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The island where people forget to die

nytimes.com

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Re: The island where people forget to die

#71

Post by adimitrov »

hntester123 wrote: post #67
pg wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You already have the data I'd use: the text of the comments. If anyone wants to try to train a filter to detect this sort of comment, I'd be very interested to see the result.

>You already have the data I'd use: the text of the comments. Wouldn't that require real AI though? I thought for a minute that NLP (Natural Language Processing, not the other meaning(s) of the acronym) might help, but then thought that it may not work for cases where the comment is quoting another comment. Note: I'm not at all an expert in any of those fields, just interested.

Sounds like a job for Sentiment Analysis [1]. Modern systems are pretty good at discerning negative from positive comments.

You could probably find a way to mark negative and positive comments. Whether the resulting algorithm would be fine-grained enough to semi-reliably mark 'middlebrow dismissal,' I really don't know. Actually, as somebody who has worked on that stuff in the past, I don't think it would be very easy.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentiment_analysis

Re: The island where people forget to die

#72

Post by heed »

pg wrote: post #63
pmelendez wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "If there is one thing I wish I could do to improve HN it would be to detect this sort of middlebrow dismissal algorithmically." Do you have some data that we could use to play with? That sounds like a nice problem to solve.

You already have the data I'd use: the text of the comments. If anyone wants to try to train a filter to detect this sort of comment, I'd be very interested to see the result.

It might be easier to investigate submissions first and filter at this level if a trend is discovered. That is, a certain type of submission might attract a certain attitude of comment.

Re: The island where people forget to die

#73

Post by bilbo0s »

starpilot wrote: post #51
binxbolling wrote: post #24

TIL that even if you study longevity for 10+ years, you're never allowed to share anecdotes (or god forbid, close with a joke) ever again unless you're prepared to be crucified by twentysomething pseudo-experts in Silicon Valley.

I think this is how every expert in a non-CS/IT field feels about HN commentary on their field. 95% of what I read about aviation/aerospace here makes me cringe. It's like hearing my parents talk about computers, but with 10x more self-assurance.

What I read in the comments about Cancer...

Just...

Wow.

Re: The island where people forget to die

#74

Post by hntester123 »

gjkood wrote: post #59
relix wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you seriously suggesting that as long as anyone has been working on something for years, that we should accept what he says without looking at it in a critical way? The enlightenment must have passed you by.

There's a saying, "Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement". It's just possible that a twenty something may not have spent as much time making bad judgements as a forty something. At forty you will look at your twenty year old self and wonder how you could have been such an idiot even though at that time you would have thought all the forty somethings were idiots. It happens in p…

+1 on the parent-child thing.

Re: The island where people forget to die

#75

Post by hntester123 »

adimitrov wrote: post #71
hntester123 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You already have the data I'd use: the text of the comments. Wouldn't that require real AI though? I thought for a minute that NLP (Natural Language Processing, not the other meaning(s) of the acronym) might help, but then thought that it may not work for cases where the comment is quoting another comment. Note: I'm not at all an expert in any of those fields, just interested.

Sounds like a job for Sentiment Analysis [1]. Modern systems are pretty good at discerning negative from positive comments. You could probably find a way to mark negative and positive comments. Whether the resulting algorithm would be fine-grained enough to semi-reliably mark 'middlebrow dismissal,' I really don't know. Actually, as somebody who has worked on that stuff in the past, I don't think it would be very eas…

Hadn't heard of it; thanks for the link.

Re: The island where people forget to die

#76

Post by pmelendez »

adimitrov wrote: post #71
hntester123 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You already have the data I'd use: the text of the comments. Wouldn't that require real AI though? I thought for a minute that NLP (Natural Language Processing, not the other meaning(s) of the acronym) might help, but then thought that it may not work for cases where the comment is quoting another comment. Note: I'm not at all an expert in any of those fields, just interested.

Sounds like a job for Sentiment Analysis [1]. Modern systems are pretty good at discerning negative from positive comments. You could probably find a way to mark negative and positive comments. Whether the resulting algorithm would be fine-grained enough to semi-reliably mark 'middlebrow dismissal,' I really don't know. Actually, as somebody who has worked on that stuff in the past, I don't think it would be very eas…

Thanks for the link.

Agreed I don't think it would be an easy task, but I wonder how would perform a "bag of word" approach.

Harder part as I see it would be to categorize the comments on middlebrow dismissal / Not dismissal. It seems like we would be spending more time preparing the data than in the algorithm itself.

Re: The island where people forget to die

#77

Post by RyanMcGreal »

krschultz wrote: post #39
CWuestefeld wrote: post #7

I hate this kind of reporting. I read through the entire first page without the slightest clue as to what the article is actually about -- I'm pretty sure it's not all just for one guy's life story. But by that point I was tired of reading, and quit. Cut it out with the pathos and human interest, and get some of the real point in there quicker.

No. Don't worry, 57 blogs will distill it down to the core 5 points and post them in a bulleted list with a link-bait title by Friday. But writing is much more than 'get to the point as fast as possible'. These kind of stories are far more interesting than the quick summary articles found on most shitty websites. If you don't like the style, then don't click through to the New Yorker, New York Times, etc.

> But writing is much more than 'get to the point as fast as possible'.

I agree with you, but my personal reading sweet spot is to get to the point a bit faster than the author of this piece did.

Re: The island where people forget to die

#78

Post by Florin_Andrei »

reasonattlm wrote: post #6

Arguing anything other than differences in levels of exercise/activity and calorie intake has a large mountain of evidence to overcome. The effects of those two are very large, the effects of everything else comparatively small per decades of animal and longitudinal human studies. Nonsense about antioxidants in the diet is exactly that: nonsense. The weight of evidence suggests that, if anything, ingested antioxidant…

> Nonsense about antioxidants in the diet is exactly that: nonsense.

Well, it is nonsense if you look at it as the sole source of longevity.

But get a diet rich in antioxidants. Add low saturated fat intake. Continuous, low level, healthy exercise. Plenty of fresh vegetables. Low-stress lifestyle. Sense of belonging. All that stuff. Then you reach a tipping point and things start to improve suddenly.

The secret of longevity is probably an all-of-the-above type of thing.

Re: The island where people forget to die

#79

Post by pg »

sakai wrote: post #70
pg wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You already have the data I'd use: the text of the comments. If anyone wants to try to train a filter to detect this sort of comment, I'd be very interested to see the result.

I'll consider that a challenge... To any that have experience getting comments data from HN -- what's the fastest, most polite way to do this? And am I correct in remembering that there's some aggressive rate-limiting for crawling the site?

Don't crawl the site, please. The place to get data is the HNSearch API.

Re: The island where people forget to die

#80

Post by Florin_Andrei »

CWuestefeld wrote: post #7

I hate this kind of reporting. I read through the entire first page without the slightest clue as to what the article is actually about -- I'm pretty sure it's not all just for one guy's life story. But by that point I was tired of reading, and quit. Cut it out with the pathos and human interest, and get some of the real point in there quicker.

Since this is a board for computer folks, this type of opinion is not surprising. :)
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