that the worst it gets is around <15% negative comments. Sometimes, HN seems to cynical to me, at least the comments that float up to the top do. What would be interesting is negative comments weighted by the place in the comment section (since you can't see upvoted scores).
- jbob2000 8y ago
  The site is blocked for me at work, but if he didn't include shadow banned comments, then he's missing the biggest pool of potentially negative comments.
Nasrudith 8y ago
It is funny how polite mentions of crashes are regarded so negatively by it compared to messages. Now I wonder what can be said to get an overwhelmingly positive sentiment while being not just rude but downright horrifying messages. Say "I hope you enjoy eating your family." Reminds me of the one account of an essay question grading program's unique flaw where it scored higher with every mention of orangutans with no regard to relevance or possibily even grammar.
- tahw 8y ago
  Do you have a source on the orangutan grader? That sounds like an hilarious read.
  - Nasrudith 8y ago
    Sadly it was a while ago - the closest I could find was a MIT one mentioning essay graders judging by length and connective words allowing for properly structured nonsense to be judged as good writing. https://www.theguardian.com/education/mortarboard/2013/may/24/automated-marking-bad-for-essays https://www.theguardian.com/education/mortarboard/2013/may/2... I guess orangutan is a sufficiently long word that replacing most nouns with it would improve your score.
- walz 8y ago
  When people copy and paste error messages into the comments, they usually contain stuff like "kill", "fatal" or "stopped" which the analysis thinks is negative
- Crespyl 8y ago
  The grading program may have been written by a librarian.
  - btschaegg 8y ago
    Of course, no one would ever look too far into the matter. We’ve got the only librarian who can rip off your arm with his leg. People respect that.
lukev 8y ago
This kind of automated or rule-based analysis is not sufficiently smart to use as any kind of moderation tool. And it won't be until it can interpret semantic content as well as recognize patterns. Consider the following exchange: Person 1: Hello! I just wanted to chime in and make you aware of the fact that according to some very cool research <link>, people with sub-equatorial ancestry exhibit markedly lower test scores, in fact very similar to many of the great apes! Your mileage may vary, but in my humble opinion I would never hire someone or work with someone from that demographic. Person 2: Shut up and go away, you racist prick. This pattern plays out on twitter fairly regularly, and it's usually Person 2 who gets moderated, despite the fact that the content of their message is actually more appropriate and a net positive for the community (given the context.) Meanwhile, as long as it's polite, actual hate speech can make it through most of these filters. I've heard this referred to as the "polite Nazi" problem, and it's quite real.
- repolfx 8y ago
  It sounds like what you want is not sentiment analysis but rather some sort of political-correctness analysis, which rather than identifying aggressive language identifies "wrongthink". I suspect you're the sort of person who would have torn down the signs 4channers put up last year saying "It's OK to be white", because despite the obviously anodyne and correct content of the message, you would have interpreted it as "polite Nazi".
  - happytoexplain 8y ago
    I thought his point was interesting and practical, and that he used a non-controversial example. The problem he's describing is probably impossible to solve because real examples aren't so obvious, but it seems like you jumped to the conclusion that he would be willing to accept the downside of such a system in practice (punishing people who are in fact acting in good faith, and not just hiding hatred behind apparently rational wording), and you seem to be personally attacking him. However, I can only say that by assuming from the way you wrote it that you believe the 4channers you referenced were by-and-large acting in good faith. You should be more clear if that's what you're saying, since that would be a surprising conclusion to me. From everything I saw and heard, that movement seemed to be dominated by the usual hatred, and "It's OK to be white", while ostensibly an addressal of very real problems, was really just a slogan that's unassailable outside of any other context and therefore easy to hide behind.
misterbowfinger 8y ago
I'm confused how this comment got rated "-10": I use Backblaze now and once I get my NAS, I’ll probably end up using a B2 based backup. But let’s make an honest comparison. Backblaze does not replicate your data across data centers. The standard S3 storage class does (0.23/gb). The comparible storage class for S3 is one zone infrequent access (.01/gb). B2 still comes out ahead, but I wouldn’t use either one for primary storage. For thier suggested “3-2-1” backup strategy, sure. Then again, just for backup, I could use S3 glacier for $.004/gb. That’s cheaper than B2 and I get multiple AZ storage. The data charges would be higher - but its backup. If catastrophe struck and I lost my primary and my local backups, getting my data fast is the last thing I would worry about. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17407275 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17407275
