Hacker News Reader

How about, "LETS F*ING GOOOOO YOU DINGBAT", now if that's a comment between friends the addition of the insult might be said in jest and still be impatient/enthusiastic, or does by adding the insult to the end automatically label it as combative?

I realise this wasn't part of the dataset, more making a point that written language without context ( and sometimes even with ) is subject to huge amounts of reader interpretation.

View on HN

Agree that context is often needed! (Which is why it was strange to us that raters weren't presented with any context besides the comment text itself -- not even the subreddit, much less the original Reddit post.)

One interesting question, though: if "LETS FUCKING GOOOOO YOU DINGBAT" were meant to be a combative insult, would someone still add a bunch of O's ("GOOOOO" instead of merely "go")? My intuition is that if combativeness were intended, "let's fucking go, you dingbat" would be more likely than "LETS FUCKING GOOOOO YOU DINGBAT", but of course it's a bit hard to say without that context.

This one is indeed hard to label.

PS Hope they will never begin solving philosophy problems with ML.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com