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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

#121
post #44

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 don't know that I'd call this evil. We have no idea who else is using this kind of technology but not making the results public. Better to know what's possible and take measures to make it less effective.

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

#123

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?

Stylometry is an old hat technique; you can assume that intelligence services around the globe regularly apply it.

(Statistical stylometry is a little newer and more rigorous than manual stylometry, which essentially involved a human being's judgement call around the similarity of documents.)

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

#125
post #106
post #90

nice one. are you using gpt3 under the hood?

I'm not that smart - my site is basically just doing some calculations on word frequencies. You can read https://academic.oup.com/dsh/article-abstract/17/3/267/92927... and https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09296174.2011.53... and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755898 for more information.

Simplicity is the greatest form of sophistication! Great work!

One small nit from a user experience point of view..: it'd be easier on the eyes if you just truncated those cosine similarity scores (or whatever score you're using) after the, say, 5th digit. Showing the entire float is kinda messy to my eyes.

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

#127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, top 20 was necessary for mine. The bolding was a brilliant move. Several of my accounts were ranked 10-20, but popped out due to the bolding.

What does the bolding indicate?

The explanation is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755466

As far as I’m concerned, it’s the killer feature of the app. The top 20 results may be noisy, but the bolded results have a signal to noise ratio close to infinity.

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