- scarface74 8y ago
  I was about to mention that comment. Especially since it is mine. I actually said that I’m a happy Backblaze customer, and couldn’t see why it was considered so negative.
- soared 8y ago
  > does not > I wouldn't use > then again > catastrophe > struck > worry I can see it. If you bag-of-words'd it there are a lot of negative words used and effectively no positive words.
jancsika 8y ago
> The most negative ones are shown below. The message that is the third most negative by this metric is the following: > Looks like a cool project, but I can't scroll very far down the site before my browser crashes. I've reproduced this several times, here's the terminal output if it helps: $ conkeror https://alpha.trycarbide.com https://alpha.trycarbide.com ...... JavaScript strict warning: https://alpha.trycarbide.com/ https://alpha.trycarbide.com/, line 603: SyntaxError: test for equality (==) mistyped as assignment (=)? fault.... That is clearly a false positive.
- repolfx 8y ago
  It's probably picking up on words like "Looks ... cool ... but", "crashes", "I can't", "strict", "warning", "mistyped", "fault".
- craftyguy 8y ago
  My favorite is #5 from the top, where a user DMCA'd themselves to get yahoo to delete some website they created previously: > I used to have a Geocities containing weird bad poetry I wrote when I was a teenager. I forgot about it, until years later I stumbled upon it again. I was embarrassed. I asked Yahoo to delete it. But I'd forgotten the password, and I'd used fake personal details (wrong date of birth) to create the account, and I couldn't remember what the fake info was, so they refused to delete it because I couldn't verify that I was who I said I was. What do I do? I hit on a solution. I decided to DMCA myself. I sent Yahoo a DMCA takedown request for my old Geocities, and straight away it disappeared. Mission accomplished. Again, not negative at all, IMHO.
  - DoofusOfDeath 8y ago
    I find something deeply poetic about the post that you quoted. It somehow reminds me of haiku.
  - russh 8y ago
    Yeah, been there done that. I once created a fake neo-nazi like web site with the same name of our Dark Age of Camelot guild. Mythic had a no guild name change policy at the time and we wanted to change the name. I sent off a trouble ticket to customer support with the link to the "newly discovered" site and we had a new name in less then an hour.
scarface74 8y ago
I’m no expert in the field - I’ve only watched a few videos - but the example I’ve seen is where they use a movie’s rating by a person (1-5) and their comments to train a model and then use the model to determine sentiment analysis. Unfortunately, since AFAIK their isn’t a way to determine how many points a post earned except for your own, he couldn’t do that.
lowhangingnuts 8y ago
I see that these are only comments that weren't flagged. Which means you missed many gems that @dang - HN's resident comment NAZI - flagged to promote his forced narrative.
shove 8y ago
I consider it a personal failure of character not to have at least gotten an honorable mention ;)
libeclipse 8y ago
The irony here is amazing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11082337 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11082337
crsv 8y ago
This is pretty cool - I'd love to see similar analysis for truly "contentious" comments, wherein there were an almost equal but large amount of upvoting and downvoting, controlled for accounts that have the ability to do either.
anonytrary 8y ago
> how are you going to avoid head hunters' spam, either as fake candidates to discover new clients or with fake offers for CV mining? Was given a sentiment of -9, but I'd say the sentiment is closer to 0. Anyway, it's clear there are a ton of false positives, but overall, this was a really neat idea and it would definitely be interesting to further index the posts.
CM30 8y ago
Huh, so apparently the day with the highest percentage of mean comments is Sunday. Anyone want to have a guess as to why that may be the case? Personally, I'd expect people to least happy on Monday morning or something, not the second day they usually get a rest that week. Similarly confused as to why everyone is supposedly so positive on Wednesday...
- everdev 8y ago
  A few guesses: 1. People who got into family fights over the weekend 2. People who loved online for a minute and got an upsetting work email and are dreading the coming work week. 3. People who feel isolated or bored and are online instead of enjoying their weekend. Would be curious to see if this is random noise though it if it's consistent year to year.
- joshuak 8y ago
  My guess would be that a larger percentage of respondents are not professionals in the field. The pros are afk.
- abjorn 8y ago
  I'm wondering how this compares to the frequency of any comments by day. It could be that more comments are posted on Sunday in general, and the least on Wednesday.
  - walz 8y ago
    The negativeness is a percent (number of negative comments divided by number of total comments). I don't think the data is too significant though, because they are all + or - 5 percent of each other
- lylecubed 8y ago
  The difference between the most negative day (14.18%) and the least negative day (10.66%) is very small.
- corobo 8y ago
  Smonday - the period of time where you realise your weekend is coming to an end and you have to go back to work tomorrow
glitcher 8y ago
