It 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:<p><i>Oh, sorry, "nm" means "nanometer" to me, but of course nautical miles.</i> (Score: -0.5. Comment is entirely taking responsibility for misinterpreting someone)<p><i>Well, if he was trying 1M combinations every 40 seconds, for $7 per hour, and he didn't need to use hundreds of dollars per hour of commute time, let's say 10 hours = $70. That's 900M combinations per hour, so 9B combinations in 10 hours. If he was trying combinations using upper-case characters, lower-case characters, numbers, and let's say 20 symbols, that's 82 possible combinations for each one. We'd expect him to find the password after exhausting half of the search set, so we want log base 82 of 18B. That suggests 5 characters. If he let's say just used lower-case characters and numbers, that's log base 36 of 18B, which suggests 7 characters.</i> (Score: -0.32. Comment is 100% technical, with no meaningful sentiment.)<p><i>Sorry, I submitted this article earlier with the wrong link.</i> (Score: -0.27. System appears to regard legitimate, largely bloodless apologies as salty.)<p><i>Note that the article is from approximately 20 years ago.</i> (Score: -0.24. This is to some degree a critical comment, but it's a short, straightforward statement of fact.)<p><i>Probably too late to reply, but I mean things like :ets.method or :queue.whatever.</i> (Score: -0.20. Probably it's cueing off the first phrase?)
The 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".
(testing the tool with this comment, do not take this seriously - I think it's a neat experiment)<p>This is the worst thing I've ever seen.<p>I am appalled at how terrible the UI design is. My eyes are literally bleeding because it does not have enough contrast. I can't even see my "sweet" comments so I can inflate my massive ego.<p>I take personal offense that the site evaluated 9 of my comments as being salty. Maybe the site is just salty!<p>The developer should take personal responsibility for this tool by manually counting the distribution of colors in 400 bags of skittles!<p>Also, ordbajsare is right. Javascript <i>is</i> disgusting!<p>Here's some more words I think the algorithm dislikes: horrible, screwing, dreadful, idiot, stupid, retard
The 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.<p>The other two top lists are more interesting, because while there is a <i>lot</i> 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.<p>Apparently in terms of the raw number of salty comments, I rank 217.
I love this!<p>I'm sort of proud to note that my salt score is -0.08, with my saltiest comment being:<p><i>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.</i><p>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?:<p><i>Out of curiosity, how does Metro look to color blind people?</i><p><i>I used to get terribly sleepy in the afternoons; sometimes I'd go out to my car and take a 15 minute nap, even in the brutal Texas summer. Then I started taking vitamin D and went on a paleo diet, and now I almost never get tired in the afternoons. Nada. It's a great relief to not always be fighting to stay awake.</i>
Defining saltiest by counting salty words has some serious limitations. #2 on the "Total Overall Score" list, merricksb, only points out reposts, and politely points users to the original post. merricksb's only sin is using the words "discuss" and "discussed". Maybe those are considered salty because "discussed" sounds like "disgust"?
In the comments, it would be nice to have a link to the original comment for context.<p>Some comments like the second in the main page:<p>> Discussed 7 months ago: (435 points/163 comments)<p>are helpful, not salty. The old discussion usually have some interesting comments.
How is saltiness trained? Are there readily available sentiment analysis tools or did the author train it himself? Anyway, cool and entertaining idea :) PS: not just seeing the saltiest but also the sweetest comments of a person would be nice.
I'm disappointed at how unsalty my saltiest comments are (<a href="https://www.hackersalt.com/weberc2" rel="nofollow">https://www.hackersalt.com/weberc2</a>). I'll have to try harder. :/
what 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 <i>baffled</i> at <what you said>". 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.<p>Another great one is "you're <i>getting confused</i> about ___". Nice casual drive-by insult on their intelligence.<p>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.
Amusingly, this seems to think I'm pretty unsalty, assuming I'm not misunderstanding something.<p>This is amusing from two perspectives:<p>1. Posting as openly female has been enough drama that the low score doesn't really jibe with how other people seem to perceive me.<p>2. I have a condition that causes unusually salty sweat. There are other people here with a more severe form of it who presumably are saltier than I am, but most of you people can't compete with my brine.
My guess is pg_is_a_butt gets enough salt from his username.<p>But this got me curious. Who are the sweetest users?<p>And what kind of topics generate most salt? This will be interesting because there has been a general trend on HN where people bemoan "HN hates X" with X being cryptocurrency, Tesla, new starts on Show HN.
I hope it's not based on the contents of the quoted posts alone.<p>> <i>This was explored (all the way to its grim dystopian conclusion) in tv series Dollhouse. Might want to check it out.</i><p>That doesn't seem very salty to me, and I could see myself writing that same comment.
I'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."
Fun to see “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world” is ranked above “Robert Scobel is an ass”. The algorithm seems to know about tech c-list celebs AND able to recognize great literature.
I’d love to see a category like “productively salty” which would do something like an h index ranking. Your score is the highest number n such that you have n salty comments with at least n net score.