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Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts

stylometry.net

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Re: Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts

#231

Post by costco »

vbezhenar wrote: post #219
thesz wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep no alternate accounts, but this tool reports best matches for me that appear to be Slavic or just Russian - and I am Russian. Best match score in my list is just above 0.5. There are some clearly alternate accounts on the list, their match scores with this tool are well above 0.7. It is probable that persons of same cultural origin will have similar writing style and vocabulary. It is also probable that person…

There're 19 other accounts this tool finds similar to me. Those are not my accounts. 0.46 - 0.56 are numbers.

I think people are sort of confused at what this tool is supposed to be which I will concede is partially my fault. The results of this tool are by themselves not indicative of having an alternative account. It generates the 20 most similar users for every single user on the site, regardless of whether they have an alt or not (there's obviously no way for me to know that for every single user). In your case further investigation would reveal that none of those accounts are yours.

Re: Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts

#233

Post by Animats »

jsnell wrote: post #105

After a few tries on boring accounts, I thought to try the account of somebody who was notorious for an incident outside of HN, and had a (deservedly) bad time at HN for a couple of years before the account went dark. And yeah, there's a bunch of high confidence (.6-.8) hits for that account, and from a quick browse of the comments of the recently active ones, they look really likely to be alts. Like, all three that…

0.6 isn't much. I have 3 matches above 0.6, and they're not me. 20 or so over 0.5.

Re: Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts

#236

Post by seydor »

drc500free wrote: post #155

This is a super interesting tool for self reflection. Looking at the top 10 similar accounts to mine, it gives me an arms-length view of how other people probably interpret my tone. I appear to be a well-educated, over-confident know-it-all.

we must be a good match

Re: Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts

#237

Post by rand_user_100 »

costco wrote: post #49
dvh wrote: post #25

Make a fundraiser and start doing it for other sites.

It would be possible for Reddit because Pushshift.io archives all the comments there and Reddit is still pretty small. I'd probably need to make things a lot faster. Doing it on a specific subreddit would be very feasible. I'll think about it but I don't actually know if I really want to do that because for instance I've been banned from subreddits before but I don't want a ban from when I was 12 years old to follow…

> I'll think about it but I don't actually know if I really want to do that because for instance I've been banned from subreddits before but I don't want a ban from when I was 12 years old to follow me around forever

Insightful that your personal experience and impact on you personally affects your decision. I invite you to think about the impact of the products you build in your CS career by putting yourself in the shoes of other people as well.

Some products should not be built, even though it's easy to build them.

Re: Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts

#238

Post by costco »

dsr_ wrote: post #224

This is interesting. I'm 0.566 correlated with logfromblammo -- and while we are definitely not the same person, I could easily imagine writing a sentence such as: "For some bizarre reason, management has not yet assigned a task to their programmer underlings to automated themselves out of existence. I can't imagine why." which is theirs, not mine, from about a year ago. I like that. On the other hand, I'm nearly as…

> On the other hand, I'm nearly as correlated with peterwwillis: 0.5485 -- who has no comments and no submissions.

This is due to the Firebase API not updating when users ask the admins to move their comments to another account.

Re: Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts

#239

Post by lifeisstillgood »

dsr_ wrote: post #224

This is interesting. I'm 0.566 correlated with logfromblammo -- and while we are definitely not the same person, I could easily imagine writing a sentence such as: "For some bizarre reason, management has not yet assigned a task to their programmer underlings to automated themselves out of existence. I can't imagine why." which is theirs, not mine, from about a year ago. I like that. On the other hand, I'm nearly as…

I had a similar experience finding my most likely alt (.50 suggesting I am a unique snowflake as I have always thought :-), my most likely alt is writing certainly in a style I appreciate and on subjects I often mention.

Re: Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts

#240

Post by klohto »

bhaney wrote: post #177

Well now I'm self conscious about my closest match being an 0.34 when so many other people are reporting much closer matches with accounts that aren't alts. Do I write weirdly?

0.36 here! Out of curiosity, are you a native speaker?
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