Show HN: Quickly score items on a scale of 1-5 | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Quickly score items on a scale of 1-5

dynamate.io

1 pointleobg3 comments

I made this. It's very simple:

1. You paste in lines of text. 2. As each item is presented, you score it 1-5. 3. You download your annotated dataset.

If you paste image URLs instead of text, those will get rendered.

I use it for whole bunch of things, both for programming tasks and personal stuff. Like:

  - triaging a list of domain names I'm considering
  - labeling training data for, say, a text classifier
  - deciding between a list of logos

Basically anytime I've got a long list of stuff and need to separate the good stuff from the bad stuff.

To make things really fast and intuitive, the labels are mapped to the 1-5 keys (num row). So you can just place your fingers on those keys and blitz through your data.

Here's a screenshot: https://ibb.co/5kHXLxX

Curious to see who else may find this useful. Questions and suggestions welcome.

opens notepad, writes each thing on a separate line, presses 1 to 5 for each line.

done, requires no internet, browsers

Well, you obviously haven't faced the problem I am trying to solve here. So there's not point in convincing you.

Still, for other potential wanderers into the graveyard of Show HN, I have to dispute that the tool is no improvement over using a text editor. I have, of course, tried that, and even spreadsheets. And it did not work at all for the task at hand.

1. When using a text editor (or a spreadsheet even), you need to keep moving the cursor to add a score. With a text editor, you even have to add some separation character after it, like a tab, if you want to be able to use the result as a TSV. And then, you need to backtrack, and move to the next line. One mistake and you end up with a score like 33, or your score lands on the wrong line, which you then have to fix. This all takes up cognitive load and distracts you from the scoring task. No biggie perhaps when you're scoring your 7 item shopping list. But when you're scoring 200 Hacker News comments by, say, dismissiveness, it gets frustrating really fast.

2. With a text editor (or a spreadsheet even), you visual field is filled with lots of items at the same time. You have to make a mental effort to focus on the one item you are labeling right now. Again, cognitive load.

3. A "line" of text can run quite long. In a text editor, you have the choice of long lines being cut off or wrapped. If they are cut off, it's hard to score them. And if they are wrapped, it's quite difficult to tell where one "line" ends and the next one starts. So you can't even use any fixed rhythm for moving the cursor after typing in your score ("left left down"). Because, if the current "line" is short, you need to move "down" just once to get to the next item. But if the current "line" got wrapped, you may need to move "down" twice, or many times, to get the the next item.

All of that being said:

The site has been hit by quite some traffic from this post. Still, I did not receive any form of feedback. So it appears that the itch it's scratching is only my own.

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