Who Do You Write For?
http://mikecanex.wordpress.com/2010/08/17/who-do-you-write-f...
Show HN: Weekend Project - Hide Inane Comments on HN
11–20 of 36 posts
Re: Show HN: Weekend Project - Hide Inane Comments on HN
#12A clearly written, thoughtful comment might demonstrate an eighth grade reading level.
A comment with esoteric vocabulary might be inane.
I question the premise of this project.
Re: Show HN: Weekend Project - Hide Inane Comments on HN
#13The whole reason why HN is my preferred place to read news, is that I do not need a filter like this. Comments are generally useful and if someone posts something stupid, its greyed out in the bottom. That being said, cool idea.
Re: Show HN: Weekend Project - Hide Inane Comments on HN
#14Something to turn this into a killer extension would be "Hide comments that use words on my filter list".
Thus, I could chose to hide any comment that used the word FANBOI or fanboy or whatever.
You'd need to include some method for alerting me that there's a comment that I might wish to downvote.
It's a neat project. It's a shame people will pile-on over your unfortunate choice of title here. Your "Important note" on github is pretty clear, I think.
Re: Show HN: Weekend Project - Hide Inane Comments on HN
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
You got rejected by it, incidentally.
Unsurprisingly, such a technique seems likely to be biased against non-native speakers. But it's entirely possible to make insightful points without sophisticated language.
> it's entirely possible to make insightful points without sophisticated language.
"Growing a Language" by Guy Steele is an extreme example of that.
Re: Show HN: Weekend Project - Hide Inane Comments on HN
#16Isn't the whole reason behind the 'points' part of the HN comments to hide inane comments? If a comment is inane, it will be down-voted and grayed out. I think relying on humans is a far better filter for inane comments than number of syllables in a sentence. That said, the code looks good and the idea is fun - might be nice to try and implement a javascript NLP library to make it more intelligent? [1] [1] http://www…
Well, at a certain number of levels deep, comments seem to be un-downvoteable. I don't quite understand why.
Re: Show HN: Weekend Project - Hide Inane Comments on HN
#17Something to turn this into a killer extension would be "Hide comments that use words on my filter list". Thus, I could chose to hide any comment that used the word FANBOI or fanboy or whatever. You'd need to include some method for alerting me that there's a comment that I might wish to downvote. It's a neat project. It's a shame people will pile-on over your unfortunate choice of title here. Your "Important note" o…
I hope you don't include my comment above in that 'pile-on'. I had no intention of negative criticism on the project or the author; just wanted to give a quick tl;dr of how this library works. Nothing more, nothing less.
@Author: I apologize if it was taken that way.
Re: Show HN: Weekend Project - Hide Inane Comments on HN
#18Isn't the whole reason behind the 'points' part of the HN comments to hide inane comments? If a comment is inane, it will be down-voted and grayed out. I think relying on humans is a far better filter for inane comments than number of syllables in a sentence. That said, the code looks good and the idea is fun - might be nice to try and implement a javascript NLP library to make it more intelligent? [1] [1] http://www…
Well, at a certain number of levels deep, comments seem to be un-downvoteable. I don't quite understand why.
I think there is just a delay, to keep back-and-forth arguing at a minimum you cannot immediately vote on or respond to a deeply nested comment.
Re: Show HN: Weekend Project - Hide Inane Comments on HN
#19If you want to filter by grade level, why not just use a ready-made javascript script that computes an actual Flesch-Kincaid reading level [1]? This seems like reinventing the wheel, though I understand that can be the point of a weekend project. [1] = e.g., https://github.com/cgiffard/TextStatistics.js
Maybe because the Flesch-Kincaid reading level isn't a particularly good metric of anything other than sentence length and syllable count? Certainly not of "content" or "value" however you might define those concepts.
Re: Show HN: Weekend Project - Hide Inane Comments on HN
#20Something to turn this into a killer extension would be "Hide comments that use words on my filter list". Thus, I could chose to hide any comment that used the word FANBOI or fanboy or whatever. You'd need to include some method for alerting me that there's a comment that I might wish to downvote. It's a neat project. It's a shame people will pile-on over your unfortunate choice of title here. Your "Important note" o…
Yeah, I suspect all of the comments will either be about why somebody thinks the algorithm is stupid or why they don't think they need a filter on HN or why they think filters in general are stupid or promote groupthink or whatever.
The author seems pretty clear that this was just a programming exercise written for fun and self-education and makes no claims about its perfection.
As a side note, I agree that "fanboy" and all of its permutations is a 99.9% reliable indication of a worthless comment (although such a filter would obviously catch this post :). This is regardless of whether the poster is referring to themselves or someone else or some hypothetical group that they imagine exists somewhere, and regardless of the subject of the fanboyism.