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Tools of the Trade, from Hacker News

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Re: Tools of the Trade, from Hacker News

#41

Post by lettergram »

Waterluvian wrote: post #40
lettergram wrote: post #8

Related to this, using: https://hnprofile.com/ You can identify who is an expert related to each tool or any topic in general

Can you share more about how the "mood" is determined? Definitely will be controversial and is deserving of a much more clear explanation. Why am I tense? Is it the sentences I formulate? Upvote vs. downvote patterns? RNG? I pretty strongly believe that you should take that piece rather seriously, even if you don't previously consider it a big deal. People generally don't like when a stranger tells the world what the…

EDIT: Fixed the UI: I'm assuming you were looking at a topic, the "probable mood" used to render as it relates to the topic being searched, not current mood.

Highly recommend reading the "how it works" section (I assume you already have):

https://hnprofile.com/learn-more

That section has a few examples and details. I'll add further details below.

The system ONLY looks at comments sent to it. It, kind of looks like:

    { Author, Comment }
From there, everything else is derived. Nothing else, no profiles, no voting, nothing. That's it.

The system identifies:

  - Expertise
  - Knowledge
  - Interests
  - Relevant content
  - Promoter score (an improved net promoter score)
  - Trends
  - Mood
  - Related Topics
  - etc.
To your question, there are multiple algorithms at work determining mood, most are pretty standard models. These are ones you can find in NLTK, spaCy, CoreNLP, etc. There's also a couple home-baked ones. These models than "vote" for the mood, with an averaged score. Typically these scores are 3 - 7 models voting at any one time. The aggregate score is roughly 80% accurate (based on my tags), and it tags the topics, sentence, and overall comment all separately. Finally, the models are much more accurate at the extremes: Very Positive and Very Negative, but in the middle, it's much fuzzier. This is in part, just how language works, it's subjective.

All NLP models are based on a combination of open datasets with the tagged sentiment, as well as my own manually created dataset, and finally, a dataset that was manually created via looking at following comments (for instance, "no need to be negative", is used to tag the prior comment.

The probable current mood is a prediction of your prior moods. I believe right now, it looks at the last time you discussed the given topic you searched (if you searched for a user, it is the most recent mood). If there is enough data, it'll also predict your mood, based on the time of day + topic being discussed.

Finally, I should add - there are definitely improvements to be made, and I'm currently working on mood. Primarily, the focus was on expertise, knowledge, and interests. That is what enables the "related content" section and is now very accurate (given a decent number of data samples). Mood, as stated, is ~80% accurate based on my tags. I think I can do better (probably >90%), especially with more labeled data for this particular dataset.

The goal of this is it can drop into any company and instantly can search for who and what is relevant to your company.

Re: Tools of the Trade, from Hacker News

#42

Post by Waterluvian »

lettergram wrote: post #41
Waterluvian wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you share more about how the "mood" is determined? Definitely will be controversial and is deserving of a much more clear explanation. Why am I tense? Is it the sentences I formulate? Upvote vs. downvote patterns? RNG? I pretty strongly believe that you should take that piece rather seriously, even if you don't previously consider it a big deal. People generally don't like when a stranger tells the world what the…

EDIT: Fixed the UI: I'm assuming you were looking at a topic, the "probable mood" used to render as it relates to the topic being searched, not current mood. Highly recommend reading the "how it works" section (I assume you already have): https://hnprofile.com/learn-more That section has a few examples and details. I'll add further details below. The system ONLY looks at comments sent to it . It, kind of looks like:…

Thanks for sharing these details. I'd like to chat more about it if you'll bear with me:

Last I checked I was "tense". Is it theoretically possible to explain why your models came to that conclusion? Is there a theoretical data view that could say "here's the comments that contributed to you being considered "tense" (or even better: specific parts of the comments).

From my perspective, without a way to concretely back up any conclusion made, I simply cannot consider the complex-sounding systems to be any better than RNG.

I alluded to this in my first comment, but I think it's imperative that if you're going to explicitly call out what mood you think someone was/is/will be, you need to back it up with "why" so that, at the very least, someone can say, "that's clearly an unfair representation of my mood and here's where the algorithms messed up."

I'm going to go on a bit of a limb and assume that you're just having some fun and exploring an interesting feature. And I think that's really quite cool. But I think we're getting into a software engineering ethics realm that I'm ill-equipped to dig in to. You've got a site that applies "moods" to individuals in a way that doesn't appear to be verifiable. And even if they are, and are accurate, is that even the right thing to do?

I don't want to ruin your fun or twist your arm into changing this. I'm just responding to my red-alert alarm that lives in my stomach. It's set off by the discovery that one of my few online accounts where I don't hide my identity has been assigned a mood label.

Re: Tools of the Trade, from Hacker News

#43

Post by ObsoleteNerd »

I find that my problem isn't finding services that match a requirement I have, but picking which one to use. It's totally overwhelming how many services do pretty much exactly the same thing these days.

I love that it's like this in the sense that there's healthy competition and they're all pushing each other forward, giving each other ideas to improve, etc... but as a pure consumer of these services, it's incredibly daunting to actually choose which to use.

Re: Tools of the Trade, from Hacker News

#44

Post by lettergram »

Waterluvian wrote: post #42
lettergram wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EDIT: Fixed the UI: I'm assuming you were looking at a topic, the "probable mood" used to render as it relates to the topic being searched, not current mood. Highly recommend reading the "how it works" section (I assume you already have): https://hnprofile.com/learn-more That section has a few examples and details. I'll add further details below. The system ONLY looks at comments sent to it . It, kind of looks like:…

Thanks for sharing these details. I'd like to chat more about it if you'll bear with me: Last I checked I was "tense". Is it theoretically possible to explain why your models came to that conclusion? Is there a theoretical data view that could say "here's the comments that contributed to you being considered "tense" (or even better: specific parts of the comments). From my perspective, without a way to concretely bac…

First, this conversation is not going to be comforting and your red-alert alarm should be going off. I know this is building toward the dystopian future. I personally use Signal, put my cell phone in the microwave when I come home, and am writing this through a VPN.