Great job, love the "Y tho?" logo :)
- walz 8y ago
  Haha thanks :)
bumholio 8y ago
I hope you realize there is a built in sentiment analyzer on HN, based on highly advanced, natural intelligence algorithms. Your filter actually seems to dig strongly opinionated posts. They are not automatically bad, and they can be quite good.
blattimwind 8y ago
For some reason there is a .nobreak class that's actually enabling word breaks. Weird! And it even goes one step further and enables "word-break: break-all", so that the renderer will break all your nice words apart anywhere. That's not nice. (Yes, this was a half-arsed attempt to match the "negative sentiment tone" without actually being mean ;)
- walz 8y ago
  Haha, thanks for sounding nice :) I added that because some comments had really long URLs, so I had to enable breaks so the page wouldn't be really wide, more so on phones. Didn't realize that it added hyphens to words, thanks for pointing that out, it's fixed now
estsauver 8y ago
A comment on my own show HN got flagged, which is kind of funny.
DoYouEvenLFTR 8y ago
Sure, lets all push for that "supernice" community vibe that avoids any and all controversy by giving numerical means to point out and grounds to get rid of those members raising tough and controversial discourse. Push it into the fucking ground! Get rid of people like me, like every other platform does to provide a "high quality site for all members"! Curbstomp the undesireables for the sake of the greater community (even though it's actually to avoid political fallout and protect the shareholders than the community). It doesn't matter everyone has their proverbial nuts cut off if it happens to foster an "inclusive" community. This is TOTALLY not like China's social credit system, right guys?! PROTECT SOCIETY FROM THE UNDESIREBLE! COMMUNITY OVER THE INDIVIDUAL! COMMUNITY OVER THE INDIVIDUAL!! Fuck you if you think this is anything but a garbage idea that fosters virtue-signaling and appropriates the status quo. I'd rather be banned from this place and have a shit social-credit score than be part of the system. Watch me get compared to the alt-right, my comment deleted and perma-banned from HN for being "rude" -- which completely misses the entire point of this post. It's really easy to rationalize removing someone if he's "undesirable". Sure the alt-right thinks LGBTs are "undesireable", but they always fail to point out the exact same hypocritcal behavior by people like the guy who made this system: the establishment of an undesireable class, and the (beginning of) rationalization to remove them. Food for thought: Homosexuals, jews and communists all were "undesired" in their time and place. Identity politics is a dangerously slippery slope and modern America -- the entire west is full of it. Wake the fuck up, quit that shit. PS: Fuck you you fucking fucks, give me the worst fucking score you can give me. Come on! Do it! I'd rather you'd be busy purging me than the others! Can't argue with crazy!
sam0x17 8y ago
I think it's really funny how most of the comments in this list are genuine critiques and concerns, that get downvoted by toxic users. I went through and upvoted about half of them.
lylecubed 8y ago
I'd love to see how HN's 14% negative comments compare to youtube or reddit.
dangle 8y ago
I'm very happy to report that most sentiment analysis is awesomely, incredibly, even beautifully inane.
DoYouEvenLFTR 8y ago
Sure, lets all push for that "supernice" community vibe that avoids any and all controversy by giving numerical means to point out and grounds to get rid of those members raising tough and controversial discourse. Push it into the fucking ground! Get rid of people like me, like every other platform does to provide a "high quality site for all members"! Curbstomp the undesireables for the sake of the greater community (even though it's actually to avoid political fallout and protect the shareholders than the community). It doesn't matter everyone has their proverbial nuts cut off if it happens to foster an "inclusive" community. This is TOTALLY not like China's social credit system, right guys?! PROTECT SOCIETY FROM THE UNDESIREBLE! COMMUNITY OVER THE INDIVIDUAL! COMMUNITY OVER THE INDIVIDUAL!! Fuck you if you think this is anything but a garbage idea that fosters virtue-signaling and appropriates the status quo. I'd rather be banned from this place and have a shit social-credit score than be part of the system. Watch me get compared to the alt-right, my comment deleted and perma-banned from HN for being "rude" -- which completely misses the entire point of this post. It's really easy to rationalize removing someone if he's "undesirable". Sure the alt-right thinks LGBTs are "undesireable", but they always fail to point out the exact same hypocritcal behavior by people like the guy who made this system: the establishment of an undesireable class, and the (beginning of) rationalization to remove them. Food for thought: Homosexuals, jews and communists all were "undesired" in their time and place. Identity politics is a dangerously slippery slope and modern America -- the entire west is full of it. Wake the fuck up, quit that shit. PS: Fuck you you fucking fucks, give me the worst fucking score you can give me. Come on! Do it! I'd rather you'd be busy purging me than the others! Can't argue with crazy!
deleted 8y ago
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78 points by walz 8y ago

