The Saltiest Users on HN | Hacker News Reader

The Saltiest Users on HN

hackersalt.com

106 pointsmjswensen90 comments

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:

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 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. (Score: -0.32. Comment is 100% technical, with no meaningful sentiment.)

Sorry, I submitted this article earlier with the wrong link. (Score: -0.27. System appears to regard legitimate, largely bloodless apologies as salty.)

Note that the article is from approximately 20 years ago. (Score: -0.24. This is to some degree a critical comment, but it's a short, straightforward statement of fact.)

Probably too late to reply, but I mean things like :ets.method or :queue.whatever. (Score: -0.20. Probably it's cueing off the first phrase?)

Likely negative-scoring words: sorry, mean(s), exhaust(ing), submit(ted), wrong, late, whatever.

My "saltiest" comment was:

Oh man, that's terrible news. R.I.P. Tim May.

So yeah, the sentiment analysis could use some work.

Thanks for trying my app! And thank you for taking the time to respond!

It does have a LONG way to go. These are valid criticisms. And all areas we are working to improve on with our next ML model. (Sad vs Negative, rating numbers as "salty",

This model is pretty simple. It's using TextBlob and looking for a combination of negative sentiment (not necessarily condescending) and subjectivity. Essentially hand built heuristics derived by weighting each word in the sentence. Not a great way to make predictions.

The model is FAR from great. But great from afar. For high level (overall user saltiness) it performs better.

The unlabeled dataset of this size presents some unique challenges but in our testing of our new model (based on SOTA BERT fine-tuining & a large labeled training dataset) the results look promising. I'm really looking forward to getting it deployed.

I am encouraged by the words of @pg who said "you can and should give users an insanely great experience with an early, incomplete, buggy product, if you make up the difference with attentiveness.

Can, perhaps, but should? Yes. Over-engaging with early users is not just a permissible technique for getting growth rolling. For most successful startups it's a necessary part of the feedback loop that makes the product good. Making a better mousetrap is not an atomic operation. Even if you start the way most successful startups have, by building something you yourself need, the first thing you build is never quite right. And except in domains with big penalties for making mistakes, it's often better not to aim for perfection initially."

No problem. By the way, another thing that seems like it maybe departs from the intuition of human-understanding of negative sentiment versus the machine scoring: I notice that almost all of the highly negatively rated comments that it's flagged -- both mine and others -- are relatively short.

I know that there are multi-paragraph laments about how dumb other people are or whatever on HN. In general, those strike me as seeming more salty than even deeply negative one-sentence putdowns. Like, sure, "Javascript is awful" is clearly negative sentiment. But spilling a few hundred words on the topic of "Javascript is awful" is surely more so?

That is interesting. I"ll have to explore that correlation and make sure that we have a good baseline comparison for the v2.0 model.

Thanks!

It seems like this is heavily biased towards the most active users: Dang, tptacek, jaquesm, TeMPOraL, etc...

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".

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 limited without semantic analysis or live-human scoring.

20.23% of my posts are rated as "salty". I wonder what percentage of scoring words are rated as negative.

Honestly I think the whole thing would be more meaningful if it just used total downvotes and/or ratio of downvotes to upvotes

I agree. Would have been much easier too. Unfortunately, HN doesn't have downvotes. The current model does incorporate upvotes, but we're seeing a lot more success training with like-kind labeled datasets + BERT fine tuning.

Thank you for trying the app and hopefully V2 will leave you feeling like the system is more precise.

"HN doesn't have downvotes"

It certainly does; although it's possible they aren't stored independently and simply "cancel out" an upvote, so maybe that's what you meant.

The interface and the graphs are really nice; even though basing the data on votes alone would be less interesting in one sense, I think the rest of the site would still provide value even with that simpler metric.

You're spot on. This model is based off a dictionary with scored words!

For the curious you can see the dictionary here: https://github.com/sloria/TextBlob/blob/eb08c120d364e9086467...

The package used is a pretty popular one called TextBlob. It is nifty for working with unlabeled data like we have with the HackerNews dataset.

We really focused our definition of saltiness around being a combination of (subjective + negative) comments.

We reduced the impact of (objective + negative) as we feel that criticism, while at times painful, if presented objectively isn't necessarily salty.

We built this model fast (1 week) and have since iterated this week into developing a Fine Tuned BERT model that we are training over a much broader set of toxicity, demographic, and polarity features. The training set is much larger and higher quality so we are expecting a large jump in precision upon deployment.

I hope the app gave you some good chuckles as you went around though. It's hard to explain how excited I felt when I saw pg_is_a_butt at the top of my pandas data frame the first time I processed the data.

It's doing a little bit right. :)

My saltiest comment was reportedly "If taxing price gougers seems stupid you're going to hate the pitchfork-toting mobs." I'm not sure how to work some kind of contextual analysis into it but I'm pretty sure it's something on your to-do list. Good on you for the creative idea and implementation and putting it out here for us to sprinkle salt on.

