Show HN: Which chef knife steels are good? Data from 540 Reddit tread
new.knife.dayI wanted to see if "super-steel" marketing actually matched reality, so I scraped ~500 threads from r/chefknives and ran sentiment analysis on the specific steels mentioned.
The results:
MagnaCut: 28:1 positive ratio. The hype is real.
Ginsan: The sleeper favorite. High satisfaction because it almost never chips.
VG-10: Most controversial. High volume, but highest statistical ratio of "micro-chipping" complaints.
How I saved tokens (Inverse Masking): Feeding raw threads into an LLM just to find common terms like "Wüsthof" is a waste of money. I built a hybrid pipeline instead:
Fuzzy Match: Fuse.js catches 80% of common brands for $0.
Mask: Replace those entities with placeholders.
LLM: Feed the "masked" text to the model to catch obscure artisan makers and nuanced sentiment the fuzzy matcher missed.
Stack is Node.js + MongoDB. Full charts and the steel-by-steel breakdown are here: https://new.knife.day/blog/knife-steel-comparisons/all
Would love to hear thoughts on the methodology or if the data misses your favorite steel.
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