
Show HN: Hater News – Find trolls and anyone's hater level on Hacker News - KevinMcAlear
http://haternews.herokuapp.com/
======
vezzy-fnord
I got a score of 3.27%.

That said, the methodology here is totally broken. I expected my worst comment
to be related to one of the many gender debates on HN, but no.

Apparently, it's _this_ :

\----------------------

You can try "Masters of Deception: The Gang that Ruled Cyberspace".

It's a fictionalized retelling of the stories of the two prominent BBS
hacker/phreaker groups during the 80s and early 90s.

It's not really brain food or anything like that, but it's a quick and decent
read if you have free time.

\---------------------

Truly this is the pinnacle of vitriol. I then looked at some of the other
darker hues in the periodic table. More mundane stuff.

~~~
kazinator
The last two letters of the "bulletin board system" abbreviation might be what
the software is latching on to.

~~~
vezzy-fnord
So the Scunthorpe problem is in effect?

------
adventured
"The internet is covered in trolls who are filled with hate. It's time we
started to expose them and put them in their place."

Can't say I agree with that sentiment. It comes across almost as bad as the
hate it proclaims to wish to expose.

I don't think the Internet is covered in trolls, the trolls are an extremely
small percentage of users.

------
jnbiche
This is one of the very few sites I've flagged in my 3+ year HN history.
Here's why: HN seems to work because we focus our attention on high-quality
posts and "content-filled" comments. Low-quality (and sometimes unpopular,
unfortunately) comments are penalized.

This project -- if it does what it claims -- seems to focus on people that
create low-quality comments (i.e., "trolls"). In a way, it's rewarding them
for their behavior. (and yes, I realize the irony in my comment).

Also, it blanket labels anyone meeting its algorithmic threshold as a "hater",
when in fact they may just have written something unpopular.

So I'd prefer for people to create value using HN's API in more positive,
constructive ways.

Just my opinion, obviously.

~~~
ddoolin
I would say this project alone seems harmless enough, but this regarding this
comment from the author's blog post I have to say I agree with you on:

> *Side Note: Eventually I would love to turn this into a Chrome App that will
> just real-time analyze any user on a page when you visit hacker news and put
> a score right next to them so the world can see if they hate or love. I’m
> also going to build versions of this for Twitter, reddit, Instagram,
> Facebook, and maybe even dating apps. If you want to help, reach out!

[http://kevinmcalear.com/thoughts/building-hater-
news/](http://kevinmcalear.com/thoughts/building-hater-news/)

~~~
KevinMcAlear
I think both of you have great points. I am not trying to demean anyone or
give extra credit to trolls. I do agree that this app is focused on "haters"
though. It was more just a fun experiment to see how well it would even work.
One thing I noticed is that most people on Hacker News have well thought out
comments and are not in fact "haters" (usually only a few percent likely they
post insulting comments.) As far as a chrome extension, my intention would be
to help give people context for comments based on previous actions. I think
transparency can sometimes be powerful and give someone an additional lens to
look through when encountering an encouraging or discouraging comment.

------
krapp
Apparently, this is my worst comment... which can't possibly be true:

    
    
        "Even then, you're aware of the contacts or the implant, 
        unless you're living in the Matrix and were genetically 
        engineered with a AV jack in your spinal column." 
    

Only 3.15%, i'm kind of disappointed with myself.

~~~
sbenario
@KevinMcAlear - can you share any details on the algo? :-)

~~~
KevinMcAlear
Sure! I wrote a dry blog post about it actually.
[http://kevinmcalear.com/thoughts/building-hater-
news/](http://kevinmcalear.com/thoughts/building-hater-news/)

@krapp there were some challenges building out a great model but you can
download the whole repo and pull out just the machine learning part and see
what I did, I have it commented out in an iPython Notebook. :)

The Repo:
[https://github.com/kevinmcalear/hater_news](https://github.com/kevinmcalear/hater_news)

It basically uses word tokenization using scikit-learn's count vectorizer and
some extra features I added like "bad words", ratio of bad words to total
words used, speaking in all CAPS, and a few other features. I then took the
features and use logistic regression to predict the likely hood that a
specific comment is insulting then average all a user's comments into one
score.

I used training data from a kaggle competition and was able to score near the
same level as the winners but it will definitely be improved as I keep working
on it.

------
bkeroack
Like every other site on the internet with game-ified comment scoring
(starting perhaps with Slashdot), it mostly encourages groupthink and
discourages dissenting views from being expressed.

OTOH, at least HN lets you create throwaway accounts easily.

------
negativeview
1.7% for me. It seems to show constructive criticism as "hate," though I bet
that's very hard to get perfect.

I like the little time waster videos and whatnot that show when it's taking a
little while to compute.

------
miguelrochefort
Score: 4.65%

Worst Comment: "You're just making a caricature of yourself."

------
cmdrfred

      An error occurred in the application and your page could not be served. Please try again in a few moments.
    

aww I always get here too late for the cool stuff.

~~~
KevinMcAlear
Should be fixed now! :)

~~~
cmdrfred
It is! My most hateful comment is about the Apple Air: "Please provide an
example why a screw or removable panel would provide less value to the
consumer than gluing the thing and making it impossible to replace the battery
on your own. I eagerly await your response."

