131–140 of 152 posts
it's pretty impossible to identify a user just by 1 anonymous post on a website.(without the logs). I mean sure you can compare a person's typing style...but unless they always add "jambalaya" to their posts, it'll be next to impossible to be 100% sure. The way it works in real life, is that you find a person's email address or a long term account on a forum, and then use that info to build up a full profile about th…
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1199756 yes? no?
I base this on eru's phrasing and use of "dissimilar" in the post in question, which can also be noted here:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1159200
My strategy was to look for unusual words and phrases and do a google site search for those phrases.
Additionally, eru's post in this thread indicate an interest in privacy and eru's activity pattern is both frequent, and recent which I would expect to be true for the poster.
edit: Here, eru even taunts us a bit: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1200060
http://www.hackerfactor.com/GenderGuesser.html
The Output
Total words: 365
Genre: Informal Female = 326 Male = 616 Difference = 290; 65.39% Verdict: MALE
Genre: Formal Female = 348 Male = 450 Difference = 102; 56.39% Verdict: Weak MALE
Weak emphasis could indicate European.
A different (and probably much easier) challenge: Disprove that it was me [or insert any other user here].
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…
> The post did not explain what methods were used, The post didn't but the original thread did, I tried matching the vocabulary of the samples to the corpus of HN comments. > what work in authorship identification influenced his approach This is not a scientific paper. > nor did he provide his ranked findings. I'm not giving my ranked results because I think two attempts from me is enough. > The tries are actually fa…
Walked through the results for each word, pulling in all the usernames:
intersection of: pure-ad dissimilar
['noodle']
intersection of: CTRs disinformation
['jacquesm']
intersection of: CTRs dissimilar
['ivankirigin', 'patio11', 'strlen']
Is it marketer? http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=marketer This is merely a naive guess. He's the only other user on hacker news (according to Google) to use the term "people search engines". He also seems to have been working in the data mining business.
It's an interesting guess but it's not me :) I am concerned with online privacy, but not to the extent as "onetimetoken" (my FB profile is globally viewable). Also my comments are usually short, and I avoid big generalizations. Looking at the thread in question, though, I'd definitely guess jgrahamc.
I picked several suspicious words and ran them through searchyc. The four rarest words in the post are: pure-ad, CTRs, disinformation, and dissimilar. Walked through the results for each word, pulling in all the usernames: intersection of: pure-ad dissimilar ['noodle'] intersection of: CTRs disinformation ['jacquesm'] intersection of: CTRs dissimilar ['ivankirigin', 'patio11', 'strlen'] Of those, strlen's writing sty…
It'd be really interesting if we had challenges, both social and technical, posted here on HN on a weekly basis. Some of the solutions and discussions would be pretty brilliant, I think.