It would also be great to see the most positive comments!

Quick question. How does your sentiment analysis treat the following two sentences? I fucking hate this thing. VS I fucking love this thing.

anoncoward111 8y ago
It would have to somehow know that "fucking" in this case is being used as an adverb similar to "really", e.g "I really love dogs". Another tough one would be "I don't fucking hate dogs", which actually means you like them. The sentence needs to be parsed together, not word for word :)
- yeleti 8y ago
  "I don't fucking hate dogs" A double negative is a positive.
  - anoncoward111 8y ago
    Technically this isn't a double negative, but you are right that the negative connotation of "hate" is reversed by "don't". "I don't have nothing" is a double negative. In "proper" English (whatever that means ;p) , the correct phrasing would be "I don't have anything" or "I have nothing".
  - rectangletangle 8y ago
    This does kind of start to adopt a counter-accusative tone, which could be interpreted as negative. Though it would entirely depend on context. The expletive just makes it sound angry overall.
    - blattimwind 8y ago
      "I don't fucking hate dogs!!" sounds like something yelled with a raised fist-finger in a dispute about dog shit on the lawn between neighbours in some lowly apartment complex.
qbrass 8y ago
>this shit is wayyy too fucking cool....next snapchat! >-8 sentiment, gailees 5 years ago in reply to "Show HN: Vinepeek - watch the world in realtime in 6 second snippets" Like that?
supermdguy 8y ago
Looks like it's using hardcoded word/phrase scores based on AFINN-165[0] Your example is actually built in: https://github.com/thisandagain/sentiment/blob/251bea96190ec347e789a4bba1f50360f7c7a04b/languages/en/labels.json#L1395 https://github.com/thisandagain/sentiment/blob/251bea96190ec... [0]: http://www2.imm.dtu.dk/pubdb/views/publication_details.php?id=6010 http://www2.imm.dtu.dk/pubdb/views/publication_details.php?i...
walz 8y ago
I just ran this though and "I fucking hate this thing" has a -7 score, and "I fucking love this thing" is -1. "Fucking" and "hate" is negative, but "love" is positive and adds to the score. It would be improved if it could tell the difference, "fuck" itself definitely sounds negative but "fucking" can almost mean anything

