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

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

#521

Post by notahacker »

dragonwriter wrote: post #252
sillysaurusx wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Of my top 20, 19 are bold, all are above 0.6, and I have no alts.

Vast majority of my top 20 were bold, except you funnily enough!

None of them are me (and you were the only one I recognised and thought "yeah, I can see where it gets it from"...)

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

#523

Post by pyb »

costco wrote: post #452
pyb wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would montrose be pg ? The correlation is not that high. Looks like a few people have picked up pg's mannerisms.

There are factors that make me think it is more likely than not (just scrolled through the comment history, don't feel like linking everything) that he is pg. - Is bolded on pg's page - Mentions yoga - Talks about Lisp often - Talks about YC often - Talks about kids - Links to Paul Graham's website - Says he uses vi - Writes exactly like you would expect pg to write

I agree that this person is trying very very hard to sound like pg ! You could be right actually. Could still be a "wannabe" though.

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

#524

Post by sambapa »

rcarr wrote: post #441
InGoodFaith wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you are describing is also known as an eggcorn. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggcorn

This is my all time favourite one of these: https://thehabit.co/knowledge-is-power-france-is-bacon/ > When I was young my father said to me: “Knowledge is power, Francis Bacon.” I understood it as “Knowledge is power, France is bacon.” > For more than a decade I wondered over the meaning of the second part and what was the surreal linkage between the two. If I said the quote to someone, “Knowledge is power, France is…

You left the funniest thing - the guy/gal's nickname was "Lard_Baron"

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

#526

Post by [deleted] »

costco wrote: post #493
spdustin wrote: post #486

Have you tried including parts of speech (for example, as bigrams and trigrams) as part of the features considered in your model? I’ve had great success with stylometry that goes beyond TF-IDF with bags of words; including grammar patterns was shockingly good. (FWIW, it didn’t find my throwaways; my own model didn’t, either, because I knew that word choice wasn’t enough to avoid being outed by stylometry) Edit: by bi…

> Edit: by bigrams and trigrams, I mean reducing word to their parts of speech labels and using THOSE as word tokens. You’ll find that native English speakers have higher weights on some phrase construction patterns than, say, folks from Romania. TF-IDF is useful for these POS-grams (just made that word up) as well. That is a very good idea and when I update the site that will almost certainly be included :) Any othe…

[deleted]

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

#527

Post by lifeisstillgood »

headhasthoughts wrote: post #477
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this might be old age creeping up on me but I find it harder and harder to work backwards through "argument by sarcasm" to arrive at what you meant. I think clearly you are heartfelt in your views that having your identity online be a real one is bad - but I am not sure if that is because of posts you made years ago being linked back to you or nefarious advertising ? The old posts issue is interesting- do you…

My view isn't that accounts tied to real people are bad. It's that your lack of ability to think of cases where what you propose could be harmful points to a total lack of critical thought on your part. The point that I am making is that it's incredibly easy to decipher why "track everyone under every identity they choose" can go wrong and lower the quality of discussion, and specifically, that it's so easy the fact…

I disagree that tracking leads to lower quality discussion - for example I know my name and identity is tied to this account and instead of responding to "lack of ...thinking" with an insult I am forced to come up with intelligent responses (now you try ... it's really annoying isn't it :-)

I also explicitly ask for real life examples and studies of harm - I can imagine and create examples but I much prefer the real world to my imagination as a guide. We learnt that as basis of science.

I also think there is a difference between privacy and secrecy. You seem to conflate the two - if your actions online were secret then advertisers would not send you smoking ads. Secrecy is probably impossible - privacy is merely the politeness of our neighbours. And at scale politeness is enforced - by social norms and sometimes legal measures. We are seeing this come in (GDPR) but it's hard to have legal enforcement before the social norms have arrived.

On the smoking ad front, Gabriel Weinbergs main argument is that searching for "red men's trainers" should be enough to serve ads without having to know if I am a 20 something graduate in wisconsin or a middle aged bloke in London. And I suspect he is right within a few percentage points.

As for online grooming -yeah this is a huge danger. Every parents nightmare. And still absolutely something that needs to be enforced in the real world. And may need extra police and social resources. But if we want to stop predators reaching out to vulnerable children then it requires co-ordination amoung many groups onleine and offline - funding, political will, training education over many years.

There will be no quick fixes for the problems tech is bringing - but I remain optimistic that the cost benefit ratio is worth it and that we can vote for and require change to defend against the dangers

which takes me back to my point - what are the real world examples of dangers so we can make sensible policy

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

#528

Post by antirez »

jll29 wrote: post #216

The method used, i.e. to calculate the cosine of the two authors' word vectors, is poorly suited for stylometric analysis because it is based on a poster's lexicon and the word frequencies of each word, but ignoring stylistically relevant factors like word order. Also, the cosine of the vectors of word frequencies conflates author-specific vocabulary and topics; in other words, my account is grouped (with >51% simila…

In practice a more complex approach will tend to require a greater amount of data per user, so in this specific case this simple approach is not too bad. Moreover, fake accounts are likely to talk about the same topics, so while this leads to false positives, also makes it more likely that in the list we find actual duplicates.

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

#529

Post by klabb3 »

kaba0 wrote: post #294
tbrownaw wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but this functionality turned out way creepier than I thought the moment I tried it Hopefully this raised awareness means that people who actually need anonymity will be more likely to know to take precautions.

Genuinely asking, what way is there to combat this? Is there a tool that takes out stylistic elements of your comment?

This is the million dollar question. I think the goal of "anonymity for most intents and purposes" is worthy, it's been how I've enjoyed HN and Reddit, but I also know that it was just a matter of time before stylometry and other meta-analysis of post history become 10 second tools for everyone. Now the cat is out of the box.

I've been thinking about this a bit, and I've landed in that having a stable identifier across ALL comments & posts is a poor default. We still probably want some coherence, at minimum within a thread, eg to follow a back-and-forth. The site itself may also use stable identifier for abuse prevention. But there's no reason one should have the same username externally traceable for posts about completely different topics.

In practice, this could be done with low friction pseudonym creation, which all ties to the same account privately.

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