If anything, this tool tracks with my general opinion on sentiment analysis: it would be awesome if it actually worked, but most algorithms just predict everything as neutral.

For example if you search for bitwarden it ranks three comments as negative, all others as neutral. If I as a human look at actual comments about bitwarden [1] there are lots of comments about people using it and recommending it. As a human I would rate the sentiment as very positive, with some "negative" comments in between (that are really about specific situations where it's the wrong tool).

I've had some success using LLMs for sentiment analysis. An LLM can understand context and determine that in the given context "Bitwarden is the answer" is a glowing recommendation, not a neutral statement. But doing sentiment analysis that way eats a lot of resources, so I can't fault this tool for going with the more established approach that is incapable of making that leap.

1: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastMonth&page=0&prefix=tr...

I like the concept and the interface, but after trying one of the suggested examples, I'm not convinced this actually works?

I tried "remote work" like the initial instructions recommended as an example. The graph it gave me showed large spikes of "neutral" sentiment with a few negligible bouts of negative sentiment and even smaller bouts of positive sentiment. The sample comment it gave was from a "Who Wants to be Hired" post where the poster demanded exclusively remote offers, which the tool classified as "neutral" (with 98.7% confidence!)

Very slick tool, but if the sentiment analysis itself doesn't really work well then I don't see what value this could have.

I think this is actually one of the very first times I have seen neumorphic design in the wild.

Prior to this I’ve mostly only seen it on dribbble.

I actually like this style a lot, and I wish more apps would use it. But at this point I thought that this style was one that “came and went” before it saw any significant actual use in any apps or OSes. Maybe there is still hope after all :)

Edit: oh and I had to try asking your tool for sentiment about neumorphic design after this of course. It returned my own comment lol :p and it called it “neutral”. Is it only evaluating the first paragraph that the word appears in in the comment? (Also I guess other people more commonly refer to it as “neumorphism” than as “neumorphic design” and maybe that’s why when I asked it for neumorphic design it returned my own comment.)

Hmm, it thinks HN is neutral on crypto. Hmmmm.

Is it actually doing anything?

Cool idea. But as a red/green color blind person, I have no way to figure out what is positive/negative in the graphs.

Idea: single number metric, something like, %-of-positive - %-of-negative avearaged over a time period.

So that we could compare terms based on this result metric: google vs microsoft, rust vs go, rust vs microsoft, etc

(Will not work for Go as it's a common word in addition to the programming language, but anyways)

It would be really interesting to see, in the limit of this tech, how any given comment ranks on the group-think to contrarian scale for every comment you read. There are a lot of signals on HN about comment quality, like karma, account age, reputation of certain individual names, but this could be an interesting one. Wonder what kind of emergent behavior it would drive.

NFTs — neutral with 98% confidence. Hmm…

Also, it seems like putting in the same phrase twice generates different graphs and results at least sometimes. So it’s difficult to use comparatively.

It’s great. Simple and works in 10 seconds. Only thing is I’d prefer to know sentiment over at least a year (defaults to just 1 month)

Still, great idea and execution

Seems pointless to go through all that effort to chart this over time, and have that time limited to..... a single month.

> you can track trends with it

No, no, you can't.

A month doesn't seem like a useful time frame? Or maybe I'm misunderstanding the main use case.

Also, you could drastically improve styling on mobile. Lot of wasted space.

it'd be great if I could turn off neutral, it's drowning out the positive and negative lines... for example Kubernetes... mostly neutral.

On mobile when I select the text input the whole page zooms so far in that I can’t see the submit button (or anything else for that matter).

Took me a minute to figure out what had happened, but I was able to submit a phrase. The response was

> Randomly sampled comment from the pulled data: Sorry, there was an error processing your message.

The sentiment of “fart” is neutral.

Out of curiosity, is the sentiment index weighted for up-voted threads and comments? Because those things are a kind of sentiment index too.

Are there any terms that don't say "neutral" as the sentiment?

Nice idea, not sure it works though.. got neutral on all words I tried .. even beer

My biggest issue when I tried to analyze sentiments was that there is no practical way to bias for sarcasm, such as "it's great if you love pulling your hair out".

Exit vim - Sentiment: neutral (Confidence: 98.32%)

Stockholm Syndrome?

RTO and Elon Musk are both overwhelmingly neutral sentiment? Seems unlikely.

Appears to be struggling from the hug of death.

I searched Blockchain and it said "neutral". This is the sample comment it displayed:

> Ah yes, because blockchain is the 100% true source of ultimate truth.

The model can't detect sarcasm.

>> white board interviews

nothing

>>hobos in san francisco

nothing

>>accommodating my neurodivergence

error

>>is everyone I don't like hitler or just some people

nothing

Love the fact I didn't need to signup to get value out of this!

Note: I would suggest just removing dark mode for now. Works WAY better in light mode. I almost missed the light mode, and that would have been too bad.

Here's my user test: https://news.pub/?try=https://www.youtube.com/embed/2eac5XZe...

Cute, love the idea! Would perhaps cut the examples to be substrings to avoid long comments that mention the issue in passing once, but that’s a personal preference. Either way, actually seeing the graph on mobile is wonky, and IMO the example is way less interesting than the graph — maybe make it bigger and more front n center?

Thanks for sharing :) TIL sentiment for “communism” is slightly less negative than for “capitalism” on here! Tho both are, surprisingly, mostly neutral.