9 ms·

Building Hater News

120 points by chippy 12y ago

chippy 12y ago
The main submission was flagkilled so thought this, more technical post would be more on topic.
- pohl 12y ago
  It's too bad it was flagkilled, because it is an interesting project.
  - dang 12y ago
    We unkilled it so discussion can continue: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8517267 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8517267.
    - roghummal 12y ago
      Very gracious of you.
- lmm 12y ago
  Looks like even this much traffic was enough to take it down, so maybe it's just as well.
wdewind 12y ago
Google cached http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://kevinmcalear.com/thoughts/building-hater-news/ http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
mwfunk 12y ago
I can't evaluate how serious or useful this is but I really like the idea. Anything that might encourage more constructive discussions is a perfectly valid thing to explore. I love the idea of trying to characterize the contributions of different commenters based on their history, including my own. Not just for things like "hatefulness" or "incoherence", which is what this seems to be detecting, but other things as well, like "helpfulness" or "erudition" or apparent areas of interest.
- MarkPNeyer 12y ago
  https://github.com/neyer/dewDrop https://github.com/neyer/dewDrop may be up your ally - a formal language designed to make this sort of thing doable..
  - HashHishBang 12y ago
    Woah, I always pondered the idea of doing a formal language for this but it's awesome to see someone else's take on it. Thanks for the link.
- tjradcliffe 12y ago
  I have a dreadful fear that this will evolve into a system for trolls to keep score. "Dude! My h8r score is TWICE yours!"
  - tjradcliffe 12y ago
    Funnily enough, this comment how has my second-highest hate-score (the highest is a fairly level-headed comment on drug policy.) Apparently my cunning plan to fake being a nice person on HN is working.
- fit2rule 12y ago
  doubleplusgood, mini-citizen. language baduse, rectify!
KevinMcAlear 12y ago
A few things: 1. Thanks for posting my blog post @chippy. :) The actual app ( haternews.co ) kept getting booted off HN... 2. There have been a lot of interesting comments on the three threads on here. People pointed out some bugs and overall issues which I will be fixing (also, the site should not crash half as much now). This is just a fun side project I have been messing around with so I can get better at using data science in various applications. If you would like to help build it out for fun further let me know! Also, feel free to submit a bug or suggestion for an improvement if you really want to.(https://github.com/kevinmcalear/hater_news/issues https://github.com/kevinmcalear/hater_news/issues) 3. I wanted to build the "hater score" for two reasons. First, to see how accurately I could build a model to measure insulting comments in the wild and second (if it's accurate), to see how people would react to seeing how positive or negative they usually are on Hacker news (or other social networks). 4. I wanted to make sure everyone knows that just because something is your "Worst Comment" doesn't mean it is negative. Most people have very low scores and most of your comments are not identified as insulting. (It would be over 50% if it is actually an insulting comment.) So most people on HN are not actually haters. I just had a more "hater" focused design just for fun. There are in fact actual haters though, if you look hard enough. 5. Something I found interesting is clicking the "Back In The Day" checkbox. It takes your 50 oldest comments and analyses them, instead of your 50 most recent. 6. Finally, if you're not sure why some comments are getting ranked higher than others, feel free to look at the training data I used (it's from a kaggle competition from a while back.) and read my blog post. If you don't want to here are additional features I used on top of standard bag-of-words (CountVectorizer): * badwords_count – A count of bad words used in each comment. * n_words – A count of words used in each comment. * allcaps – A count of capital letters in each comment. * allcaps_ratio – A count of capital letters in each comment / the total words used in each comment. * bad_ratio – A count of bad words used in each comment / the total words used in each comment. * exclamation – A count of "!" used in each comment. * addressing – A count of "@" symbols used in each comment. * spaces – A count of spaces used in each comment. If you have suggestions on other features I could collect let me know! I'll also be building a way to get actual training data from HN itself and letting HN users determine if a comment is actually insulting or not so that the predictions constantly improve.
- joshschreuder 12y ago
guard-of-terra 12y ago
Why does hate have negative connotations? If someone did evil to me, and I can't fight back, what do I have besides hate? And the app in question doesn't work.
- mvc 12y ago
  Forget it and move on with your life?
  - serf 12y ago
    so, is that to say that hate can't add to a discussion? It can certainly detract, but I wouldn't be so quick to say that there are no benefits.
  - guard-of-terra 12y ago
    I'll walk knee deep in their spit then. If they can make evil to me and get away with it - why won't they? Hatred is like a spring - it will eventually go off. That's a mechanism of delayed defence.
- dsjoerg 12y ago
  On the internet, the native currency is attention. You fight back by refusing to pay them the attention they crave.
  - guard-of-terra 12y ago
    This doesn't solve the problem. They go on with doing evil to me.
- eCa 12y ago
  Because it is negative [1], even if it sometimes might be an appropriate response. [1] http://i.word.com/idictionary/hate http://i.word.com/idictionary/hate
- krapp 12y ago
  Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.
serf 12y ago
I like the idea -- sure wish I could try it. It hasn't worked since the original submission for me. I have a feeling I'm a hater.
- fleitz 12y ago
  Same here I swear a fucking lot in my posts, hopefully the swear word detector ranks me high. I hope this site stays up, seems lot more fun to game than karma, or rather it would be more challenging to garner karma and HP (hate points).
