I was curious to use this on myself to see if anyone writes like me. Closest was a .51 confidence, so I guess not?
Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts
131–140 of 562 posts
Re: Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The funny thing is that I thought of it while eating dinner last night :)
Re: Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts
#133Wow. 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.…
> sillysaurus3
> sillysaurus2
Tbf a human could have found a bunch of them relatively easily
Re: Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts
#134Re: Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts
#135I 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.
If it's >0.9 is you can almost guarantee it's an alt but I've seen certain matches at 0.6. The problem is writing styles change over time. Another idea I had was converting the scores which are just cosine similarity scores into percentiles (so 0.99 would be 99th percentile of certainty) to make them more human interpretable.
>The problem is writing styles change over time.
Will be interesting if we could plot the writing style divergence over time.
Re: Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts
#136What does the bold signify? For example when I search for dang ( https://stylometry.net/user?username=dang ) the 4th most likely user is not bold whereas the 16th is?
Say you see user2 listed in bold on user1's page. That means that user1 is also in user2's top 20 users. In my experience it is often an indicator of a good match (but not always).
Re: Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The precision of the bolded results looks like maybe 30% to me. Significantly better than the non-bolded, but nowhere near perfect precision.
Re: Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts
#138I really liked the informative and straight-to-the-point about page - describing how the algorithm works in a way that is easy to understand. All the important details are summarised there. Well done! Edit: From the "How to avoid .." page, there is the following sentence: > Also, most authorship identification algorithms have poor accuracy when working with small amounts of words. This means the optimal strategy woul…
> Can you clarify what this means and why it would result in a ban?
I have seen dang respond to users multiple times asking them to stop making new accounts especially but not always if it's to avoid rate limiting. I don't know if there's an official policy but it's definitely something I recall.
Re: Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts
#139The scary thing is that once you have this data, finding HN matches for individual targeted users on other sites becomes trivial, even if those sites are harder to scrape. I bet most people here have an anonymous Reddit account, for example. If you wanted to know who was behind a particular Reddit account, you could feed it into something like this and compare the results with HN, where accounts are less likely to be anonymous. Or build a database based on blogs, Github comments, etc.
Also, since this uses only word frequency, there are probably relatively easy improvements to make that would make it even more powerful, like looking at particular runs of words that are unique. Some expressions or figurative language only show up in combinations of words, and tend to be highly style specific.
Re: Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts
#140I've complained a lot about Haskell and now it thinks I like Haskell =( Needs sentiment analysis IMO, otherwise you'll get "Here's a bunch of people who are JUST LIKE YOU", except they use a similar grammar style but hold opposite opinions on the same nouns.
It just thinks you engage a lot with Haskell. These are people with who you have something to talk about. :)