The Saltiest Users on HN(hackersalt.com) |
The Saltiest Users on HN(hackersalt.com) |
I actually think "salty" is a very deep misunderstanding of why people are writing such comments, and the attempt to politely call it negative by labeling it "salty" is ironically itself very negative and aggressive.
By making that timid, low-level aggression very blunt and calling it "nihilistic asshat", you are making a very good point. But I don't think they are actually nihilistic asshats. And I think even a true nihilist asshat is worthy of some respect.
Oh, sorry, "nm" means "nanometer" to me, but of course nautical miles. (Score: -0.5. Comment is entirely taking responsibility for misinterpreting someone)
Well, if he was trying 1M combinations every 40 seconds, for $7 per hour, and he didn't need to use hundreds of dollars per hour of commute time, let's say 10 hours = $70. That's 900M combinations per hour, so 9B combinations in 10 hours. If he was trying combinations using upper-case characters, lower-case characters, numbers, and let's say 20 symbols, that's 82 possible combinations for each one. We'd expect him to find the password after exhausting half of the search set, so we want log base 82 of 18B. That suggests 5 characters. If he let's say just used lower-case characters and numbers, that's log base 36 of 18B, which suggests 7 characters. (Score: -0.32. Comment is 100% technical, with no meaningful sentiment.)
Sorry, I submitted this article earlier with the wrong link. (Score: -0.27. System appears to regard legitimate, largely bloodless apologies as salty.)
Note that the article is from approximately 20 years ago. (Score: -0.24. This is to some degree a critical comment, but it's a short, straightforward statement of fact.)
Probably too late to reply, but I mean things like :ets.method or :queue.whatever. (Score: -0.20. Probably it's cueing off the first phrase?)
It does have a LONG way to go. These are valid criticisms. And all areas we are working to improve on with our next ML model. (Sad vs Negative, rating numbers as "salty",
This model is pretty simple. It's using TextBlob and looking for a combination of negative sentiment (not necessarily condescending) and subjectivity. Essentially hand built heuristics derived by weighting each word in the sentence. Not a great way to make predictions.
The model is FAR from great. But great from afar. For high level (overall user saltiness) it performs better.
The unlabeled dataset of this size presents some unique challenges but in our testing of our new model (based on SOTA BERT fine-tuining & a large labeled training dataset) the results look promising. I'm really looking forward to getting it deployed.
I am encouraged by the words of @pg who said "you can and should give users an insanely great experience with an early, incomplete, buggy product, if you make up the difference with attentiveness.
Can, perhaps, but should? Yes. Over-engaging with early users is not just a permissible technique for getting growth rolling. For most successful startups it's a necessary part of the feedback loop that makes the product good. Making a better mousetrap is not an atomic operation. Even if you start the way most successful startups have, by building something you yourself need, the first thing you build is never quite right. And except in domains with big penalties for making mistakes, it's often better not to aim for perfection initially."
I know that there are multi-paragraph laments about how dumb other people are or whatever on HN. In general, those strike me as seeming more salty than even deeply negative one-sentence putdowns. Like, sure, "Javascript is awful" is clearly negative sentiment. But spilling a few hundred words on the topic of "Javascript is awful" is surely more so?
Oh man, that's terrible news. R.I.P. Tim May.
So yeah, the sentiment analysis could use some work.
I have written posts very much saltier than the ones scored as saltiest by this ranking algorithm, possibly because I didn't use inherently negative vocabulary to express a highly negative sentiment.
It's a fun party trick, but its usefulness is limited without semantic analysis or live-human scoring.
20.23% of my posts are rated as "salty". I wonder what percentage of scoring words are rated as negative.
For the curious you can see the dictionary here: https://github.com/sloria/TextBlob/blob/eb08c120d364e9086467...
The package used is a pretty popular one called TextBlob. It is nifty for working with unlabeled data like we have with the HackerNews dataset.
We really focused our definition of saltiness around being a combination of (subjective + negative) comments.
We reduced the impact of (objective + negative) as we feel that criticism, while at times painful, if presented objectively isn't necessarily salty.
We built this model fast (1 week) and have since iterated this week into developing a Fine Tuned BERT model that we are training over a much broader set of toxicity, demographic, and polarity features. The training set is much larger and higher quality so we are expecting a large jump in precision upon deployment.
I hope the app gave you some good chuckles as you went around though. It's hard to explain how excited I felt when I saw pg_is_a_butt at the top of my pandas data frame the first time I processed the data.
It's doing a little bit right. :)
This is the worst thing I've ever seen.
I am appalled at how terrible the UI design is. My eyes are literally bleeding because it does not have enough contrast. I can't even see my "sweet" comments so I can inflate my massive ego.
I take personal offense that the site evaluated 9 of my comments as being salty. Maybe the site is just salty!
The developer should take personal responsibility for this tool by manually counting the distribution of colors in 400 bags of skittles!
Also, ordbajsare is right. Javascript is disgusting!
Here's some more words I think the algorithm dislikes: horrible, screwing, dreadful, idiot, stupid, retard
The other two top lists are more interesting, because while there is a lot of salty people in there I recognize, a bunch of people make the list solely based on total prolific amount of comments. tptacek, of course, as well as literally all of the HN moderators.