- timv 12y ago
  Sorry, you need to work harder on your hating. serf's Hater Score: 2.36% Of The Time Spent Hating. The worst comment: I wish that it showed the previous color scheme if I go back. As it stands I have to go back and then refresh with that URL. (firefox)
JoeAltmaier 12y ago
It'd be nice to see the score on a post before you post it - it could keep me from doing something I'll regret.
- mahmud 12y ago
  Most fleshware should have this preinstalled.
  - JoeAltmaier 12y ago
    Sure if I can read what I wrote objectively. Often not.
fleitz 12y ago
Yes! I love this idea, can you make it go back further and have a leader board?
- KevinMcAlear 12y ago
  Yes and yes. :) The problem with the first one is I have to make an individual API call for each comment currently. If you go past 50 comments it starts to get slowwww. For example, I tried to pull back all of @pg's comments... Bad idea. It's like 13,000 of them. Check it: https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/user/pg.json?print=pretty https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/user/pg.json?print=pre...
  - BWStearns 12y ago
    I think I've seen a few archives of HN comments. Maybe grab some of those and only make API calls for newer comments? Also preserve the comments from the API calls?
dmm 12y ago
This link points to a stupid blank page. I disable noscript and I get a stupid horse video. You suck!
- KevinMcAlear 12y ago
  scroll down.
  - w1ntermute 12y ago
    Whoosh
    - _broody 12y ago
      That's just textbook Poe's Law at work.
1123581321 12y ago
I got hater scores of around 2.5% on both my accounts. On each one, the most hated comment was the one where I took the most pains to explain that I liked the user's main point and was just trying to clarify/disagree with a small part, i.e., to be sure I was not dodging the central point. Reading them, they come off as passive-aggressive. I think that's a useful discovery for me. Thanks.
- sitkack 12y ago
  Don't be a douche. You just got chastised by a lame algorithm.
wgeorgecook 12y ago
I was really, really hoping that you built this in lisp.
- sbenario 12y ago
  (he tried to originally, but(
jjcm 12y ago
Small bug: It seems like the specific comments that you link to also include submissions, which once it encouters that it mismatches all the subsequent 2 character links with the comments they're associated with by an index of 1. I.E. AA -> links to comment beginning with AA BB -> links to comment beginning with BB CC -> links to a link the user submitted DD -> links to comment beginning with CC EE -> links to comment beginning with DD Very cool implementation though.
- KevinMcAlear 12y ago
  Thanks! Looking into it! :)
nailer 12y ago
My most hating comment is: 'Ah interesting re self - how did you find out about that?' Which I didn't think was particularly harsh.
mfkp 12y ago
I appreciate the irony of me posting this "hater" comment, but... my "most hateful" comment was this: "Thanks, would love to see your app when it's ready!" Not sure if it's ready for prime-time.
- smsm42 12y ago
  Maybe you're just not that good at hating ;)
- pluies_public 12y ago
  Maybe you should ease up on the sarcasm.
  - mfkp 12y ago
    No sarcasm there, just an earnest response to a comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7462010 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7462010
    - nacs 12y ago
      Think you missed the sarcasm in pluies_public's comment :)
stefantalpalaru 12y ago
I hate Hater News for giving me a hater score of only 5.48%!
Dewie 12y ago
> An error occurred in the application and your page could not be served. Please try again in a few moments. Your app sucks.
freditup 12y ago
Your website sucks. All the content is is smashed in a column with small width so I have to scroll left and right to read each paragraph. This despite there being gigantic 30% of the screen margins on each side. Try to build something even half-worthwhile next time you're at it. I could build a better website easily; you should go back to school.
- freditup 12y ago
  Intentionally hateful comment by the way ;) Just curious to see how much haternews picks up on it. Although the problem I describe with the content column is real, all the insults and drama isn't at all! For reference: http://imgur.com/St9hAqR http://imgur.com/St9hAqR Edit: My intentionally hateful comment shows up as being somewhat hateful, but not my most hateful comment. So not too bad!
  - KevinMcAlear 12y ago
    Haha. Awesome! :) I'll fix the site and I'll keep improving the model.
    - freditup 12y ago
      Screenshot is FF34 if that helps by the way. And just a fun side experiment idea: I'm curious how the IBM Watson User-Modeling service would stack up out-of-the-box against how you currently do things: https://ace.ng.bluemix.net/#/store/cloudOEPaneId=store&serviceOfferingGuid=e37fb381-4aa8-4b53-b5ef-ce975d9f646b https://ace.ng.bluemix.net/#/store/cloudOEPaneId=store&servi... http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developercloud/user-modeling.html http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developercl... Could make for an interesting blog post if you have the time!
      - KevinMcAlear 12y ago
        Interesting. I'll check it out, thanks!
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
wingerlang 12y ago
My most hateful comment was - "Yup"
platz 12y ago
I've been too lenient on my architectural taste lately as well. Looking forward to good discussion with the other architects at this site.
tomc1985 12y ago
Afraid of negativity much? Why do all these positive thinker optimist types insist on pushing their dogma on the rest of us? You happiness drones are nauseating. Grow up Also, might want to work on (simplify) your algo...
personjerry 12y ago
Clicking the quoted comment on the bottom of the page takes you to the wrong comment on HN.
Beltiras 12y ago
"Which profiling tool do you use to target your optimizations?", but then again I am a 2.97% hater ....
eigenrick 12y ago
Please point this at the kernel.org mailing lists. Thank you.
knd775 12y ago
It would be awesome if this was fast enough to run on every user. That way, you could make some sort of leaderboard for Haters.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

