Neat work! Out of curiosity: do you filter sentences than begin with ‘>’, indicating a block quote from another user? That might improve the accuracy a little here, if you don’t already.
Yep!
Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts
71–80 of 562 posts
Re: Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts
#72Wow. 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.
It is. The description on the about page is a little simplified but I basically I look at the most common word and character ngrams of size 1,2,3 (200 each), put all the frequencies in an array and then compare to all the other users with https://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/generated/sklearn.me....
Re: Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts
#73Nice work! Thank you, of course I plugged in the obvious HN usernames Edit to add; Would be nice to have the https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=username links included.
And perhaps rounding to 3 or 4 decimal places?
Re: Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts
#74Oh wow, it's really sure that I'm stavrosk, which I am: https://stylometry.net/user?username=stavros The next person is 30% less certain, that's huge! This would basically identify any alt I might have with near certainty.
stavrosk doesn't have any posts/comments? What's it using to match?
Re: Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts
#75It would be nice to make the names clickable. I don't think the list of pg alternate account is accurate. I checked a few. They have many oneliners that is typical of pg, but the topics and style don't look similar. I searched a few more and got better results. :) I searched myself (that I know that I have no alternate accounts). I recognize a few users that are interested in similar topics, and I discuss/upvote them…
> I searched myself (that I know that I have no alternate accounts). I recognize a few users that are interested in similar topics, and I discuss/upvote them many times. But I didn't recognize most of the user of the list. It's based purely off frequency of the 200 most common English 1 word phrases, 2 word phrases, 3 word phrases, 1 character sequences, 2 character sequences, and 3 character sequences. Topic does no…
One is also a mathematician. It's trivial that we overuse some technical words even if it's unnecessary.
Another is form Argentina, so I guess the native language leaks, for example using words derived from latin that are not idiomatic.
And there are a few more, that is a honor to be "confused" with, but I have no clue why.
Re: Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts
#76I 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.
Interesting. The highest non-me account is under 0.4 on my page. I do not believe that I have such a unique writing style - especially since half my posting is on mobile and therefore possibly slightly different than my desktop posts.
My closest is 0.4879. I know I tend to be wordy but I thought I had a pretty generic style as well. This is definitely a fascinating demonstration.
Re: Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts
#77Strip leading/trailing white space from the name if it says no match.
Re: Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts
#78This is an evil website. We won’t have any anonymity soon. The highest match is my years old banned account that I forgot about. Where did you get the data from?
> This is an evil website. We won’t have any anonymity soon. The highest match is my years old banned account that I forgot about. Where did you get the data from?
I'd way rather have someone tell me "look at all the things I can find out about you" so that I can act accordingly (whatever that means!) rather than what we've mostly actually got, which is companies silently exploiting my data and doing everything they can to mumble reassuring but legally ineffective formulas assuring me that they deeply respect my privacy.
Re: Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts
#79Anything like this for Reddit?
Would translating to other language and back defend against this algorithm?
Re: Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts
#80Wow. 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.…
[deleted]