TYVM.

This kind of feedback gets me pumped about continuing to work on it.

I got -.25 for a "link of the lazy <url>" comment. And now I will again ;)

(testing the tool with this comment, do not take this seriously - I think it's a neat experiment)

This is the worst thing I've ever seen.

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.

I take personal offense that the site evaluated 9 of my comments as being salty. Maybe the site is just salty!

The developer should take personal responsibility for this tool by manually counting the distribution of colors in 400 bags of skittles!

Also, ordbajsare is right. Javascript is disgusting!

Here's some more words I think the algorithm dislikes: horrible, screwing, dreadful, idiot, stupid, retard

This webpage is very inaccessible. The links aren't proper links, so can't be easily opened in a new tab.

Yeah, I noticed that trying to use the back button sets you back to the front page, not the actual last user you looked at. Similarly, modifying the URL to hackersalt.com/usernametolookfor doesn't actually work, despite being what appears when you get a search result.

Oh that's strange! Yep. Need to fix that! Good catch, thanks!

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.

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.

Apparently in terms of the raw number of salty comments, I rank 217.

The top guy is someone who's shadowbanned, I see him often.

Also heartwarming to see Terry Davis there, haha.

Yeah, does pg_is_a_butt@ not realize that most people cannot see his posts? You'd think he would figure it out after a while as nobody is replying to him.

He probably knows and is content by having his posts read only by those who've opted in to do so.

I would worry about my methodology if I saw dang, who basically only ever weighs in to politely tell people to be less salty, in the #2 spot on my "Total Salt Score" list.

Again, that list is hugely weighted by frequency of comment. Someone who posts more than almost anyone else will end up vastly higher on the list, even if the majority of comments are not salty. People whose job it is to post on this forum, and particularly to step in where things get negative, is almost sure to manage to rank on the list.

And of course, if you click on him, you can see his "saltiest" responses to people. Some are arguably decently salty, though many are pretty polite too.

What's your definition of 'salty'? I think you can definitely be politely salty, and dang's comments are all saying (at least) 'don't do that' which seems to fit.

My understanding of the word lines up pretty well with the Merriam-Webster definition (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/salty): feeling or showing resentment towards a person or situation; bitter.

By that standard, just telling someone not to do something wouldn't be salty. Salty is telling someone not to do something because only an idiot would do that.

This seems to me to be detecting how "snarky" a comment is, rather than how salty, as it seems to include snappy, sarcastic, and impertinent comments.

If you have "showdead: off" in your profile you won't see some of those users.

I assumed as much. I've played with what HN looks like with showdead: off from time to time, and relatively happy to trust the moderators and leave it turned on. (I am both glad I have the option to view it though, and glad people who are dead-ed still have the ability to participate. I think HN's system here is quite nice.)

I 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 curiosity, how does Metro look to color blind people?

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’m glad you like it! I think we all have room to improve.

I like the idea, but I'm very skeptical of the implementation. My saltiest comments per the tool are not remotely salty, and I'm sure I have many saltier comments. Turns out NLP is hard.

FWIW, my salt score is -0.09 ;)

> I like the idea, but I'm very skeptical of the implementation. My saltiest comments per the tool are not remotely salty, and I'm sure I have many saltier comments. Turns out NLP is hard.

> FWIW, my salt score is -0.09 ;)

Same salt score, same opinion on the results. My top salty comment has a score of -1.00

> > > Unfortunately it's not a bottle. It's just a plastic cup with a lid and a straw. A really big plastic cup that tapers at the bottom so you can fit it in your vehicle's cupholder.

> > In USA even the cups have muffin-tops!?

> Yep. Horrific, isn't it?

It's a joke, it's not terribly on topic, and it's a bit glib. But salty? Nah.

Fourth most "salty" comment, at a score of -0.50:

> I like having a library that I can flip to when I'm bored and want to do something productive.

Seventh most salty, at -0.45, is literally just an explanation of the second argument in Javascript's parseInt function. Ninth is just an earnest recap of a conversation about earworms.

Meanwhile the saltiest comment I saw in a quick skim is in 12th place, with a score of -0.30. I was discussing House of Cards and the then recent scandal around Kevin Spacey, and someone was putting words in my mouth and claiming I said things that I didn't actually say or believe. I was quite salty in my response(s), but here the tool marked it as 70% less salty than joking about muffin topped cups.

Yeah, it really thinks code is salty for some reason....

The Muffin Tops part is making me lol.

I wonder if the ML has learned that words like "brutal", "fighting" "tired" or even "terribly" imply saltiness. If that's the case, this reply to you is going to be pretty darned salty.