That being said, I'm 100% confident that Google, Apple, Amazon, and more know WAY more about you than I do. This system only looks at public data and only links back to usernames. Strangely enough, it can identify users across sites (even without knowing your identity) - say Reddit and Hacker News. It was originally built for https://projectpiglet.com/ to find company insiders, and make trades (which works ridiculously well btw).

There should be no expectation of privacy.

> You've got a site that applies "moods" to individuals in a way that doesn't appear to be verifiable. And even if they are, and are accurate, is that even the right thing to do?

The short answer is, I don't know. I don't want this to exist, but it does. I also know that I have already built systems for companies doing this and more. Albeit the system here is much more of a "turn-key" solution and its patent-pending for what it's worth (I'm also against patents and donate to the EFF, but feel I can potentially segment off this market). Still, lots of people are looking to build systems such as this. Personally, I'd rather be the one guiding the ship, because I do ask myself the same questions you're asking.

I'll be honest... I've used this system to show my friends that even when they change usernames I can still identify them. That particular system (which looks at speech patterns) is turned off here. That's in part because of those questions. However, I'm 100% confident, others are doing that right now, with this conversation. We know that because Snowden shared it with us.

Re: Tools of the Trade, from Hacker News

#45

Post by yesenadam »

Waterluvian wrote: post #42
lettergram wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EDIT: Fixed the UI: I'm assuming you were looking at a topic, the "probable mood" used to render as it relates to the topic being searched, not current mood. Highly recommend reading the "how it works" section (I assume you already have): https://hnprofile.com/learn-more That section has a few examples and details. I'll add further details below. The system ONLY looks at comments sent to it . It, kind of looks like:…

Thanks for sharing these details. I'd like to chat more about it if you'll bear with me: Last I checked I was "tense". Is it theoretically possible to explain why your models came to that conclusion? Is there a theoretical data view that could say "here's the comments that contributed to you being considered "tense" (or even better: specific parts of the comments). From my perspective, without a way to concretely bac…

...so...you feel tense? I feel tense reading this. But yes, I wouldn't like to read that either.

Ok, now I've waded in, I should do something to help. Reads the first few pages of your comments.. hmm Nah, you don't seem tense. All kinds of emotions. It's not you, it's HNProfile. Tries to think why it might say that.. There were a few with emotional words, frustration with situations..probably slightly more negative-emotion words than positive.. hmm I think maybe you just write better than most people, more vividly, mostly about serious topics. And are engaged with them. I don't know if it helps, but I say That's clearly an unfair representation of your mood. (I don't know you, wasn't paid by you)

Re: Tools of the Trade, from Hacker News

#46

Post by southerndrift »

emmanueloga_ wrote: post #39

How come all these awesome lists use free form markdown? This is the sort of data that should have some sort of structure, if only just a schema less json file. That would make it easy to run a script from time to time to, for instance, remove 404 entries.

Because writing markup is more fun than writing JSON. If you want to automate something, you just need a regular expression to get whatever you want.

Re: Tools of the Trade, from Hacker News

#47

Post by shawn »

lettergram wrote: post #44
Waterluvian wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for sharing these details. I'd like to chat more about it if you'll bear with me: Last I checked I was "tense". Is it theoretically possible to explain why your models came to that conclusion? Is there a theoretical data view that could say "here's the comments that contributed to you being considered "tense" (or even better: specific parts of the comments). From my perspective, without a way to concretely bac…

First, this conversation is not going to be comforting and your red-alert alarm should be going off. I know this is building toward the dystopian future. I personally use Signal, put my cell phone in the microwave when I come home, and am writing this through a VPN. That being said, I'm 100% confident that Google, Apple, Amazon, and more know WAY more about you than I do. This system only looks at public data and onl…

Till recently, my primary account was a certain prominent account on HN. I was wondering if you'd be willing to email me the name of it.

I would be shocked and impressed, and it would serve as a great demo.

(I totally believe you. I'm just fascinated.)

Basically, I'm volunteering to be a lab rat.

Re: Tools of the Trade, from Hacker News

#49

Post by lettergram »

shawn wrote: post #47
lettergram wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, this conversation is not going to be comforting and your red-alert alarm should be going off. I know this is building toward the dystopian future. I personally use Signal, put my cell phone in the microwave when I come home, and am writing this through a VPN. That being said, I'm 100% confident that Google, Apple, Amazon, and more know WAY more about you than I do. This system only looks at public data and onl…

Till recently, my primary account was a certain prominent account on HN. I was wondering if you'd be willing to email me the name of it. I would be shocked and impressed, and it would serve as a great demo. (I totally believe you. I'm just fascinated.) Basically, I'm volunteering to be a lab rat.

Sent

Re: Tools of the Trade, from Hacker News

#50

Post by [deleted] »

ObsoleteNerd wrote: post #43

I find that my problem isn't finding services that match a requirement I have, but picking which one to use. It's totally overwhelming how many services do pretty much exactly the same thing these days. I love that it's like this in the sense that there's healthy competition and they're all pushing each other forward, giving each other ideas to improve, etc... but as a pure consumer of these services, it's incredibly…

[deleted]
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