[HN Gopher] Show HN: Search HN for interesting comment sections
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       Show HN: Search HN for interesting comment sections
        
       Author : isoprophlex
       Score  : 31 points
       Date   : 2024-04-16 13:19 UTC (9 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.searchhacker.news)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.searchhacker.news)
        
       | isoprophlex wrote:
       | I built this tool to help me find interesting discussions on
       | Hacker News. I love reading HN discussions almost more than the
       | articles themselves. However, I found that full text search,
       | although highly performant, is not always good at surfacing
       | interesting discussions on a certain topic -- especially if you
       | don't know what to search for exactly.
       | 
       | I built this by scraping the most recent ~6 million posts (that's
       | about 2 years of history) and putting the resulting posts and
       | their vector embeddings into Postgres.
       | 
       | Let me know what could be improved, and if you'd like a more
       | detailed writeup of how this was built :)
        
         | RGamma wrote:
         | Ah so this is what we wrote about recently. Good job. Would be
         | interested how you did it for sure :) It was really quick too!
         | 
         | Also, somehow this has a relatively big horizontal margin on
         | mobile.
        
           | isoprophlex wrote:
           | Yes, exactly! Your feedback prompted me to do a quick
           | iteration into something good enough for a Show HN, so thanks
           | :)
           | 
           | I see what you mean about the margin on mobile... note that
           | I'm one of the most unqualified front end people I know and
           | this was mostly done using github copilot, I might not be
           | brainy enough to understand the intricacies of css responsive
           | layouting ;)
           | 
           | I'll post a writeup sometime too!
        
       | humbleferret wrote:
       | Good work!
       | 
       | The sample searches were particularly strong for uncovering
       | discussions on specific subjects, i.e. 'Dedicated Vector
       | Databases'.
       | 
       | With less focused searches, such as 'Deep Work', I notice some
       | results feel only loosely related. Is this an aim - to broaden
       | the scope of discovery that may not seem directly related?
        
         | isoprophlex wrote:
         | Thanks for testing it out! So, because I've found (in purely
         | vibe-based testing, of course) that with queries of 1, 2 or 3
         | words, a vector embedding doesn't always make a lot of sense.
         | What's "Apple"? The fruit, the company? So, here it defaults to
         | priming the fuzzy search with a full text search on 'apple', or
         | 'flow state'. If you want to know something about deep work,
         | try "tricks for performing deep work", or "help me get into a
         | flow state".
         | 
         | It's all very serendipity-driven, and this is mostly a tool for
         | wasting time, but you might discover some interesting (and
         | hopefully on point) conversations this way.
         | 
         | Anyway, valuable feedback. Maybe in a next interation, I'll
         | always do both searches and merge the resulting ranking.
        
           | humbleferret wrote:
           | Thank you for the detailed reply - I appreciate the insight
           | into how the shorter queries are handled.
        
       | gus_massa wrote:
       | Feature request: I expected that clicking on the number of
       | comments would send me to the HN page like in the HN search. Just
       | make all the second line clicky too.
        
         | isoprophlex wrote:
         | Consider it done :)
        
       | ryandrake wrote:
       | Minor nit-pick: The browser back button doesn't seem able to
       | navigate back to the landing page.
       | 
       | Interesting project, though. As a shortcut, I usually just use
       | the hidden /active URL to find the interesting stories. Generally
       | these are the ones with the most active commentary and often they
       | get pushed off the main HN screen quickly by the "flamewar
       | detector". So you have to be quick to find them, or just use
       | /active.
        
         | isoprophlex wrote:
         | Yeah, good observation, that really annoyed me too. I tried to
         | get HTMX to mess with the browser history, but that only seemed
         | to make things worse...
         | 
         | Interesting aside on flamewar detection: you can visualize the
         | comment embeddings in a 2d scatterplot, color coded by
         | username. As you'd expect, a great deal of dang's comments
         | occupy a distinct position in comment-space.
        
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       (page generated 2024-04-16 23:01 UTC)