Interesting sentiment analysis, but hard to put into context without a baseline for the sentiment of average HN comments. In my experience, HN can be impressively cynical on just about any topic that gets posted. Some times a great article will get posted and people will find creative ways to complain about everything from the color choice of the website to unrelated complaints from loosely related topics. It gets negative very quickly in here.
It’s also interesting to see sentiment trending downward in time for both topics, even as the real-world benefits of AI become more obvious. My gut feeling is that this shows some of the contrarian bias on HN: Comments here are more optimistic about things that aren’t yet mainstream, but lean negative as soon as something becomes too popular or mainstream.
Interesting article. Thanks for including the details about fine tuning your own model.