I had hard time to understand some comments made by my closest match. I guess this is good reality check. I need to learn how to write more legible posts now.
Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts
181–190 of 562 posts
Re: Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts
#182This 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?
Please don't shoot at the messenger. costco shared this voluntarily and I can see no bad intention.
We should see it as an opportunity to learn how easy it is to associate different pseudonymous accounts. Nothing drives this point home better than a practical demo.
We can be pretty sure stylometry is used widely by bad actors already and we should not punish people who help to spread the word about these technical possibilities.
Re: Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts
#183Did something similar in 2018 (still running locally) which could damask anyone
https://twitter.com/austingwalters/status/104189476543920128...
Made both Metacortex.me and insideropinion.com
The idea being you don’t actually need an active directory. It would drop in, figure out all the users (provided one account was on the AD) and would monitor everyone’s skill sets, morale, schedule, etc. Worked super well for what it was / is.
Re: Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts
#184I have only ever had a single account but it returned 19 possibles with no confidence above .54 but 11 bolded. My own account was listed at the top with a confidence of .9999.
Re: Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts
#185[deleted]
Re: Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts
#186Ha, 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 histor…
> but the cat’s out of the boot It's my first time hearing that variant. Usually its, "the cat's out of the bag" where I'm from. Do you mean boot in the UK sense, what Americans would call the trunk of a car? Or do you mean a sturdy piece of footwear? Obligatory xkcd https://xkcd.com/2390/
It’s a little writing trick I leaned from (I think) Orwell. Any time you’re about to use a common metaphor, try to tweak it. You’ll catch readers off guard, which piques their curiosity.
It’s a fun game, too. I wish I’d used “the cat’s out of the hat,” but I didn’t think of it till later.
Re: Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts
#187Ha, 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 histor…
> but the cat’s out of the boot It's my first time hearing that variant. Usually its, "the cat's out of the bag" where I'm from. Do you mean boot in the UK sense, what Americans would call the trunk of a car? Or do you mean a sturdy piece of footwear? Obligatory xkcd https://xkcd.com/2390/
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Re: Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.)
What about "deep leaning" stylometry ?
I don't know, but it wouldn't surprise me if someone has tried to apply ML to stylometry. Statistical stylometry is already petty effective, as demonstrated by this site.
Re: Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts
#189This doesn't seem to include text from submissions.
I ran it on Brian Armstrong's temp account from here, and it said it didn't write 10,000 characters:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3754664
EDIT: Or maybe it's something else because Brian only wrote less than 6k characters. But then why can my account be looked up?
Also, I would guess quoted replies are included, which muddies the analysis. Seems to be a very naive implementation. Much more can be done, but this was probably just a quick project.
Re: Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts
#190Love a little NLP project on a public dataset - thanks for sharing!
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