

Show HN: Weekend Project - Hide Inane Comments on HN - micahmcfarland
https://github.com/micahmcfarland/ratchet

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RyanZAG
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.

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]

[1]
[http://www.chrisumbel.com/article/node_js_natural_language_n...](http://www.chrisumbel.com/article/node_js_natural_language_nlp)

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TazeTSchnitzel
Well, at a certain number of levels deep, comments seem to be un-downvoteable.
I don't quite understand why.

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tvon
I think there is just a delay, to keep back-and-forth arguing at a minimum you
cannot immediately vote on or respond to a deeply nested comment.

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ruswick
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.)

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.

~~~
youngerdryas
Indeed, brevity is the soul of wit.

~~~
harlanlewis
I'm sorry, but this assemblage is aspiring to a sophisticated strata of
dialogue. Kindly elevate your contribution beyond the 2nd grade level.
(<http://sarahktyler.com/code/sample.php>)

...alright, even my tongue-in-cheek comment only hit the the 7th grade.
Methinks the true goal of "a Chrome extension which hides all HackerNews
comments that are below an 8th grade reading level" is to get everyone off the
comments and back to work.

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carbocation
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.

[1] = e.g., <https://github.com/cgiffard/TextStatistics.js>

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Osmium
Maybe because the Flesch-Kincaid reading level isn't a particularly good
metric of anything other than sentence length and syllable count? Certainly
not of "content" or "value" however you might define those concepts.

~~~
carbocation
Tell that to the author maybe? The author implemented the Flesch-Kincaid grade
level algorithm in his plugin.

In other words, I'm not suggesting that he use Flesch-Kincaid; he already made
that choice. I'm suggesting a way for him to not re-implement an algorithm
that's already implemented in his language of choice.

~~~
Osmium
Ah, my mistake, my apologies. I thought the author was using a different
metric.

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

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gavinh
A clearly written, thoughtful comment might demonstrate an eighth grade
reading level.

A comment with esoteric vocabulary might be inane.

I question the premise of this project.

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DanBC
Something to turn this into a killer extension would be "Hide comments that
use words on my filter list".

Thus, I could chose to hide any comment that used the word FANBOI or fanboy or
whatever.

You'd need to include some method for alerting me that there's a comment that
I might wish to downvote.

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.

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sergiotapia
I hope you don't include my comment above in that 'pile-on'. I had no
intention of negative criticism on the project or the author; just wanted to
give a quick tl;dr of how this library works. Nothing more, nothing less.

@Author: I apologize if it was taken that way.

~~~
DanBC
Oh no! Your comment was a succinct description of the project. I didn't see
your comment as negative in anyway.

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

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coolsunglasses
You got rejected by it, incidentally.

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TillE
Unsurprisingly, such a technique seems likely to be biased against non-native
speakers. But it's entirely possible to make insightful points without
sophisticated language.

~~~
deadairspace
> it's entirely possible to make insightful points without sophisticated
> language.

"Growing a Language" by Guy Steele is an extreme example of that.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ahvzDzKdB0>

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usea
Inanity and reading level in english are orthogonal concepts.

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kenko
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.

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gurkendoktor
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.

Too bad I have already started another weekend project :)

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mikecane
Who Do You Write For? [http://mikecanex.wordpress.com/2010/08/17/who-do-you-
write-f...](http://mikecanex.wordpress.com/2010/08/17/who-do-you-write-for/)

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jere
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)."

But I think that is perhaps beside the point: congrats on writing your first
Chrome extension!

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davidmr
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.

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anigbrowl
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.

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oellegaard
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.

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jasonlotito
Decided to test this on my posts.

Posts like this one (<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5543140>) 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.

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."

Good first shot though. =) I wonder if you could reverse the plugin to help
improve my own comments.