Building Hater News

120 points by chippy 12y ago

chippy 12y ago

The main submission was flagkilled so thought this, more technical post would be more on topic.

pohl 12y ago
It's too bad it was flagkilled, because it is an interesting project.
- dang 12y ago
  We unkilled it so discussion can continue: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8517267 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8517267.
  - roghummal 12y ago
    Very gracious of you.
lmm 12y ago
Looks like even this much traffic was enough to take it down, so maybe it's just as well.

wdewind 12y ago

Google cached http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://kevinmcalear.com/thoughts/building-hater-news/ http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

mwfunk 12y ago

I can't evaluate how serious or useful this is but I really like the idea. Anything that might encourage more constructive discussions is a perfectly valid thing to explore. I love the idea of trying to characterize the contributions of different commenters based on their history, including my own. Not just for things like "hatefulness" or "incoherence", which is what this seems to be detecting, but other things as well, like "helpfulness" or "erudition" or apparent areas of interest.

MarkPNeyer 12y ago
https://github.com/neyer/dewDrop https://github.com/neyer/dewDrop may be up your ally - a formal language designed to make this sort of thing doable..
- HashHishBang 12y ago
  Woah, I always pondered the idea of doing a formal language for this but it's awesome to see someone else's take on it. Thanks for the link.
tjradcliffe 12y ago
I have a dreadful fear that this will evolve into a system for trolls to keep score. "Dude! My h8r score is TWICE yours!"
- tjradcliffe 12y ago
  Funnily enough, this comment how has my second-highest hate-score (the highest is a fairly level-headed comment on drug policy.) Apparently my cunning plan to fake being a nice person on HN is working.
fit2rule 12y ago
doubleplusgood, mini-citizen. language baduse, rectify!

