Show HN: Automatically hide flamebait/shallow/political comments on HN

2 points · 1 visible top comment · 2026-08-26 17:00:51 UTC

classify.stylometry.net · Read Story HN original

I love HN, but lately I have been sick of reading the same dismissive criticisms over and over again. Along with political arguments that have been litigated to death, people's issues with smooth scrolling on blogs, etc. Many of these comments do not get flagged for whatever reason. So I made a service to automatically classify whether comments violate (a modified form of) the HN guidelines automatically. In addition there's a Chrome extension to collapse these comments (if they violate your score thresholds) so you don't have to read them too. You can also just watch guideline violating comments come in as they are posted on the website.

Here's more info on how it works: https://classify.stylometry.net/how-it-works

Comments

Leftium · 2026-08-27 05:59:30 UTC

I have been considering adding labels/filters based on sentiment analysis to my HN reader. I wonder if your classifier-based method would be more effective.

I added filters that blur posts from new HN accounts based on age/karma thresholds (as suggested by another HN user). However, instead collapsing, I just blurred them. This allows quickly peeking via hover. My reader also highlights posts with higher points/comments, and those orange highlights survive the blurring.

This is what blurring looks like: https://hn.leftium.com/newest?min_karma=500&min_age_years=5

costco · 2026-08-27 14:29:23 UTC

That’s very nice. Feel free to integrate if you want :) Just request https://classify.stylometry.net/violations/49458161 or whatever item ID (as long as it was posted later than a few weeks ago) and it will return the scores for that post/comment and all its children.

Leftium · 2026-08-28 09:16:55 UTC

wow thanks! I integrated like this: https://hn.leftium.com/i/49449507?violation_threshold=0.5

The url param temporarily sets the threshold, you can permanently set it via the settings.

My initial assessment is 0.5 setting is too aggressive; the posts that I generally don't care to read seem to violate multiple rules at once.

It's a shame we can't see comment scores so orange highlights could shine through the blurring on "good" comments.

costco · 2026-08-28 22:00:04 UTC

Wow that was quick :) Meh, I feel like comment points have become somewhat untethered to comment quality (at least assuming threads are roughly sorted by comment score). It’s a good heuristic usually but it’s wrong often enough for it to be difficult to rely on.

I want to improve the classifier scores too. There’s some parameters in the loss function I could play around with more when training which basically optimize for more false negatives or false positives. Problems with no ground truth are very frustrating lol (though I suppose dang/tomhow’s manually written warnings could be treated as labels instead of using labels from GPT, but I suspect there’s not enough of them).