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Ask HN: What are the implications of Hacker News alt accounts being revealed?

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Re: Ask HN: What are the implications of Hacker News alt accounts being revealed?

#31
post #25
post #2

I always assumed that some actors had this capability and acted accordingly. The existence of a publicly available tool merely democratizes this power. Anyone seeking complete and perpetual anonymity should have been practicing better opsec from the beginning.

This argument, which the creator of the tool also uses, strikes me as essentially, “I’m going to harm you to show you that there is potential for you to be harmed”. To make a crude analogy, what if I punched you in the face to demonstrate that you should consider learning kung fu? Or perhaps to indicate that, if a corporation wanted to, they could hire people to assault you and there would be little you could do abou…

Your analogy makes a fundamentally different assumption - which is that you weren't already being physically assaulted or that your risk of being physically assaulted was truly negligible.

OP and creator assume that attempts at creating privacy online are always under active attack. The threat environment already exists. Publication of this tool does not meaningfully change the threat environment.

Some more analogous situations might be:

* Publicizing that police do not quickly respond to 911 calls for assault or break and entry in certain neighborhoods * Selling lockpicks and publicizing how to pick standard tumbler locks * Publicizing which bike locks can be cut with hand tools

The real fundamental disagreement is on the assumption of if your privacy is already under attack by competent actors.

Re: Ask HN: What are the implications of Hacker News alt accounts being revealed?

#32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

use the same words and logics as everyone / some mainstream show like SNL ? Or force yourself to use completely different words every time ? Be open minded ? Comment under different posts to hide your interests ? Use short sentences ? Use newspeak ? Copy the features of other users ? I also talk to ppl from various backgrounds. I could prove you why you need to vote for any candidate, thanks to the logics of coworker…

> Use newspeak Would only work if enough people did it. Otherwise all your accounts will stand out as being "the newspeak person"

> all your accounts will stand out as being "the newspeak person"

Thanks, Obama

(is talking in memes sustainable ?)

Re: Ask HN: What are the implications of Hacker News alt accounts being revealed?

#34

I finetuned T5, a text-to-text transformer, with a loss function based on the cosine similarity of any given text with statements made by individual HN users. It's like Dreambooth but for text. I have been posting under 40 different alt accounts that approximate the top users of this site textually and match them within an 80th percentile. AMA.

Please link git repo

Re: Ask HN: What are the implications of Hacker News alt accounts being revealed?

#35

I finetuned T5, a text-to-text transformer, with a loss function based on the cosine similarity of any given text with statements made by individual HN users. It's like Dreambooth but for text. I have been posting under 40 different alt accounts that approximate the top users of this site textually and match them within an 80th percentile. AMA.

    ...a loss function based on the cosine similarity of any given text with statements made by individual HN users.
A. Could you elaborate on the mechanics and particularly the loss function calculation? For example, did you take the top N users by karma, volume, something else? Does the loss get calculated as an average sim against each of the top N, or do you mean pool the top N first, or something else? Or is it one model per user?

B. How do you manage the posting and accounts? Just manually?

Re: Ask HN: What are the implications of Hacker News alt accounts being revealed?

#37

>So for some people who assumed anonymity this could be anything from unimportant to awkward to a real problem. If that's the case, then that was a bad assumption, IMHO. I don't assume anonymity. I assume pseudonymity . Then again, I don't use alt accounts either. And, interestingly, the closest "match" for me is 0.51 on the site you mentioned. Which, I guess, is both good and bad. Good in the sense that I'm expressi…

My closest match is 0.528 so I guess I don’t know what that means in terms of the weighting but it seems I’m more alike to others than you! I only have one HN account FWIW.
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