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Comment by rahooligan | Hacker News Reader

We have a strict set of criteria when rating a review as positive or negative. In general, if the review is even slightly negative we rate it as such...in the case of Moonwalking, NYT expresses a few disappointments about the book. This is to help surface only the very best of books in each genre.

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Any review of sufficient length and thoroughness is likely to include at least some criticism, if for no other reason than the reviewer not wanting to look like a cheerleader. The NYT often selects reviewers with relevant domain knowledge, or who are themselves authors in a related genre. So opinions will be expressed, hobbyhorses ridden, and nits picked, even in glowing reviews.

You should be careful to avoid setting up a business rule that could overemphasize a few negative raisins in a positive pudding.

The idea of a binary positive vs negative is really troubling to me as far as an algorithm goes. It should very much be on that sliding scale that Metacritic or Rotten Tomatoes uses--sentiment analysis shouldn't return just a 1 or a 0.

I'm not sure how giving such a binary 'good' or 'bad' to a review is helpful for books. Reviews could be on a continuum (hence the star rating system that many folks use) and calling a review negative just because of a few negative opinions voiced in a review could potentially miss the point of the review.

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