I think it would be useful to add a right-click menu option to HN content, like "similar sentences", which displays a list of links to them. I wonder if it would tell me that this suggestion has been made before.
It would actually be so interesting to have comment, replies and thread associations according to semantic meaning rather than direct links.
I wonder how many times the same discussion thread has been repeated across different posts. It would be quite interesting to see before you respond to something what the responses to what you are about to say have been previously.
Semantic threads or something would be the general idea... Pretty cool concept actually...
You'd get sentences full of words like: tangential, orthogonal, externalities, anecdote, anecdata, cargo cult, enshittification, grok, Hanlon's razor, Occam's razor, any other razor, Godwin's law, Murphy's law, other laws.
Someone made a tool a few years ago that basically unmasked all HN secondary accounts with a high degree of certainty. It scared the shit out of me how easy it picked out my alts based on writing style.
I think that original post was taken down after a short while but antirez was similarly nerd sniped by it and posted this which i keep a link to for posterity: https://antirez.com/news/150
"Well, the first problem I had, in order to do something like that, was to find an archive with Hacker News comments. Luckily there was one with apparently everything posted on HN from the start to 2023, for a huge 10GB of total data. You can find it here: https://huggingface.co/datasets/OpenPipe/hacker-news and, honestly, I’m not really sure how this was obtained, if using scarping or if HN makes this data public in some way."
This is funny to me in a number ways. I doubt anyone would be interested in post-2023 data dumps for fear it would be too contaminated with content produced from LLMs. It's also funny that the archive was hosted by huggingface which just removes any sliver of doubt they scarped (sic) the site.