KevinMcAlear 12y ago

A few things: 1. Thanks for posting my blog post @chippy. :) The actual app ( haternews.co ) kept getting booted off HN... 2. There have been a lot of interesting comments on the three threads on here. People pointed out some bugs and overall issues which I will be fixing (also, the site should not crash half as much now). This is just a fun side project I have been messing around with so I can get better at using data science in various applications. If you would like to help build it out for fun further let me know! Also, feel free to submit a bug or suggestion for an improvement if you really want to.(https://github.com/kevinmcalear/hater_news/issues https://github.com/kevinmcalear/hater_news/issues) 3. I wanted to build the "hater score" for two reasons. First, to see how accurately I could build a model to measure insulting comments in the wild and second (if it's accurate), to see how people would react to seeing how positive or negative they usually are on Hacker news (or other social networks). 4. I wanted to make sure everyone knows that just because something is your "Worst Comment" doesn't mean it is negative. Most people have very low scores and most of your comments are not identified as insulting. (It would be over 50% if it is actually an insulting comment.) So most people on HN are not actually haters. I just had a more "hater" focused design just for fun. There are in fact actual haters though, if you look hard enough. 5. Something I found interesting is clicking the "Back In The Day" checkbox. It takes your 50 oldest comments and analyses them, instead of your 50 most recent. 6. Finally, if you're not sure why some comments are getting ranked higher than others, feel free to look at the training data I used (it's from a kaggle competition from a while back.) and read my blog post. If you don't want to here are additional features I used on top of standard bag-of-words (CountVectorizer): * badwords_count – A count of bad words used in each comment. * n_words – A count of words used in each comment. * allcaps – A count of capital letters in each comment. * allcaps_ratio – A count of capital letters in each comment / the total words used in each comment. * bad_ratio – A count of bad words used in each comment / the total words used in each comment. * exclamation – A count of "!" used in each comment. * addressing – A count of "@" symbols used in each comment. * spaces – A count of spaces used in each comment. If you have suggestions on other features I could collect let me know! I'll also be building a way to get actual training data from HN itself and letting HN users determine if a comment is actually insulting or not so that the predictions constantly improve.

joshschreuder 12y ago

guard-of-terra 12y ago

Why does hate have negative connotations? If someone did evil to me, and I can't fight back, what do I have besides hate? And the app in question doesn't work.

mvc 12y ago
Forget it and move on with your life?
- serf 12y ago
  so, is that to say that hate can't add to a discussion? It can certainly detract, but I wouldn't be so quick to say that there are no benefits.
- guard-of-terra 12y ago
  I'll walk knee deep in their spit then. If they can make evil to me and get away with it - why won't they? Hatred is like a spring - it will eventually go off. That's a mechanism of delayed defence.
dsjoerg 12y ago
On the internet, the native currency is attention. You fight back by refusing to pay them the attention they crave.
- guard-of-terra 12y ago
  This doesn't solve the problem. They go on with doing evil to me.
eCa 12y ago
Because it is negative [1], even if it sometimes might be an appropriate response. [1] http://i.word.com/idictionary/hate http://i.word.com/idictionary/hate
krapp 12y ago
Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.

serf 12y ago

I like the idea -- sure wish I could try it. It hasn't worked since the original submission for me. I have a feeling I'm a hater.

fleitz 12y ago
Same here I swear a fucking lot in my posts, hopefully the swear word detector ranks me high. I hope this site stays up, seems lot more fun to game than karma, or rather it would be more challenging to garner karma and HP (hate points).
timv 12y ago
Sorry, you need to work harder on your hating. serf's Hater Score: 2.36% Of The Time Spent Hating. The worst comment: I wish that it showed the previous color scheme if I go back. As it stands I have to go back and then refresh with that URL. (firefox)

JoeAltmaier 12y ago

It'd be nice to see the score on a post before you post it - it could keep me from doing something I'll regret.

mahmud 12y ago
Most fleshware should have this preinstalled.
- JoeAltmaier 12y ago
  Sure if I can read what I wrote objectively. Often not.

fleitz 12y ago

Yes! I love this idea, can you make it go back further and have a leader board?

KevinMcAlear 12y ago
Yes and yes. :) The problem with the first one is I have to make an individual API call for each comment currently. If you go past 50 comments it starts to get slowwww. For example, I tried to pull back all of @pg's comments... Bad idea. It's like 13,000 of them. Check it: https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/user/pg.json?print=pretty https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/user/pg.json?print=pre...
- BWStearns 12y ago
  I think I've seen a few archives of HN comments. Maybe grab some of those and only make API calls for newer comments? Also preserve the comments from the API calls?

dmm 12y ago

This link points to a stupid blank page. I disable noscript and I get a stupid horse video. You suck!

