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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

#481

Post by martin82 »

VyseofArcadia wrote: post #163
sillysaurusx wrote: post #66

Ha, gruseom shows up for pg, which is dang’s old account. A worthy successor. This is a fascinating way to find similar HN users who aren’t the same person. It’s a surprisingly great recommendation engine. “If you like pg, you might also like…” Sure, the privacy concerns are valid, but the cat’s out of the boot. Might as well enjoy the benefits. montrose is almost definitely pg. Someone who talks about ancient histor…

> but the cat’s out of the boot It's my first time hearing that variant. Usually its, "the cat's out of the bag" where I'm from. Do you mean boot in the UK sense, what Americans would call the trunk of a car? Or do you mean a sturdy piece of footwear? Obligatory xkcd https://xkcd.com/2390/

There's a popular movie called "Puss in Boots". That's what I had to think of first.

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

#482

Post by seba_dos1 »

pyb wrote: post #315
sillysaurusx wrote: post #66

Ha, gruseom shows up for pg, which is dang’s old account. A worthy successor. This is a fascinating way to find similar HN users who aren’t the same person. It’s a surprisingly great recommendation engine. “If you like pg, you might also like…” Sure, the privacy concerns are valid, but the cat’s out of the boot. Might as well enjoy the benefits. montrose is almost definitely pg. Someone who talks about ancient histor…

Why would montrose be pg ? The correlation is not that high. Looks like a few people have picked up pg's mannerisms.

Yeah, that score is only slightly higher than the highest one it shows for my account (which is also bold) - and unless my alter ego has been disguised so well it even managed to hide from myself, I'm pretty sure that isn't me :)

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

#483

Post by mygentys »

And this is why I’m a reader and not a poster on HN :)

The second that I found out that requesting deletion of an account and its posts needed a MANUAL request to a single user (dang) I noped out so fast

But happy that the rest of you are still happy to contribute :)

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

#485

Post by SpelingBeeChamp »

kaba0 wrote: post #396
throwboi123 wrote: post #211

That’s why I always use throwaway :) everywhere. Reddit. HN. Twitter. Everywhere. I’ll spam every site with my throwaways. Long live throwaways.

That’s the point of this post, that you are not safe by throwaways at all, because all of your throwaways can be linked together purely by your textual style.

No they can’t. If you only have a small amount of text to work with, stylometry is unreliable.

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

#486

Post by spdustin »

Have you tried including parts of speech (for example, as bigrams and trigrams) as part of the features considered in your model? I’ve had great success with stylometry that goes beyond TF-IDF with bags of words; including grammar patterns was shockingly good.

(FWIW, it didn’t find my throwaways; my own model didn’t, either, because I knew that word choice wasn’t enough to avoid being outed by stylometry)

Edit: by bigrams and trigrams, I mean reducing word to their parts of speech labels and using THOSE as word tokens. You’ll find that native English speakers have higher weights on some phrase construction patterns than, say, folks from Romania. TF-IDF is useful for these POS-grams (just made that word up) as well.

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

#487

Post by SpelingBeeChamp »

rand_user_100 wrote: post #237
costco wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What other easily-built products do you think should not exist?

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

#489

Post by pvg »

martin82 wrote: post #481
VyseofArcadia wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but the cat’s out of the boot It's my first time hearing that variant. Usually its, "the cat's out of the bag" where I'm from. Do you mean boot in the UK sense, what Americans would call the trunk of a car? Or do you mean a sturdy piece of footwear? Obligatory xkcd https://xkcd.com/2390/

There's a popular movie called "Puss in Boots". That's what I had to think of first.

It's a bit older than the movie or movies in general.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puss_in_Boots

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

#490

Post by honkler »

costco wrote: post #33
honkler wrote: post #17

Not today. You fail, I win.

Nice. Just out of curiosity are you taking any countermeasures or varying your writing style across accounts in any way?

yeah I vary my writing styles. Much of the stuff I post through this account is controversial, to say the least. So I have to take "measures".
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