[wilsonzlin]

Thanks! Yeah I'd like to dive deeper into the sentiment aspect. As you say it'd be interesting to see some overview, instead of specific queries.

The negative sentiment stood out to me mostly because I was expecting a more "clear-cut" sentiment graph: largely neutral-positive, with spikes in the positive direction around positive posts and negative around negative posts. However, for almost all my queries, the sentiment was almost always negative. Even positive posts apparently attracted a lot of negativity (according to the model and my approach, both of which could be wrong). It's something I'd like to dive deeper into, perhaps in a future blog post.

[dylan604]

The sentiment issue is a curious one to me. For example, a lot of humans I interact with that are not devs take my direct questioning or critical responses to be "negative" when there is no negative intent at all. Pointing out something doesn't work or anything that the dev community encounters on a daily basis isn't an immediate negative sentiment but just pointing out the issues. Is it a meme-like helicopter parent constantly doling out praise positive so that anything differing shows negativity? Not every piece of art needs to be hung on the fridge door, and providing constructive criticism for improvement is oh so often framed as negative. That does the world no favors.

Essentially, I'm not familiar with HuggingFace or any models in this regard. But if they are trained from the socials, then it seems skewed from the start to me.

Also, fully aware that this comment will probably be viewed as negative based on stated assumptions.

edit: reading further down the comments, clearly I'm not the first with these sentiments.

[uyzstvqs]

Speaking from experience, debate is easily misread as negative arguing by outsiders, even though all involved parties are enjoying challenging each other's ideas.

[wilsonzlin]

You may be right, a more tailored classifier for HN comments specifically may be more accurate. It'd be interesting to consider the classes: would it still be simply positive/negative? Perhaps constructive/unconstructive? Usefulness? Something more along the lines of HN guidelines?

[prox]

Just one point of note : people are FAR more likely to respond and take to writing to something negative than positive. I don’t know the exact numbers but it just engages people more. People just don’t pick up the pen to write how good something is as much.

[flawsofar]

Every helicopter gets a trophy

[luke-stanley]

I did something related for my ChillTranslator project for translating spicy HN comments to calm variations which has a GGUF model that runs easily and quickly but it's early days. I did it with a much smaller set of data, using LLM's to make calm variations and an algo to pick the closest least spicy one to make the synthetic training data then used Phi 2. I used Detoxify then OpenAI's sentiment analysis is free, I use that to verify Detoxify has correctly identified spicy comments then generate a calm pair. I do worry that HN could implode / degrade if there is not able to be a good balance for the comments and posts that people come here for. Maybe I can use your sentiment data to mine faster and generate more pairs. I've only done an initial end-to-end test so far (which works!). The model, so far is not as high quality as I'd like but I've not used Phi 3 on it yet and I've only used a very small fine-tune dataset so far. File is here though: https://huggingface.co/lukestanley/ChillTranslator I've had no feedback from anyone on it though I did have a 404 in my Show HN post!

[deadbabe]

Anecdotally, I think anyone who reads HN for a while will realize it to be a negative, cynical place.

Posts written in sweet syrupy tones wouldn’t do well here, and jokes are in short supply or outright banned. Most people here also seem to be men. There’s always someone shooting you down. And after a while, you start to shoot back.

[xanderlewis]

(Without wanting to sound negative or cynical) I don’t think it is, but maybe I haven’t been here long enough to notice. It skews towards technical and science and technology-minded people, which makes it automatically a bit ‘cynical’, but I feel like 95% of commenters are doing so at least in good faith. The same cannot be said of many comparable discussion forums or social media websites.

Jokes are also not banned; I see plenty on here. Low-effort ones and chains of unfunny wordplay or banter seem to be frowned upon though. And that makes it cleaner.

[flir]

I think it's the engineering mindset. You're always trying to figure out what's wrong with an idea, because you might be the poor bastard that ends up having to build it. Less costly all round if you can identify the flaw now, not halfway through sprint 7. After a while it bleeds into everything you do.

[chiefalchemist]

> Anecdotally, I think anyone who reads HN for a while will realize it to be a negative, cynical place.

Sure, sometimes. But usually it's

Truth seeking > group thinking

There's a fine line between critical and cynical. Sometimes that line gets crossed. Sometimes the ambiguity of text-only comms clouds the water.

[darby_eight]

> Anecdotally, I think anyone who reads HN for a while will realize it to be a negative, cynical place.

I don't think this is particularly unique to HN. Anonymous forums tend to attract contrarian assholes. Perhaps this place is more, erm, poorly socially-adapted to the general population, but I don't see it as very far outside the norm outside of the average wealth of the posters.

[holoduke]

Really? Mmm i think hn is a place with on avarage above intelligent people. People who understand that their opinion is not the only one. I rarely have issues with people here. Might be also because we are all in the same bubble here.

[abakker]

its so interesting that in Likert scale surveys, I tend to see huge positivity bias/agreement bias, but comments tend to be critical/negative. I think there is something related to the format of feedback that skews the graph in general.

On HN, my theory is that positivity is the upvotes, and negativity/criticality is the discussion.

Personally, my contribution to your effort is that I would love to see a tool that could do this analysis for me over a dataset/corpus of my choosing. The code is nice, but it is a bit beyond me to follow in your footsteps.

[walterbell]

Great work! Would you consider adding support for search-via-url, e.g. https://hn.wilsonl.in/?q=sentiment+analysis. It would enable sharing and bookmarks of stable queries.

[wilsonzlin]

Thanks for the suggestion, I've just added the feature:

https://hn.wilsonl.in/s/sentiment%20analysis

[al_hag]

It will be a deep dive into the most essential of HN staples, the nitpick

[Karrot_Kream]

Lol what a typical comment for today's HN. Condescending ("just plain wrong") with a jab ("this isn't a hugbox") placed in just to remind you that not only are you perceived to be wrong but you've provoked anger. No proof to provoke the jab, no feedback to help fix what you perceive as wrong sentiment analysis. Just thoughtless condescension and anger. Why is the sentiment wrong? Is this a data analysis trap the OP fell into? Nah let's insult the OP instead.

In my experience having run a bunch of different sentiment models on HN comments, HN comments tend to place around neutral to slightly negative as a whole, even when I perceive the thread to be okay. However I've noticed a huge bump in negative sentiment on large HN threads. I generally find that absolute sentiment doesn't work in most corpuses because the model reflects its training set's sentiment labels. I generally find relative sentiment to be a lot more useful. I have yet to do a temporal sentiment analysis on HN but I have a suspicion that it's gotten more negative over time. I agree with another poster that I think HN needs to be careful to not become so negative that it just becomes an anger echo.

Relative sentiment on this site between topics is something I've done and the obvious results show. Crypto threads are by-and-large negative, most political and news related threads are also highly negative.