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

stylometry.net

61–70 of 562 posts

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

#61
Ingenious idea. At the very least, this is just about finding people who write like us, the same way we seek those with similar tastes (music...)

How long before large commercial indexers start offering an efficient (AI based ?) stylometry to agencies and states ?

wait... do you think the NSA is already doing this?

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

#64

Wow. This gives a lot of false positives, but it found all ~10 of my old accounts over the years. The most interesting thing is that my writing style changed pretty drastically since a decade ago. Searching for my oldest account matches my earliest usernames, whereas searching this account matched the rest. The details of the algorithm are fascinating: https://stylometry.net/about Mostly because of how simple it is.…

I’d figured it would be some kind of n-gram frequency analysis. Would be interesting to code that up and compare.

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

#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 history, Occam’s razor, VCs and startups, uses the phrase “YC cos” (relatively uncommon), etc. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17112567

Nicely done. One of the best hacks I’ve seen in a long time.

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

#67
post #14

I wonder what's a reasonable threshold for "probably the same person". I've never had an alt on HN, and when I searched myself, it found 3 other users above 0.6, none of whom I've ever heard of before.

I have no alts. The highest match for me is about 0.66.

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

#68
post #57

ive had maybe a hundred throwaway accounts on HN over the past ten years. generally, i make an account, say something that is apparently wildly offensive to someone else, get flagged and down-voted and then muted or hell-banned. then i make another account because i never did anything wrong and start the process over again. ive emailed the admins, tried to reason with the admins, it never does any good. the power is…

You are definitely right. Part of the reason I chose the 10,000 character minimum was so that people using throwaways in the true sense would be entirely excluded. I don't plan on keeping this up forever and I too would not feel comfortable if this was deployed at scale.
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