My runner-up has a rating of 0.42378790667730715
C'mon guys, work harder. That's not even close! :-D
Btw, I myself am only at 0.9999999999999999 so I guess I need to work harder at being myself.
Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts
191–200 of 562 posts
Re: Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts
#192I 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.
Sorry, what did you mean? :P
Re: Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts
#193Can we find Satoshi with this?
Re: Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts
#194Wow. 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.…
Frankly similar to how I was doing in back in 2018 (when you and I chatted about it on HN lol)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17944293
The approach I took was a bit different, but also no ML required.
The real trick is pruning and going cross platform. There are around 100k active HN accounts (meaning posts a few times a year), maybe 200k if you count at least one post a year. But It’s a very small space to try to compare so simple methods will work fine.
Re: Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts
#195[deleted]
Re: Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts
#196Wow. This is insane, it found my old accounts. So throwaway obviously (because I'm a bit of an asshole) but this really is amazing. It also highlighted another account that's not me, but looking through their comments i don't see any resemblance to me either.
Re: Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could you elaborate on why it's obvious why you won't name the account?
Maybe to avoid attracting any extra attention to this user? Also, as someone who’s read HN for a few years, it only took me 2 guesses to find an account that the above comment describes (and not necessarily the same person).
[deleted]
Re: Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts
#198After a few tries on boring accounts, I thought to try the account of somebody who was notorious for an incident outside of HN, and had a (deservedly) bad time at HN for a couple of years before the account went dark. And yeah, there's a bunch of high confidence (.6-.8) hits for that account, and from a quick browse of the comments of the recently active ones, they look really likely to be alts. Like, all three that…
I keep no alternate accounts, but this tool reports best matches for me that appear to be Slavic or just Russian - and I am Russian. Best match score in my list is just above 0.5. There are some clearly alternate accounts on the list, their match scores with this tool are well above 0.7.
It is probable that persons of same cultural origin will have similar writing style and vocabulary. It is also probable that persons of same cultural origin would have same relationships with the world as a whole, they would like same things and dislike other same things.
So, in my opinion, it is possible that you have found not only alternate accounts (score above 0.7), but accounts of people with same cultural origin (ones that are around 0.6).
Re: Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could you elaborate on why it's obvious why you won't name the account?
Maybe to avoid attracting any extra attention to this user? Also, as someone who’s read HN for a few years, it only took me 2 guesses to find an account that the above comment describes (and not necessarily the same person).
It was a classy move by jsnell, too. Thank you.
(I don’t know who the comment is talking about, which is how it should be. There’s no need to blow someone’s cover in a highly visible way. Even if they were satan, they’d still be welcome on HN as long as they’re writing substantive, interesting comments that follow the guidelines.)
Re: Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts
#200Sorry dang, aka sctb:
https://stylometry.net/user?username=dang