brudgers 8y ago

Looks like a cool project, but I can't scroll very far down the site before my browser crashes. I've reproduced this several times, here's the terminal output if it helps: $ conkeror https://alpha.trycarbide.com https://alpha.trycarbide.com ...... JavaScript strict warning: https://alpha.trycarbide.com/ https://alpha.trycarbide.com/, line 603: SyntaxError: test for equality (==) mistyped as assignment (=)? fault.... To me, this is a good ShowHN comment...on the other hand, it might say something about software error messages.

dsfyu404ed 8y ago
The further down you scroll the more the negativity becomes hit or miss.
NathanKP 8y ago
It's not a good comment if you consider that the browser crash they were experiencing wasn't even the website's fault, it was the browser being buggy. The JavaScript error that they copied from the console was an error from inside the Conkeror browser itself (that browser is written mainly in JS). So the OP was complaining to the Show HN creator about the failings of a buggy, non-maintained (in the last 6 years) non-mainstream browser that they choose to use to view the website. Unfortunately I have seen that type of comment quite a bit on some of the Show HN threads: someone complains that the site doesn't work without JavaScript, or doesn't work with their bizarre non standard web browsing setup.
- brudgers 8y ago
  Sorry for not being clear. From a sentiment standpoint, it's good, and that's the relevant context for my comment. [0] From a technical standpoint, it's gray. People land on both ends of the supported browser spectrum [1]...and all over the middle. Likewise with graceful degradation. Anyway, while Conkeror support is certainly near one end of the technical goodwill spectrum, I think discovery via "ShowHN" is probably better than via an upset customer. [1]: "Best viewed in IE6/Netscape" was standard at one point. Never mind the recent trend of jackassware "Upgrade to a modern browser" popups for anyone not using Chrome.

tmaly 8y ago

I would love to see the top nasty comments for the day similar to http://hckrnews.com/ http://hckrnews.com/ and how it ranks

deleted 8y ago

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osrec 8y ago

When I do my next Show HN, and the negativity gets too much to take, this will be a good resource to turn to, in order to feel a little better about myself (unless, of course, I end up at the top of your list)!

stcredzero 8y ago
The site is down now. I was going to see if I was on yet another HN leaderboard!

CodeWriter23 8y ago

Looks like your algorithm is classifying some neutral-toned problem solving type feedback as “mean”. Personally, that’s exactly why I would do a Show HN. Examples “Looks like a cool project, but I can't scroll very far down the site before my browser crashes. I've reproduced this several times, here's the terminal output if it helps: $ conkeror https://alpha.trycarbide.com https://alpha.trycarbide.com ...... JavaScript strict warning: https://alpha.trycarbide.com/ https://alpha.trycarbide.com/, line 603: SyntaxError: test for equality (==) mistyped as assignment (=)? fault.... -16 sentiment, chriswarbo 2 years ago in reply to "Show HN: Carbide – A New Programming Environment" “just filed an issue - but the error message is pretty obnoxious for a catch all- bound to the $(window) error event is a catch all error that blames me for not having enough data (56 public repos not enough?) This means that anyone who knows this url and decides to look me up will see a message accusing me of being a non-producer if anything goes wrong with the resume -14 sentiment, beezee 6 years ago in reply to "Show HN: My Github rsum" ...those were within the first 10. If this similarly neutral-toned problem solving type report makes me mean in your algorithm’s view, that is a label I shall wear with pride.

noobermin 8y ago

Even despite the false positives as pointed out in other comments, I'm delightfully surprised that the worst it gets is around <15% negative comments. Sometimes, HN seems to cynical to me, at least the comments that float up to the top do. What would be interesting is negative comments weighted by the place in the comment section (since you can't see upvoted scores).

jbob2000 8y ago
The site is blocked for me at work, but if he didn't include shadow banned comments, then he's missing the biggest pool of potentially negative comments.