Apparently in terms of the raw number of salty comments, I rank 217.
And of course, if you click on him, you can see his "saltiest" responses to people. Some are arguably decently salty, though many are pretty polite too.
Also heartwarming to see Terry Davis there, haha.
I'm sort of proud to note that my salt score is -0.08, with my saltiest comment being:
The iPad and iPhone are especially dangerous when it comes to accidental downvoting. Separating or enlarging the arrows would help those of us with fat fingers.
However, (and this will apparently add to my salt score ;)), I'm curious how a comments like these get rated as expressing a negative sentiment?:
Out of curiosity, how does Metro look to color blind people?
I used to get terribly sleepy in the afternoons; sometimes I'd go out to my car and take a 15 minute nap, even in the brutal Texas summer. Then I started taking vitamin D and went on a paleo diet, and now I almost never get tired in the afternoons. Nada. It's a great relief to not always be fighting to stay awake.
Some comments like the second in the main page:
> Discussed 7 months ago: (435 points/163 comments)
are helpful, not salty. The old discussion usually have some interesting comments.
We'll relaunch in about two weeks with an improved model that we're currently training on a much larger labeled dataset and SOTA BERT model. :)
Rather than say something salty about that, I'll just say what we see here is an excellent example of something that should be based on traditional pages rather than a single-page application. In fact, it seems to be an SPA emulating pages poorly, and I can't imagine why anyone would want to do that.
I need to step it up.
Another great one is "you're getting confused about ___". Nice casual drive-by insult on their intelligence.
I really wish the mods had just capped total users on HN, years ago. Maybe open it up (silently) once or twice a year to keep a minimum number of engaged commentary. But it's essentially the same thing as reddit was 5 years ago.
This is amusing from two perspectives:
1. Posting as openly female has been enough drama that the low score doesn't really jibe with how other people seem to perceive me.
2. I have a condition that causes unusually salty sweat. There are other people here with a more severe form of it who presumably are saltier than I am, but most of you people can't compete with my brine.
But this got me curious. Who are the sweetest users?
And what kind of topics generate most salt? This will be interesting because there has been a general trend on HN where people bemoan "HN hates X" with X being cryptocurrency, Tesla, new starts on Show HN.
Sweetest users is a good question. I'll have to build out that view some time.
politics, gender, race, theoretical physics (particularly dark matter) and javascript.
> This was explored (all the way to its grim dystopian conclusion) in tv series Dollhouse. Might want to check it out.
That doesn't seem very salty to me, and I could see myself writing that same comment.
Alright, I'll avoid posting the lyrics to Tool's Schism...
I figured it was something along those lines, it's just very jarring to see harmless comments rank as my saltiest when I know I've posted worse.
Ouch, Score: -1.0. I guess this is going to be counted as salty too :D.
My saltiest comment is… a quote of someone else's comment that includes the word "stupid" D:
awful difficult terrible horrible boring
bad worse worst
stupid moron retard idiot dumb
crazy insane shocking outrageous
worthless useless
effing wtf
disgust discuss (?!)
Sentiment analysis is overall a dangerous way for social media players to punt around 'things we don't like', whatever that may be. You will end up shadowbanned on whatever social media platform you use, because you're not posting cat photos and other prosaic content that people trying to sell insurance policies, sugar water, and watches are okay with.
Thankfully, this is such an ill-posed problem, it will just be an embarrassing boondoggle.
FWIW, my salt score is -0.09 ;)
> FWIW, my salt score is -0.09 ;)
Same salt score, same opinion on the results. My top salty comment has a score of -1.00
> > > Unfortunately it's not a bottle. It's just a plastic cup with a lid and a straw. A really big plastic cup that tapers at the bottom so you can fit it in your vehicle's cupholder.
> > In USA even the cups have muffin-tops!?
> Yep. Horrific, isn't it?
It's a joke, it's not terribly on topic, and it's a bit glib. But salty? Nah.
Fourth most "salty" comment, at a score of -0.50:
> I like having a library that I can flip to when I'm bored and want to do something productive.
Seventh most salty, at -0.45, is literally just an explanation of the second argument in Javascript's parseInt function. Ninth is just an earnest recap of a conversation about earworms.
Meanwhile the saltiest comment I saw in a quick skim is in 12th place, with a score of -0.30. I was discussing House of Cards and the then recent scandal around Kevin Spacey, and someone was putting words in my mouth and claiming I said things that I didn't actually say or believe. I was quite salty in my response(s), but here the tool marked it as 70% less salty than joking about muffin topped cups.
Thanks!
The Muffin Tops part is making me lol.
This kind of feedback gets me pumped about continuing to work on it.
By that standard, just telling someone not to do something wouldn't be salty. Salty is telling someone not to do something because only an idiot would do that.
Thank you for trying the app and hopefully V2 will leave you feeling like the system is more precise.
It certainly does; although it's possible they aren't stored independently and simply "cancel out" an upvote, so maybe that's what you meant.
The interface and the graphs are really nice; even though basing the data on votes alone would be less interesting in one sense, I think the rest of the site would still provide value even with that simpler metric.