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Reliability. Screws come loose, especially when flexed in a pocket etc. Its
considered a win in mechanical engineering circles when you remove a screw
from a design.

I look forward to metal-air batteries, where the charge can be expected to
exceed the lifetime of the device.

~~~
HashHishBang
Not to run too far away from the actual content of the post but...

I thought metal-air batteries didn't produce a high enough current to be used
in devices requiring much more juice than a hearing aid?

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Alcoa runs a car on an aluminum=>alumina metal-air battery!

------
chrisbennet
It couldn't find me on HN then ran some auto play video.

~~~
KevinMcAlear
Sorry! The site has been getting hammered with people so it keeps crashing.
Trying to scale it up now. It has to make a separate API calls for each of
your comments (max 50) so it takes a while and since there are so many people
using it sometimes it times out...

~~~
MoOmer
Background jobs are good for this sort of thing. Hope it's not being done in a
controller...

------
bronson
Interesting, my most downvoted comment is also my highest rated: "Downvoted
because enough is enough! The "14 competing standards" comic was really funny
the first few hundred times it was snarked into HN comments."
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8354087](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8354087)

------
tinkerrr
The worst comment: "How do you know Uber drivers use iPhones exclusively?"
-tinkerrr Can't believe I spewed such hate

~~~
oblio
Same here:

"If you have multiple modes you can basically reuse the entire keyboard for
commands. That's one advantage that is impossible to achieve in non-modal
editors. Ctrl-ing, Alt-ing, Shift-ing stuff just isn't the same, especially as
those commands get more and more complex."

------
Aldo_MX
From the blog entry[1]

    
    
      Some Final Thoughts.
      - Sarcasm is hard to detect.
    

Reminded me of park or bird[2].

[1] [http://kevinmcalear.com/thoughts/building-hater-
news/](http://kevinmcalear.com/thoughts/building-hater-news/)

[2] [http://xkcd.com/1425/](http://xkcd.com/1425/)

~~~
KevinMcAlear
haha. :)

------
sbensu
pg got a 2.95% with worst comment:

"The sort of incivility we're worried about is the more explicit type where
someone replies to a comment with "You are an idiot. Don't you realize that x
y z?" when they could have simply said "x y z." I'm pretty ..."

It would be cool to ignore/weight down quoted text somehow.

------
malandrew
I bet you that the algorithm could be adjusted to consider comments that meet
the following criteria:

(1) If user has the most upvoted comment in any thread (2) Check if that
thread had a lot of flamewar language.

If so, return that as the most hateful comment. I'm only half joking about
using this approach.

------
DanBC
On the other thread I said that it seems to be counting quoted text as my
words.

It's a fun little app! Not sure how useful it is, but I do want to see how it
develops.

I'd be really interested to see if there's any link between HN Avg karma and
hn hater score.

------
eevilspock
@KevinMcAlear. I found a serious flaw in your algorithm's results.

Your own hate score is 3.61% Should not this post and the creation of Hater
News itself up your score to 100%?

My own score is an even lower 2.06%. What gives? Maybe this comment will give
me some points.

------
waterlesscloud
Clicking on the text of the Worst Comment actually takes you to a different
comment. :-)

------
wpaprocki
I'm getting an error message. Stupid app!

...So did my rating just go up?

------
Cogito
It would be nice to have the username used in a search added to the url of the
results page, to make the results easily shareable.

Might have a look-see at the source.

------
melpomene
'The Worst Comment "Been looking for something like this! Perfect. Thanks for
the effort!"' \- right. sorry about that one.

------
riffraff
> Count Vecteriztor

took me a bit to understand that was a weird typo and not a really cool CS
concept.

~~~
mikecb
Also s/Logisitc/Logistic

~~~
KevinMcAlear
Whoops! Fixed! Thanks guys.

------
lnanek2
> Application Error

I hate hater score sites that don't give me my hater sore...

------
sbierwagen
Getting a mix of application errors and 400 errors.

------
sbenario
commented the first time this made FP, not sure what happened. I still think
this is a cool use of the HN API.

------
valarauca1
This already made the front page once today before it was _nearly at the same
moment_

1) Taken down via HN hug of death

2) Nuked from orbit by mods.

Also I'm only at 2.5% I honestly figured I was far more toxic.

~~~
dang
> Nuked from orbit by mods.

No moderator touched that post. It was killed by user flags. (Also, why on
earth would we "nuke" a post sharing original work done with the HN API?
That's why we made the API in the first place.)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8515160](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8515160)

 _Reposts_ of user-flagged items, though, we do tend to penalize. Otherwise
flags wouldn't mean very much.

~~~
valarauca1
I assume flag killed was something mods could do :x I know they can super flag
posts, I assumed that is what [Flag Killed] meant.

~~~
dang
[flagkilled] means that a post was killed by user flags. I got tired of typing
"This post was killed by user flags."

------
lcfcjs
haternews.herokuapp.com application is down. lol should have used javascript.