Nasrudith 8y ago

It is funny how polite mentions of crashes are regarded so negatively by it compared to messages. Now I wonder what can be said to get an overwhelmingly positive sentiment while being not just rude but downright horrifying messages. Say "I hope you enjoy eating your family." Reminds me of the one account of an essay question grading program's unique flaw where it scored higher with every mention of orangutans with no regard to relevance or possibily even grammar.

tahw 8y ago
Do you have a source on the orangutan grader? That sounds like an hilarious read.
- Nasrudith 8y ago
  Sadly it was a while ago - the closest I could find was a MIT one mentioning essay graders judging by length and connective words allowing for properly structured nonsense to be judged as good writing. https://www.theguardian.com/education/mortarboard/2013/may/24/automated-marking-bad-for-essays https://www.theguardian.com/education/mortarboard/2013/may/2... I guess orangutan is a sufficiently long word that replacing most nouns with it would improve your score.
walz 8y ago
When people copy and paste error messages into the comments, they usually contain stuff like "kill", "fatal" or "stopped" which the analysis thinks is negative
Crespyl 8y ago
The grading program may have been written by a librarian.
- btschaegg 8y ago
  Of course, no one would ever look too far into the matter. We’ve got the only librarian who can rip off your arm with his leg. People respect that.

lukev 8y ago

This kind of automated or rule-based analysis is not sufficiently smart to use as any kind of moderation tool. And it won't be until it can interpret semantic content as well as recognize patterns. Consider the following exchange: Person 1: Hello! I just wanted to chime in and make you aware of the fact that according to some very cool research <link>, people with sub-equatorial ancestry exhibit markedly lower test scores, in fact very similar to many of the great apes! Your mileage may vary, but in my humble opinion I would never hire someone or work with someone from that demographic. Person 2: Shut up and go away, you racist prick. This pattern plays out on twitter fairly regularly, and it's usually Person 2 who gets moderated, despite the fact that the content of their message is actually more appropriate and a net positive for the community (given the context.) Meanwhile, as long as it's polite, actual hate speech can make it through most of these filters. I've heard this referred to as the "polite Nazi" problem, and it's quite real.

repolfx 8y ago
It sounds like what you want is not sentiment analysis but rather some sort of political-correctness analysis, which rather than identifying aggressive language identifies "wrongthink". I suspect you're the sort of person who would have torn down the signs 4channers put up last year saying "It's OK to be white", because despite the obviously anodyne and correct content of the message, you would have interpreted it as "polite Nazi".
- happytoexplain 8y ago
  I thought his point was interesting and practical, and that he used a non-controversial example. The problem he's describing is probably impossible to solve because real examples aren't so obvious, but it seems like you jumped to the conclusion that he would be willing to accept the downside of such a system in practice (punishing people who are in fact acting in good faith, and not just hiding hatred behind apparently rational wording), and you seem to be personally attacking him. However, I can only say that by assuming from the way you wrote it that you believe the 4channers you referenced were by-and-large acting in good faith. You should be more clear if that's what you're saying, since that would be a surprising conclusion to me. From everything I saw and heard, that movement seemed to be dominated by the usual hatred, and "It's OK to be white", while ostensibly an addressal of very real problems, was really just a slogan that's unassailable outside of any other context and therefore easy to hide behind.

