That said, the code looks good and the idea is fun - might be nice to try and implement a javascript NLP library to make it more intelligent? [1]
[1] http://www.chrisumbel.com/article/node_js_natural_language_n...
Moreover, I'm not sure as to why I would want to rid HN of "8th Grade Content" in the first place. I'm fine with terse sentences and pedestrian word choice so long as the actual content of the post is of value to the conversation.
Almost assuredly, the preceding sentence could be comprehended by individuals with less education than a year of college education, yet most eighth graders would not be able to comprehend statements like "The impetus for men to exalt banal works of prose is arcane."
...alright, even my tongue-in-cheek comment only hit the the 7th grade. Methinks the true goal of "a Chrome extension which hides all HackerNews comments that are below an 8th grade reading level" is to get everyone off the comments and back to work.
[1] = e.g., https://github.com/cgiffard/TextStatistics.js
In other words, I'm not suggesting that he use Flesch-Kincaid; he already made that choice. I'm suggesting a way for him to not re-implement an algorithm that's already implemented in his language of choice.
A comment with esoteric vocabulary might be inane.
I question the premise of this project.
Thus, I could chose to hide any comment that used the word FANBOI or fanboy or whatever.
You'd need to include some method for alerting me that there's a comment that I might wish to downvote.
It's a neat project. It's a shame people will pile-on over your unfortunate choice of title here. Your "Important note" on github is pretty clear, I think.
The author seems pretty clear that this was just a programming exercise written for fun and self-education and makes no claims about its perfection.
As a side note, I agree that "fanboy" and all of its permutations is a 99.9% reliable indication of a worthless comment (although such a filter would obviously catch this post :). This is regardless of whether the poster is referring to themselves or someone else or some hypothetical group that they imagine exists somewhere, and regardless of the subject of the fanboyism.
@Author: I apologize if it was taken that way.
Too bad I have already started another weekend project :)
But I think that is perhaps beside the point: congrats on writing your first Chrome extension!
Posts like this one (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5543140) are removed. That is a valuable post. It directly solves a problem, while highlighting a new feature that people not not have been aware of.
I only point this out as in the article linked to by the README says: "Just because a comment is easy to read does not mean it’s inherently worthless, and in some cases these are the most important ones."
Good first shot though. =) I wonder if you could reverse the plugin to help improve my own comments.
