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Ask HN: What are the implications of Hacker News alt accounts being revealed?

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Re: Ask HN: What are the implications of Hacker News alt accounts being revealed?

#11

Post by c22 »

bheadmaster wrote: post #5
c22 wrote: post #2

I always assumed that some actors had this capability and acted accordingly. The existence of a publicly available tool merely democratizes this power. Anyone seeking complete and perpetual anonymity should have been practicing better opsec from the beginning.

What opsec measures could one take against language analysis? Everyone has a particular style of writing, and the only way of hiding it I can think of is not writing anything at all.

  * Make a small number of posts per account
  * Run your posts through machine translation services
  * Pay someone on fiverr to write a synopsis of your content, then post that
  * Intentionally vary your style, build rich back stories and identities for your nyms, including telltale mannerisms.

Re: Ask HN: What are the implications of Hacker News alt accounts being revealed?

#12

Post by f38zf5vdt »

I finetuned T5, a text-to-text transformer, with a loss function based on the cosine similarity of any given text with statements made by individual HN users. It's like Dreambooth but for text. I have been posting under 40 different alt accounts that approximate the top users of this site textually and match them within an 80th percentile. AMA.

Re: Ask HN: What are the implications of Hacker News alt accounts being revealed?

#14

Post by naruvimama »

kbelder wrote: post #6

>Presumably now people will routinely search for alt accounts of any HN commenter and bring what they find into the discussion. First, only obsessive or crazy people will do that, or maybe journalists. It'll show up occasionally in discussions, but I don't think it'll be 'routine', and I think most commenters will avoid subthreads with those sorts of shenanigans. But more importantly, these static analysis tools are…

No post body was provided.

Re: Ask HN: What are the implications of Hacker News alt accounts being revealed?

#15

Post by MonkeyMalarky »

f38zf5vdt wrote: post #12

I finetuned T5, a text-to-text transformer, with a loss function based on the cosine similarity of any given text with statements made by individual HN users. It's like Dreambooth but for text. I have been posting under 40 different alt accounts that approximate the top users of this site textually and match them within an 80th percentile. AMA.

How much did it cost to train?

Re: Ask HN: What are the implications of Hacker News alt accounts being revealed?

#17

Post by [deleted] »

MonkeyMalarky wrote: post #15
f38zf5vdt wrote: post #12

I finetuned T5, a text-to-text transformer, with a loss function based on the cosine similarity of any given text with statements made by individual HN users. It's like Dreambooth but for text. I have been posting under 40 different alt accounts that approximate the top users of this site textually and match them within an 80th percentile. AMA.

How much did it cost to train?

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: What are the implications of Hacker News alt accounts being revealed?

#18

Post by f38zf5vdt »

MonkeyMalarky wrote: post #15
f38zf5vdt wrote: post #12

I finetuned T5, a text-to-text transformer, with a loss function based on the cosine similarity of any given text with statements made by individual HN users. It's like Dreambooth but for text. I have been posting under 40 different alt accounts that approximate the top users of this site textually and match them within an 80th percentile. AMA.

How much did it cost to train?

3090

Re: Ask HN: What are the implications of Hacker News alt accounts being revealed?

#19

Post by alkonaut »

Pseudonymity isn’t anonymity. The problem of course is if you first had a non-anonymous account (e.g with your real name) and then for some reason switched to a pseudonym you thought wasn’t linked to your real identity.

The bottom line I guess is: if you did that, your choice is basically to never post at all or to create an account where you practice some kind of opsec to try to disconnect it from your previous account (e.g run it through a service that rewrites the text).

Re: Ask HN: What are the implications of Hacker News alt accounts being revealed?

#20

Post by hinata08 »

bheadmaster wrote: post #5
c22 wrote: post #2

I always assumed that some actors had this capability and acted accordingly. The existence of a publicly available tool merely democratizes this power. Anyone seeking complete and perpetual anonymity should have been practicing better opsec from the beginning.

What opsec measures could one take against language analysis? Everyone has a particular style of writing, and the only way of hiding it I can think of is not writing anything at all.

use the same words and logics as everyone / some mainstream show like SNL ? Or force yourself to use completely different words every time ? Be open minded ? Comment under different posts to hide your interests ?

Use short sentences ? Use newspeak ? Copy the features of other users ?

I also talk to ppl from various backgrounds. I could prove you why you need to vote for any candidate, thanks to the logics of coworkers. I used to copy the style of MS documentations to refactor code, so that juniors could get started right away. Before that, I used to learn English. My patterns and word usage where just a medley of recently viewed content.

I'm sure it can be achieved.

You just need to read enough, or be exposed to so much content than you can choose your patterns.

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