misterbowfinger 8y ago

I'm confused how this comment got rated "-10": I use Backblaze now and once I get my NAS, I’ll probably end up using a B2 based backup. But let’s make an honest comparison. Backblaze does not replicate your data across data centers. The standard S3 storage class does (0.23/gb). The comparible storage class for S3 is one zone infrequent access (.01/gb). B2 still comes out ahead, but I wouldn’t use either one for primary storage. For thier suggested “3-2-1” backup strategy, sure. Then again, just for backup, I could use S3 glacier for $.004/gb. That’s cheaper than B2 and I get multiple AZ storage. The data charges would be higher - but its backup. If catastrophe struck and I lost my primary and my local backups, getting my data fast is the last thing I would worry about. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17407275 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17407275

scarface74 8y ago
I was about to mention that comment. Especially since it is mine. I actually said that I’m a happy Backblaze customer, and couldn’t see why it was considered so negative.
soared 8y ago
> does not > I wouldn't use > then again > catastrophe > struck > worry I can see it. If you bag-of-words'd it there are a lot of negative words used and effectively no positive words.

jancsika 8y ago

> The most negative ones are shown below. The message that is the third most negative by this metric is the following: > Looks like a cool project, but I can't scroll very far down the site before my browser crashes. I've reproduced this several times, here's the terminal output if it helps: $ conkeror https://alpha.trycarbide.com https://alpha.trycarbide.com ...... JavaScript strict warning: https://alpha.trycarbide.com/ https://alpha.trycarbide.com/, line 603: SyntaxError: test for equality (==) mistyped as assignment (=)? fault.... That is clearly a false positive.

repolfx 8y ago
It's probably picking up on words like "Looks ... cool ... but", "crashes", "I can't", "strict", "warning", "mistyped", "fault".
craftyguy 8y ago
My favorite is #5 from the top, where a user DMCA'd themselves to get yahoo to delete some website they created previously: > I used to have a Geocities containing weird bad poetry I wrote when I was a teenager. I forgot about it, until years later I stumbled upon it again. I was embarrassed. I asked Yahoo to delete it. But I'd forgotten the password, and I'd used fake personal details (wrong date of birth) to create the account, and I couldn't remember what the fake info was, so they refused to delete it because I couldn't verify that I was who I said I was. What do I do? I hit on a solution. I decided to DMCA myself. I sent Yahoo a DMCA takedown request for my old Geocities, and straight away it disappeared. Mission accomplished. Again, not negative at all, IMHO.
- DoofusOfDeath 8y ago
  I find something deeply poetic about the post that you quoted. It somehow reminds me of haiku.
- russh 8y ago
  Yeah, been there done that. I once created a fake neo-nazi like web site with the same name of our Dark Age of Camelot guild. Mythic had a no guild name change policy at the time and we wanted to change the name. I sent off a trouble ticket to customer support with the link to the "newly discovered" site and we had a new name in less then an hour.

scarface74 8y ago

I’m no expert in the field - I’ve only watched a few videos - but the example I’ve seen is where they use a movie’s rating by a person (1-5) and their comments to train a model and then use the model to determine sentiment analysis. Unfortunately, since AFAIK their isn’t a way to determine how many points a post earned except for your own, he couldn’t do that.

lowhangingnuts 8y ago

I see that these are only comments that weren't flagged. Which means you missed many gems that @dang - HN's resident comment NAZI - flagged to promote his forced narrative.

shove 8y ago

I consider it a personal failure of character not to have at least gotten an honorable mention ;)

libeclipse 8y ago

The irony here is amazing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11082337 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11082337

crsv 8y ago

This is pretty cool - I'd love to see similar analysis for truly "contentious" comments, wherein there were an almost equal but large amount of upvoting and downvoting, controlled for accounts that have the ability to do either.

anonytrary 8y ago

> how are you going to avoid head hunters' spam, either as fake candidates to discover new clients or with fake offers for CV mining? Was given a sentiment of -9, but I'd say the sentiment is closer to 0. Anyway, it's clear there are a ton of false positives, but overall, this was a really neat idea and it would definitely be interesting to further index the posts.

