Show HN: Weekend Project - Hide Inane Comments on HN

Isn't the whole reason behind the 'points' part of the HN comments to hide inane comments? If a comment is inane, it will be down-voted and grayed out. I think relying on humans is a far better filter for inane comments than number of syllables in a sentence.<p>That said, the code looks good and the idea is fun - might be nice to try and implement a javascript NLP library to make it more intelligent? [1]<p>[1] <a href="http://www.chrisumbel.com/article/node_js_natural_language_nlp" rel="nofollow">http://www.chrisumbel.com/article/node_js_natural_language_n...</a>

This algorithm seems incredibly arbitrary and fails to account for the complexity of diction or sophistication of content of the post. (Obviously, this is incredibly difficult and computationally-intensive, and is likely untenable for a simple Chrome app, but applying such a narrow and draconian algorithm that reduces such complex facets of pedagogy and language into a calculus comprised only of sentence size and syllabic length does not help in weeding HN of poor-quality content.)<p>Moreover, I'm not sure as to why I would want to rid HN of "8th Grade Content" in the first place. I'm fine with terse sentences and pedestrian word choice so long as the actual content of the post is of value to the conversation.

If you want to filter by grade level, why not just use a ready-made javascript script that computes an actual Flesch-Kincaid reading level [1]? This seems like reinventing the wheel, though I understand that can be the point of a weekend project.<p>[1] = e.g., <a href="https://github.com/cgiffard/TextStatistics.js" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/cgiffard/TextStatistics.js</a>

Brought to you by the person whose last submission was titled "Everything sucks and nobody cares".

A clearly written, thoughtful comment might demonstrate an eighth grade reading level.<p>A comment with esoteric vocabulary might be inane.<p>I question the premise of this project.

Something to turn this into a killer extension would be "Hide comments that use words on my filter list".<p>Thus, I could chose to hide any comment that used the word FANBOI or fanboy or whatever.<p>You'd need to include some method for alerting me that there's a comment that I might wish to downvote.<p>It's a neat project. It's a shame people will pile-on over your unfortunate choice of title here. Your "Important note" on github is pretty clear, I think.

This basically just counts syllables and if it has few of them, they are tossed as '8th grade level'.

Inanity and reading level in english are orthogonal concepts.

Alas, it is all too feasible to compose inane comments using sesquipedalian vocabulary and an overly-reticulated sentence structure in which dependent clauses which add nothing to the comment save for syntactic complexity, and sometimes only a small measure of that, as when one just links relative clause to relative clause, are stacked, to no one's benefit, one on top of the other.

If I facepalm and close the comment tab, it is usually not because if a single posting, but because of a complete subthread that has become a trope. E.g, every time a post contains the phrase "steal software", there will be someone saying "you can only steal cars, not software" and it will go on forever; same for eating meat/going veg, is Google evil or not, skeuomorphism vs flat design. I haven't ever learned anything from these discussions.<p>Too bad I have already started another weekend project :)

Who Do You Write For? <a href="http://mikecanex.wordpress.com/2010/08/17/who-do-you-write-for/" rel="nofollow">http://mikecanex.wordpress.com/2010/08/17/who-do-you-write-f...</a>

What you have created is clearly A Very Bad Idea. A readable sentence isn't necessarily inane. And this gem really makes me laugh "Conversely, some of the most inane comments of all can escape this filter by not using any punctuation (the script will read it as one long sentence)."<p>But I think that is perhaps beside the point: congrats on writing your first Chrome extension!

Were I to have more patience and a digital copy of a Hemingway novel, I would be very curious to see the results. It's an interesting idea, but were you to enable it in practice, you'd lose a lot of quality content and have an HN even more dominated by native English speakers.

I sort of like it, but then I'm verbose to begin with. With tools like this, I think it's better to fold in the supposedly-offending comment as opposed to just making it disappear. Without the threading cues, some pages may become hard to read.

The whole reason why HN is my preferred place to read news, is that I do not need a filter like this. Comments are generally useful and if someone posts something stupid, its greyed out in the bottom. That being said, cool idea.

Decided to test this on my posts.<p>Posts like this one (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5543140" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5543140</a>) are removed. That is a valuable post. It directly solves a problem, while highlighting a new feature that people not not have been aware of.<p>I only point this out as in the article linked to by the README says: "Just because a comment is easy to read does not mean it’s inherently worthless, and in some cases these are the most important ones."<p>Good first shot though. =) I wonder if you could reverse the plugin to help improve my own comments.