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Hacker News' Reading Level

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Re: Hacker News' Reading Level

#11

Post by mbm »

j_baker wrote: post #6
iwwr wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An elevated reading level is not necessarily a sign of more thoughtful or insightful comments. It could just be contrived banality disguised as conceptual depth.

"contrived banality disguised as conceptual depth" Is it possible this phrase is an example of itself? :-)

Irony: (n) - incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs

Re: Hacker News' Reading Level

#13

Post by derefr »

achille wrote: post #5

Can someone briefly explain how google determines reading level? I'm assuming it's using something like the Flesch–Kincaid test: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flesch%E2%80%93Kincaid_readabil... A brief search on wikipedia reveals a few readability tests, but they all seem to be based on sentence/syllable ratios, not content complexity. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Readability_tests And in general they all ran…

I figured that, since Google must read every word of every page to spider it, they must thereby have, as a byproduct, the world's most accurate database of word usage frequencies. "Reading level" would then just be a measure of the average frequency of all the words on a page (thus making words learned in a first year ESL class simple, and technical jargon advanced—quite the same as the measure of difficulty used by language proficiency exams.) The fact that the average of Simple English Wikipedia articles seems to be more intermediate than basic, though (29/52/17), would argue against that—unless the calculations are being biased by all the very infrequent proper nouns.

Re: Hacker News' Reading Level

#15

Post by rchowe »

I suspect this is because the algorithm measures word use and not grammar. HN tends to have people who follow the "simple is better" mantra and who write in a tone similar to either an executive summary or an online dialog, thus an accessible reading level.

Re: Hacker News' Reading Level

#19

Post by citricsquid »

redthrowaway wrote: post #16

Well, it's official: 4chan is smarter than us. http://www.google.com/search?q=site:news.ycombinator.com&#38...

Well 4chan.org is simply the homepage, if you link to the actual boards (specifically /b/): https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&tbs=rl:1&q...

Re: Hacker News' Reading Level

#20

Post by redthrowaway »

citricsquid wrote: post #19
redthrowaway wrote: post #16

Well, it's official: 4chan is smarter than us. http://www.google.com/search?q=site:news.ycombinator.com&#38...

Well 4chan.org is simply the homepage, if you link to the actual boards (specifically /b/): https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&tbs=rl:1&q...

You, sir, have made my day.
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