CM30 8y ago

Huh, so apparently the day with the highest percentage of mean comments is Sunday. Anyone want to have a guess as to why that may be the case? Personally, I'd expect people to least happy on Monday morning or something, not the second day they usually get a rest that week. Similarly confused as to why everyone is supposedly so positive on Wednesday...

everdev 8y ago
A few guesses: 1. People who got into family fights over the weekend 2. People who loved online for a minute and got an upsetting work email and are dreading the coming work week. 3. People who feel isolated or bored and are online instead of enjoying their weekend. Would be curious to see if this is random noise though it if it's consistent year to year.
joshuak 8y ago
My guess would be that a larger percentage of respondents are not professionals in the field. The pros are afk.
abjorn 8y ago
I'm wondering how this compares to the frequency of any comments by day. It could be that more comments are posted on Sunday in general, and the least on Wednesday.
- walz 8y ago
  The negativeness is a percent (number of negative comments divided by number of total comments). I don't think the data is too significant though, because they are all + or - 5 percent of each other
lylecubed 8y ago
The difference between the most negative day (14.18%) and the least negative day (10.66%) is very small.
corobo 8y ago
Smonday - the period of time where you realise your weekend is coming to an end and you have to go back to work tomorrow

glitcher 8y ago

Great job, love the "Y tho?" logo :)

walz 8y ago
Haha thanks :)

bumholio 8y ago

I hope you realize there is a built in sentiment analyzer on HN, based on highly advanced, natural intelligence algorithms. Your filter actually seems to dig strongly opinionated posts. They are not automatically bad, and they can be quite good.

blattimwind 8y ago

For some reason there is a .nobreak class that's actually enabling word breaks. Weird! And it even goes one step further and enables "word-break: break-all", so that the renderer will break all your nice words apart anywhere. That's not nice. (Yes, this was a half-arsed attempt to match the "negative sentiment tone" without actually being mean ;)

walz 8y ago
Haha, thanks for sounding nice :) I added that because some comments had really long URLs, so I had to enable breaks so the page wouldn't be really wide, more so on phones. Didn't realize that it added hyphens to words, thanks for pointing that out, it's fixed now

estsauver 8y ago

A comment on my own show HN got flagged, which is kind of funny.

DoYouEvenLFTR 8y ago

Sure, lets all push for that "supernice" community vibe that avoids any and all controversy by giving numerical means to point out and grounds to get rid of those members raising tough and controversial discourse. Push it into the fucking ground! Get rid of people like me, like every other platform does to provide a "high quality site for all members"! Curbstomp the undesireables for the sake of the greater community (even though it's actually to avoid political fallout and protect the shareholders than the community). It doesn't matter everyone has their proverbial nuts cut off if it happens to foster an "inclusive" community. This is TOTALLY not like China's social credit system, right guys?! PROTECT SOCIETY FROM THE UNDESIREBLE! COMMUNITY OVER THE INDIVIDUAL! COMMUNITY OVER THE INDIVIDUAL!! Fuck you if you think this is anything but a garbage idea that fosters virtue-signaling and appropriates the status quo. I'd rather be banned from this place and have a shit social-credit score than be part of the system. Watch me get compared to the alt-right, my comment deleted and perma-banned from HN for being "rude" -- which completely misses the entire point of this post. It's really easy to rationalize removing someone if he's "undesirable". Sure the alt-right thinks LGBTs are "undesireable", but they always fail to point out the exact same hypocritcal behavior by people like the guy who made this system: the establishment of an undesireable class, and the (beginning of) rationalization to remove them. Food for thought: Homosexuals, jews and communists all were "undesired" in their time and place. Identity politics is a dangerously slippery slope and modern America -- the entire west is full of it. Wake the fuck up, quit that shit. PS: Fuck you you fucking fucks, give me the worst fucking score you can give me. Come on! Do it! I'd rather you'd be busy purging me than the others! Can't argue with crazy!

sam0x17 8y ago

I think it's really funny how most of the comments in this list are genuine critiques and concerns, that get downvoted by toxic users. I went through and upvoted about half of them.

lylecubed 8y ago

I'd love to see how HN's 14% negative comments compare to youtube or reddit.

dangle 8y ago

I'm very happy to report that most sentiment analysis is awesomely, incredibly, even beautifully inane.

DoYouEvenLFTR 8y ago

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