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A challenge, identify this HN user, I tried twice and failed

jacquesmattheij.com

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Re: A challenge, identify this HN user, I tried twice and failed

#101

Post by jacquesm »

eru wrote: post #99
jacquesm wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would certainly spice things up. Hacking and puzzling are intricately interwoven anyway, especially debugging. It's no wonder that plenty of hackers have hobbies like lockpicking.

Also donating prizes would give a different metric than pure karma-per-submission to order the challenges. (Though it might be hard to order bragging rights. But we should be able to find a (corporate?) sponsor who hands out 50 dollar for the charity of choice of the winner every week. (Hey, I might even be able to get the money out of my employer, if I asked to--or I just do it myself.)) Enough parenthesis. I just g…

Ok, I'll match your 10 pounds, whatever that works out to in my currency (euros).

Re: A challenge, identify this HN user, I tried twice and failed

#102

Post by eru »

jacquesm wrote: post #96
dustingetz wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i could care less if you get karma. frankly, you'd deserve it for orchestrating this.

Karma doesn't enter in to it, what's the difference between posting a challenge yourself vs mailing someone and having them post it for you and credit you. Seems a bit roundabout without any real advantage. Daniels tag is all it really needs.

Oh, there's something to be said for having an "official" challenge of the week. It focusses attention. Though on the other hand, having the primaries out in court of HN may be the best approach to picking the most interesting challenges.

Re: A challenge, identify this HN user, I tried twice and failed

#103

Post by jacquesm »

eru wrote: post #102
jacquesm wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Karma doesn't enter in to it, what's the difference between posting a challenge yourself vs mailing someone and having them post it for you and credit you. Seems a bit roundabout without any real advantage. Daniels tag is all it really needs.

Oh, there's something to be said for having an "official" challenge of the week. It focusses attention. Though on the other hand, having the primaries out in court of HN may be the best approach to picking the most interesting challenges.

Informal is cool with me. Someone could just state their challenge, and the prize, if any (which need not be money), and if others think the challenge is interesting enough they could paypal the author their contribution to the pot, or they could publicly state that they want to up the stakes (or both).

Re: A challenge, identify this HN user, I tried twice and failed

#104

Post by eru »

jacquesm wrote: post #98
eru wrote: post #95

A different (and probably much easier) challenge: Disprove that it was me [or insert any other user here].

I don't think that's an easier challenge at all. Disprove that pink elephants exist vs prove that gray ones do. Which one is the easier challenge ?

Yes, and still people seem take the denials of the other users at face value.

Re: A challenge, identify this HN user, I tried twice and failed

#105

Post by eru »

jacquesm wrote: post #103
eru wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, there's something to be said for having an "official" challenge of the week. It focusses attention. Though on the other hand, having the primaries out in court of HN may be the best approach to picking the most interesting challenges.

Informal is cool with me. Someone could just state their challenge, and the prize, if any (which need not be money), and if others think the challenge is interesting enough they could paypal the author their contribution to the pot, or they could publicly state that they want to up the stakes (or both).

Yes. Probably a common protocol will emerge.

Also posting bets and searching for someone to take the other side (or be the arbiter--in case any is needed) could be interesting. Similar to http://www.longbets.org/, but embedded into HN and not focussed on long-term bets.

Edit: I have opened a new top-level post about this topic. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1200153

Re: A challenge, identify this HN user, I tried twice and failed

#106

Post by jacquesm »

petercooper wrote: post #87

So I wrote a bit of code to compare against other HN comments Do you have a corpus? Further, and this is an open question, is there an archive/downloadable corpus of HN in part or entirety anywhere? It would be fascinating and I'd love to keep a copy to look back at in years to come.

> Do you have a corpus?

Yes, that's why I thought it would be an easy challenge.

My bad :)

> Further, and this is an open question, is there an archive/downloadable corpus of HN in part or entirety anywhere?

Yes, you can query the google cache. It's fairly easy to do.

The only things you don't get that way is the stuff you can see as a logged in user.

Re: A challenge, identify this HN user, I tried twice and failed

#108

Post by jacquesm »

pbh wrote: post #63

Obviously, everyone loves a good challenge, but is there any evidence that the find-ee wants to be found? They seemed interested in the thread as to how they might be found, but don't seem to have given any permission for a site-wide (wo-)manhunt. (This might have happened out of band, though.) I guess they do say that they were just using a one time account for rhetorical emphasis. Further, if this were to really be…

Please read the whole original thread, that's exactly how we got to that point, and the response I got to my 'I bet I can identify you' and his/her admission that they thought of obfuscating the text made it pretty clear they would not mind an attempt, but that does not guarantee that there will be a resolution.

Re: A challenge, identify this HN user, I tried twice and failed

#109

Post by jacquesm »

Estragon wrote: post #77

Why is this a worthwhile endeavour?

It's not 'worthwhile' in a sense that you can't take it to the bank (though it may come to that, see elsewhere in this thread), but I think it is what hackers do, solve puzzles.

This is effectively a puzzle, a reasonably hard one (my attempt failed, but not for lack of trying, I spent a fair number of hours on it before making my guesses, of course it could simply be that I'm stupid), and one that seems fun to solve.

It is exactly the kind of thing that I enjoy doing when it comes to programming in the first place, figure out how stuff works and/or solving reasonably hard problems. One step above my current competence is my favorite, that way I'm reasonably sure I can solve the problem, if the difference is too big then I tend to get stuck.

It's of course a bit like the question why people climb Mount Everest, the answers are: because they can and because it's there.

edit: Funny, I thought your downmod for asking a valid question was unfair, in return I get downmodded for answering :)

Re: A challenge, identify this HN user, I tried twice and failed

#110

Post by onetimetype »

Stop trying to identify this user.

They did not issue a challenge to be identified--in fact they agree with the notion that privacy is dead, which seems to be what you're trying to prove with this exercise. They may have serious reasons for using a one time account.

If your name is one of the (very random) guesses in this post, please neither confirm nor deny that the user is you, since this could identify that user by elimination.

This item should not have so many points. The post is rubbish. A 275 word sample is long, but likely insufficient given the pool of candidates. The post did not explain what methods were used, what work in authorship identification influenced his approach, nor did he provide his ranked findings. The tries are actually failed guesses, rather than, say, different algorithms attempted. This item has now devolved into a guessing game, rather than a coding exercise.

Again, stop trying to identify this user.

written with a one time account

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