I have the same score! Apparently I was a little salty in summer of 2011 and 2012, other than that I'm a pretty sweet guy.

For somoeone who goes by "crankylinuxusuer" I need to work on this! I only got a -.06

I'm nothing but salty and my score is -0.13. Garbage in garbage out.

Sentiment analysis is overall a dangerous way for social media players to punt around 'things we don't like', whatever that may be. You will end up shadowbanned on whatever social media platform you use, because you're not posting cat photos and other prosaic content that people trying to sell insurance policies, sugar water, and watches are okay with.

Thankfully, this is such an ill-posed problem, it will just be an embarrassing boondoggle.

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.

We used TextBlob for this one and penalized to help avoid false-positive classifications for saltiness (subjectivity + negativity).

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.

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.

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.

For this version we used TextBlob out of the box with some custom weighting to avoid false positives.

We'll relaunch in about two weeks with an improved model that we're currently training on a much larger labeled dataset and SOTA BERT model. :)

I'm disappointed at how unsalty my saltiest comments are (https://www.hackersalt.com/weberc2). I'll have to try harder. :/

I have a salty comment that is rated -0.0

I need to step it up.

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.

Thank you very much for your feedback Zak. Those are totally valid points. We will definitely continue to work on the app and fix the search function and share-ability of urls.

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 baffled 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.

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.

Amusingly, this seems to think I'm pretty unsalty, assuming I'm not misunderstanding something.

This is amusing from two perspectives:

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.

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.

But this got me curious. Who are the sweetest users?

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.

>And what kind of topics generate most salt?

politics, gender, race, theoretical physics (particularly dark matter) and javascript.

Actually, username & story titles aren't included in the model. We may experiment with including them in the future but for now we left them out to avoid any undo bias.

Sweetest users is a good question. I'll have to build out that view some time.

I hope it's not based on the contents of the quoted posts alone.

> This was explored (all the way to its grim dystopian conclusion) in tv series Dollhouse. Might want to check it out.

That doesn't seem very salty to me, and I could see myself writing that same comment.

It seems to be based on the individual words, not the meaning. "Grim" and "dystopian" are probably considered "salty" words. My lowest scoring comment was about dissonance in music, and presumably "dissonance" is a "salty" word too.

> My lowest scoring comment was about dissonance in music, and presumably "dissonance" is a "salty" word too.

Alright, I'll avoid posting the lyrics to Tool's Schism...

I figured it was something along those lines, it's just very jarring to see harmless comments rank as my saltiest when I know I've posted worse.

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."

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.

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.

A lot of my salty comments are me complaining about myself or my own stuff.

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.

This sounds interesting. I like it.

May I suggest removing Cantarell from the list of fonts used? The font weight used on this site makes it extremely hard to read.

We will definitely work on improving readability of the app. Thank you very for your feedback. Very appreciated!

"Looks like I'm going to be laid off soon :'("

Ouch, Score: -1.0. I guess this is going to be counted as salty too :D.

This is really cool!

My saltiest comment is… a quote of someone else's comment that includes the word "stupid" D:

Thanks for the feedback Jake!

Well, I guess I'm not very salty at all: rank 1236. Only 360/1698 comments were considered salty.

This is cool, but my comment history contains some comments far saltier than the one that makes the list.

I guess I'm not nearly as salty as I thought. Or at least, other people on here are saltier.

I would be interested to know what words/phrases are the best predictors of saltiness.

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

awful difficult terrible horrible boring

bad worse worst

stupid moron retard idiot dumb

crazy insane shocking outrageous

worthless useless

effing wtf

disgust discuss (?!)

https://github.com/sloria/TextBlob/blob/eb08c120d364e9086467...

Have at it. :)

Judging by my score... this can't see flagged comments at all.

Great work! Would love to learn how the sentiment is scored!

This website has no contrast. I can't read it at all.

Sorry about that, and thank you for the feedback. I'll try to make sure it is more readable in the next version. Thanks for taking the time to check it out!

The opposite of this would also be interesting.

I agree! Great idea.

Why the hell am I not on that list?

Your account is pretty new. We intentionally remove any accounts with less then ? number of comments to discourage people from attempting to set a record. Lol

this is hilarious

a computer converted a human's action into a number and graphed it using sophisticated numerical algorithms and analysis methods. ergo it must be true.

"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"

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=salty

It's funny because this one sounds much more charitable:

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/salty

Broadly applied definition, weakly defined.

Well done, this is a great comment! And I really disagree with it.

I actually think "salty" is a very deep misunderstanding of why people are writing such comments, and the attempt to politely call it negative by labeling it "salty" is ironically itself very negative and aggressive.

By making that timid, low-level aggression very blunt and calling it "nihilistic asshat", you are making a very good point. But I don't think they are actually nihilistic asshats. And I think even a true nihilist asshat is worthy of some respect.

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