When the service first came up on the front page, I punched in some personal writings from my journal into it. Comparing my results from that to this HN assessment is like night and day. The HN assessment shows me as highly intellectual, imaginative, and adventurous, with a strong value for self-enhancement. The personal stuff showed me as being much more emotional, with a huge emotional range, because—surprise, surprise—I tend to write more about emotional parts of my life in my journal than on HN comments.

While this service might be useful to get a broad sense of people for marketing purposes, using it on an individual basis is like talking to a fortune teller—it could tell you nearly anything about yourself, and you'd be able to come up with an explanation to justify it.

Ironically, this really did feel like a machine based cold-reading.

paste it into http://watson-um-demo.mybluemix.net/demo

87% Openness, 5% Agreeableness, that's funny.

        function redcom(){ ! [ -z "$2" ] && i="&after=$2" || i=""; data=$(curl -s "https://www.reddit.com/user/${1}/comments.json?count=100${i}"); j=$(jq -e -r '.data["after"]' <<<$data); echo $j; (jq -e -r '.data["children"][]["data"]["body"]' <<<$data)>>${1}-redcom.txt; echo $(echo -e $data|wc -l) lines; ( [ "$j" = "null" ] || [ -z "$j" ] ) || redcom $1 $j ;} ;

Never user/heard of jq before, it's a pretty nice tool.

Maybe they all come out a bit like that?

To some extent, our personalities are our personalities. We behave, on some level, the same in every context and in every community. But the extent to which that's the case is up for debate. We probably use different approaches, or if you prefer, we show different aspects of our personalities, in different contexts and in front of different groups. That's why it's extremely difficult to take one context (HN, for instance), and extrapolate universal characteristics from it.

Even within the set of HN history, I got some oddball results. For instance, Watson considers me very "Fiery" (51%) here. There are plenty of areas in my life in which the word "Fiery" makes a bit of sense. HN isn't one of them.

When the results are right, they're just "right" so you should accept them, when they're wrong they're actually also right by whatever magical hamster wheel is operating inside of the thing and you just don't "get it".

The problem is that humans like to have some clue as to how the results were derived, something easy to explain that gets the gist across. Something like "Watson counted all the words you use and compared them to different reference lexicons to arrive at the score". This provides a little bit of context so we understand the semantics of the result and how to consider them and reason with them.

But for all we know the results we're seeing are from some arbitrary stochastic method:

openness=rand(90,99) harmony=rand(90,100)

etc.

For things like this to be accepted by the users (humans) there needs to be a quick explanation for how this works otherwise we get head scratchers.

Meanwhile, you can do a search on "IBM System U" (the project's not-so-internal code name.) This particular slideshare.net prez has some great info on the methodology, validation tests and references: http://slidesha.re/1ri0vPV

and using the sample Node project to show the results. I am still exploring it myself :p

The IBM documentation doesn't really say anything about how these numbers are calculated

For example -- When interviewing someone, being able to run their github username (if known of course) to analyze their commit messages, comments, discussions. Or even their hn, reddit, twitter user names (if the usernames are linked with their first names, nothing creepy). It will potentially help to identify candidates that are downright rude, arrogant etc.

Or analyze internal mailing lists, hipchat/slack channels for co workers who are potentially burnt out.

This sounds very dangerous to me. I assume when recruiters and/or lead engineers decide to reach out to me via LinkedIn, they did their homework on me. I purposely link to enough stuff for them to realize "smtddr" is my handle. The same blog & youtube channel in my HN profile is also in my LinkedIn. But I expect a human to look, not some computer judging me. I can totally see people getting lazy and just doing stuff like only filtering for people who rate 80% on openness or something. Then everyone will start grooming their posts simply to get positive results... then someone will create a social website that claims to block those scanners so people can say whatever they want.

It just forces people underground and the filters won't work anymore since at that point you might as well assume everyone is gaming the system.

(fwiw, I'm also against standardized tests. Anything that forces a whole group of people to start grooming themselves for a very specific measurement kills diversity, imho. Since the very term "standardized" kinda goes against the concept of diverse... and people become lazy and just rely on such tests to make or break the deal)

You can read the words they wrote but you cannot perceive the tone they wrote it in....I dont think this is helpful and may dismiss candidates that are otherwise perfect except when Watson analyzes them.

        function redcom(){ ! [ -z "$2" ] && i="&after=$2" || i=""; data=$(curl -s "https://www.reddit.com/user/${1}/comments.json?count=100${i}"); j=$(jq -e -r '.data["after"]' <<<$data); echo $j; (jq -e -r '.data["children"][]["data"]["body"]' <<<$data)>>${1}-redcom.txt; echo $(echo -e $data|wc -l) lines; ( [ "$j" = "null" ] || [ -z "$j" ] ) || redcom $1 $j ;} ;

http://www.redditinvestigator.com/

"""

Probably from: Canada

Support OWS: Probably no or doesn't care.

Children: I do not think so...

Gamer: Only pong probably...

Like trees: Must be in a really good mood.

Behavior: Candidate as replace for Good Guy Greg

"""

http://labs.five.com/

Given my name I found that funny Also I know it's wildly inaccurate on several characteristics, but maybe my persona here is like that! Interesting.

And another question---is this applicable to non-native English speakers? Do they acquire the same language habits as if English was their mother tongue?

[1]: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3783449/

    502 Bad Gateway: Registered endpoint
                     failed to handle the
                     request.

Edit: In fact, entering someone else's username worked, and another, but mine continues to fail. Is it just me?

Curious to know what the average hacker news scores look like? I'm imagining it is a pretty small segment of "normal" society.

For more information on systematic associations between personality and individual differences in word use, please refer to studies like Tal Yarkoni, "Personality in 100,000 words: A Large scale analysis of personality and word use among bloggers", 2010

any insight on the tech stack and how it was implemented?

Not sure what that means... but maybe this post is contributing to it?

Ouch! How did it know?

Some are completely off, with plenty of 1% cop-outs but a few — spot on. What's the methodology? What does the need for practicality mean for example?

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      Requested route ('hn.mybluemix.net')
        does not exist.