"salty" is a great euphemism for "nihilistic asshat"
This comment I'm writing, as well as the comment I'm replying to, are both "salty"
The Saltiest Users on HN
41–50 of 92 posts
Re: The Saltiest Users on HN
#42The first list is mostly people who I don't recognize, and assume are uncommon posters, where one or two bad comments put them on the "saltiest" list. 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. Appare…
If you have "showdead: off" in your profile you won't see some of those users.
Re: The Saltiest Users on HN
#43In the comments, it would be nice to have a link to the original comment for context.
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.
Re: The Saltiest Users on HN
#44what turns me off about HN is how most of the conversations are argumentative and not productive discussion. I don't understand why the urge to correct or invalidate other peoples' ideas is so pervasive. Is it an appeal to control? Is it a subconscious ploy to be liked and accepted by finding a "weak idea" and attempting to destroy it, so that others will fear and revere you? Is it a yearning to be noticed and appreciated for how smart you are? I sense this layer of hostility lying about 1mm below the figurative skin of most of the commenters here. The moderation is strong here, so the hostility is usually cloaked under innocent sounding barbs like "what an odd thing to say" or "I'm baffled at ". No, you're not "baffled", you're shooting a barb at that person by trying to alienate them and making it sound like their comment was so bizarre and nonsensical that it left you "baffled" when really you just disagree with it so much you're signalling that you won't even attempt to consider it.
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.
Re: The Saltiest Users on HN
#45I'm seeing this "Firefox detected a potential security threat and did not continue to www.hackersalt.com. If you visit this site, attackers could try to steal information like your passwords, emails, or credit card details."
Cisco umberlla firewall blocks any domains that are newly registered. For new domains you have to wait a few days or not use your work's network.
Re: The Saltiest Users on HN
#46The scoring heuristic could use some work; I've already encountered multiple "salty" comments along the lines of "That sounds awful", with a sympathetic tone, probably tagged because of the word "awful".
Agreed. It looks like they went through a dictionary and scored the words on a negativity/positivity axis, and then just took the mean of all the scoring words in a post. 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 lim…
Honestly I think the whole thing would be more meaningful if it just used total downvotes and/or ratio of downvotes to upvotes
Re: The Saltiest Users on HN
#47The scoring heuristic could use some work; I've already encountered multiple "salty" comments along the lines of "That sounds awful", with a sympathetic tone, probably tagged because of the word "awful".
I got -.25 for a "link of the lazy " comment. And now I will again ;)
Re: The Saltiest Users on HN
#48I love this! 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 curios…
I bet it's using a version of the basic sentiment score system used that just takes the 'positivity or negativity' of each work and then sums it up to figure out the sentence. Some are better than others but the most basic version is literally just a list of words with points and the sum is the score.
Re: The Saltiest Users on HN
#49It is my feeling that sentiment analysis has a ways to go. Here are a few of the comments I've made that the system has described as among my saltiest: 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…
Likely negative-scoring words: sorry, mean(s), exhaust(ing), submit(ted), wrong, late, whatever.
Re: The Saltiest Users on HN
#50I'm disappointed at how unsalty my saltiest comments are ( https://www.hackersalt.com/weberc2 ). I'll have to try harder. :/
Direct links just go to the home page, even though that's the URL produced by putting your username into the search box.
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.