
The Saltiest Users on HN - mjswensen
https://www.hackersalt.com/
======
aetherson
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?)

~~~
Kassius509
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."

~~~
aetherson
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?

~~~
Kassius509
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!

------
_bxg1
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".

~~~
logfromblammo
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.

~~~
Kassius509
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...](https://github.com/sloria/TextBlob/blob/eb08c120d364e908646731d60b4e4c6c1712ff63/textblob/en/en-
sentiment.xml)

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. :)

~~~
howard941
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.

~~~
Kassius509
TYVM.

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

------
CivBase
(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

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

~~~
ocdtrekkie
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.

~~~
Kassius509
Oh that's strange! Yep. Need to fix that! Good catch, thanks!

------
ocdtrekkie
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.

~~~
smacktoward
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.

~~~
lazyasciiart
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.

~~~
smacktoward
My understanding of the word lines up pretty well with the Merriam-Webster
definition ([https://www.merriam-
webster.com/dictionary/salty](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.

~~~
gnode
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.

------
msluyter
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._

~~~
weberc2
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 ;)

~~~
reificator
> _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.

~~~
Kassius509
Yeah, it really thinks code is salty for some reason....

The Muffin Tops part is making me lol.

------
kangnkodos
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"?

------
gus_massa
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.

------
jcfrei
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.

~~~
Kassius509
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. :)

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

~~~
Zak
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.

~~~
ivahuc
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.

------
JudgeWapner
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.

------
DoreenMichele
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.

------
thisisit
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.

~~~
Kassius509
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.

------
reificator
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.

~~~
mrob
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.

~~~
reificator
> _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.

------
newsoul2019
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."

~~~
soared
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.

------
matt4077
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.

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

------
shhehebehdh
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.

~~~
Kassius509
This sounds interesting. I like it.

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

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

------
rickyc091
"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.

------
jakelazaroff
This is really cool!

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

~~~
Kassius509
Thanks for the feedback Jake!

------
pmiller2
Well, I guess I'm not very salty at all: rank 1236. Only 360/1698 comments
were considered salty.

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

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

------
weberc2
I would be interested to know what words/phrases are the best predictors of
saltiness.

~~~
Kassius509
[https://github.com/sloria/TextBlob/blob/eb08c120d364e9086467...](https://github.com/sloria/TextBlob/blob/eb08c120d364e908646731d60b4e4c6c1712ff63/textblob/en/en-
sentiment.xml)

Have at it. :)

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

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

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

~~~
Kassius509
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!

------
neom
The opposite of this would also be interesting.

~~~
ivahuc
I agree! Great idea.

------
grayed-down
Why the hell am I not on that list?

~~~
Kassius509
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

------
jeho
this is hilarious

~~~
JudgeWapner
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.

------
wsdfsayy
"salty" is a great euphemism for "nihilistic asshat"

~~~
jamescostian
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](https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=salty)

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

[https://www.dictionary.com/browse/salty](https://www.dictionary.com/browse/salty)

~~~
Kassius509
Broadly applied definition, weakly defined.

