I really would love it if somebody could go back in HN-Time and track the data on Mongo posts & comments. I've always been slightly skeptical about it, but it always seemed to me that there was a long love affair with it overall. Then people started voicing their frustrations and the community was divided and now it looks acrimonious for everyone.
Isn't that true for most of those 'flavour of the month' technologies?
First a shiny new piece of technology shows up that promises to solve all the issues you have with a mature and widely adopted solution. People get exited and at some point the media picks up on it und starts the hype cycle. More and more decision makers hear about the technology (probably aided by marketing) and decide to adopt it. Implementation takes place and the new technology is deployed into the live environment. Some time goes by and the first issues appear, workarounds and tweaks are devised to mitigate those. After even more time the technology's inherent flaws become apparent. At this point either someone else develops a new iteration of that technology with the promise of solving those issues or the technology is abandoned altogether as it is unable to deliver sufficient value and cannot be fixed.
Is there an algorithm which measures negativity in a given text? Considering the level of grammatical errors and sarcasm involved, one would need a really complicated system, I'd bet. A google search brought me to Sentiment Analysis page on Wikipedia[0], which, after the initial skimming, doesn't seem to link to any implementations.
