Show HN: What is HN thinking? Real-time sentiment and concept analysis

15 days ago (ethos.devrupt.io)

Hi HN,

I made Ethos, an open-source tool to visualize the discourse on Hacker News. It extracts entities, tracks sentiment, and groups discussions by concept.

Check it out: https://ethos.devrupt.io

This was a "budget build" experiment. I managed to ship it for under $1 in infra costs. Originally I was using `qwen3-8b` for the LLM and `qwen3-embedding-8b` for the embedding, but I ran into some capacity issues with that model and decided to use `llama-3.1-8b-instruct` to stay within a similar budget while having higher throughput.

What LLM or embedding would you have used within the same price range? It would need to be a model that supports structured output.

How bad do you think it is that `llama-3.1` is being used and then a higher dimension embedding? I originally wanted to keep the LLM and embedding within the same family, but I'm not sure if there is munch point in that.

Repo: https://github.com/devrupt-io/ethos

I'm looking for feedback on which metrics (sentiment vs. concepts) you find most interesting! PRs welcome!

26 comments

ddtaylor

Reply
kretaceous  14 days ago

This is really cool and something I've envisioned building for a long time!

There is a bug in the entity tracking. For the entity "github", it shows a positive sentiment. HN does NOT like GitHub (for reasons good or bad). If you click on it, it shows you stories about other seemingly unrelated stories.

https://ethos.devrupt.io/entities/github

  • ddtaylor  14 days ago

    Thank you. I believe this is because it's not properly aggregating the story title, content, and comment hierarchy. There are going to be cases where the LLM does a poor job of understanding the conversation, but I think right now the information isn't being sent to the prompt.

    Right now it seems to be only using one level of the parent comment hierarchy.

    (Source: https://github.com/devrupt-io/ethos/blob/67670eb2855b84d389d...)

sdwr  14 days ago

Awesome idea! The entity tracking is very exciting, most interesting part imo

I think the budget is noticeable in the sentiment analysis unfortunately, the tags and entity recognition are good but the sentiment ratings themselves seem pretty sloppy.

  • ddtaylor  14 days ago

    I think it's mostly prompting, but I will be experimenting with this more. The prompt currently is garbage IMO

        You are an expert analyst of the Hacker News community. Analyze submissions for
    the underlying ideas, concepts, technologies, and entities being discussed.

    Write all summaries in third-person analytical prose. Do NOT start sentences
    with "The user", "The commenter", "The author", or "This post". Instead, lead
    with the substance: describe the idea, argument, or phenomenon directly.

    Good: "Decentralized identity systems could reduce reliance on corporate
    gatekeepers." Bad: "The user discusses how decentralized identity systems work."

    (Source: https://github.com/devrupt-io/ethos/blob/67670eb2855b84d389d...)

esseph  15 days ago

This is virtually identical to tools the US Department of Homeland Security uses across each social media platform and major website with comments to monitor sentiment and activities.

Congrats, I guess.

  • ddtaylor  15 days ago

    I was also told this by someone randomly while working at a coffee shop here in DC. Something about CGA.

tangotaylor  14 days ago

The sentiment analysis is very interesting. I'm super curious what that looks like historically, going back to 2007.

  • ddtaylor  14 days ago

    I currently have it limited to this "epoch" date while I tweak the prompts, once I feel the prompt is done cooking I will be letting it go back to 2007. But, also, gotta keep the lights on somehow ;)

    Also, hello fellow taylor.

sixtyj  14 days ago

Well done.

If I could suggest, please make green colors more distinct in sentiment split wheel, they seem to be very similar now.

claudegamedev  14 days ago

Jeffrey Epstein: 0.20% Positive! Lol.

Side note: this is cool, but the sentiment analysis could be a bit more sophisticated in v2.

  • CatMustard  14 days ago

    I know I'm going against the HN hivemind a bit here, and I hope I don't get flamed too much for it - but I think that that Jeff Epstein fellow wasn't a very nice man.

dk8996  15 days ago

Very interesting. LLMs open up space for transforming unstructured raw data into visualizations and dashboards. I made something just looking at “Who wants to be hired” posts.

https://hireindex.xyz/#stats

  • ddtaylor  14 days ago

    Does that use the "real" LinkedIn API or something else like Playwright?

    What model does it use?

    What vector database is it using?