KevinMcAlear 12y ago
scroll down.
- w1ntermute 12y ago
  Whoosh
  - _broody 12y ago
    That's just textbook Poe's Law at work.

1123581321 12y ago

I got hater scores of around 2.5% on both my accounts. On each one, the most hated comment was the one where I took the most pains to explain that I liked the user's main point and was just trying to clarify/disagree with a small part, i.e., to be sure I was not dodging the central point. Reading them, they come off as passive-aggressive. I think that's a useful discovery for me. Thanks.

sitkack 12y ago
Don't be a douche. You just got chastised by a lame algorithm.

wgeorgecook 12y ago

I was really, really hoping that you built this in lisp.

sbenario 12y ago
(he tried to originally, but(

jjcm 12y ago

Small bug: It seems like the specific comments that you link to also include submissions, which once it encouters that it mismatches all the subsequent 2 character links with the comments they're associated with by an index of 1. I.E. AA -> links to comment beginning with AA BB -> links to comment beginning with BB CC -> links to a link the user submitted DD -> links to comment beginning with CC EE -> links to comment beginning with DD Very cool implementation though.

KevinMcAlear 12y ago
Thanks! Looking into it! :)

nailer 12y ago

My most hating comment is: 'Ah interesting re self - how did you find out about that?' Which I didn't think was particularly harsh.

mfkp 12y ago

I appreciate the irony of me posting this "hater" comment, but... my "most hateful" comment was this: "Thanks, would love to see your app when it's ready!" Not sure if it's ready for prime-time.

smsm42 12y ago
Maybe you're just not that good at hating ;)
pluies_public 12y ago
Maybe you should ease up on the sarcasm.
- mfkp 12y ago
  No sarcasm there, just an earnest response to a comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7462010 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7462010
  - nacs 12y ago
    Think you missed the sarcasm in pluies_public's comment :)

stefantalpalaru 12y ago

I hate Hater News for giving me a hater score of only 5.48%!

Dewie 12y ago

> An error occurred in the application and your page could not be served. Please try again in a few moments. Your app sucks.

freditup 12y ago

Your website sucks. All the content is is smashed in a column with small width so I have to scroll left and right to read each paragraph. This despite there being gigantic 30% of the screen margins on each side. Try to build something even half-worthwhile next time you're at it. I could build a better website easily; you should go back to school.

freditup 12y ago
Intentionally hateful comment by the way ;) Just curious to see how much haternews picks up on it. Although the problem I describe with the content column is real, all the insults and drama isn't at all! For reference: http://imgur.com/St9hAqR http://imgur.com/St9hAqR Edit: My intentionally hateful comment shows up as being somewhat hateful, but not my most hateful comment. So not too bad!
- KevinMcAlear 12y ago
  Haha. Awesome! :) I'll fix the site and I'll keep improving the model.
  - freditup 12y ago
    Screenshot is FF34 if that helps by the way. And just a fun side experiment idea: I'm curious how the IBM Watson User-Modeling service would stack up out-of-the-box against how you currently do things: https://ace.ng.bluemix.net/#/store/cloudOEPaneId=store&serviceOfferingGuid=e37fb381-4aa8-4b53-b5ef-ce975d9f646b https://ace.ng.bluemix.net/#/store/cloudOEPaneId=store&servi... http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developercloud/user-modeling.html http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developercl... Could make for an interesting blog post if you have the time!
    - KevinMcAlear 12y ago
      Interesting. I'll check it out, thanks!

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

wingerlang 12y ago

My most hateful comment was - "Yup"

platz 12y ago

I've been too lenient on my architectural taste lately as well. Looking forward to good discussion with the other architects at this site.

tomc1985 12y ago

Afraid of negativity much? Why do all these positive thinker optimist types insist on pushing their dogma on the rest of us? You happiness drones are nauseating. Grow up Also, might want to work on (simplify) your algo...

personjerry 12y ago

Clicking the quoted comment on the bottom of the page takes you to the wrong comment on HN.

Beltiras 12y ago

"Which profiling tool do you use to target your optimizations?", but then again I am a 2.97% hater ....

eigenrick 12y ago

Please point this at the kernel.org mailing lists. Thank you.

knd775 12y ago

It would be awesome if this was fast enough to run on every user. That way, you could make some sort of leaderboard for Haters.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]