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

stylometry.net

541–550 of 562 posts

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

#541
post #278

This is a super interesting tool for self reflection. Looking at the top 10 similar accounts to mine, it gives me an arms-length view of how other people probably interpret my tone. I appear to be a well-educated, over-confident know-it-all.

My #3 match is cstross, and now I’m convinced that my life-long secret dream of being a successful sci-fi novelist is basically a matter of typing. (Ideas? Character development? Ruthless editing? Developing an audience? Having a publisher? What do I need of those when the Computer told me I’m practically a genius…)

I'd suggest giving the back story to Agent to the Stars by John Scalzi a glance.

http://www.scalzi.com/agent/

> In the summer of 1997, I was 28 years old, and I decided that after years of thinking about writing a novel, I was simply going to go ahead and write one. There were two motivations for doing so. First, I was simply curious if I could; I'd had up to that time a reasonably successful life as a writer, but I'd never written anything longer than ten pages in my life outside of a classroom setting. Two, my ten-year high school reunion was coming up, and I wanted to be able to say I'd finished a novel just in case anyone asked (they didn't, the bastards).

> In sitting down to write the novel, I decided to make it easy on myself. I decided first that I wasn't going to try to write something near and dear to my heart, just a fun story. That way, if I screwed it up (which was a real possibility), it wasn't like I was screwing up the One Story That Mattered To Me. I decided also that the goal of writing the novel was the actual writing of it -- not the selling of it, which is usually the goal of a novelist. I didn't want to worry about whether it was good enough to sell; I just wanted to have the experience of writing a story over the length of a novel, and see what I thought about it. Not every writer is a novelist; I wanted to see if I was.

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

#542

Ahhh, anyone remembers this hacking crew who leaked BLUEETERNAL and other NSA tools and exploits? Shadowbrokers. They were always communicating in some kind of meme-russian, and their texts were funny to read. [1] I believe their writing mostly defeated this kind of analysis, at the cost of looking like idiots (which was probably the reason no one sent them crypto-dollars to buy that stuff exclusively). Here's an exc…

*EternalBlue

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

#543
post #71

Neat work! Out of curiosity: do you filter sentences than begin with ‘>’, indicating a block quote from another user? That might improve the accuracy a little here, if you don’t already.

Yep!

Perhaps explain in the about what you filter out? Along with what the bolding means?! Do you filter out anything else (like spaced/indented/monospace text/code, or even quoted text, which is often not written by the user?). Super thanks for this - interesting!

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

#544
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep!

Perhaps explain in the about what you filter out? Along with what the bolding means?! Do you filter out anything else (like spaced/indented/monospace text/code, or even quoted text, which is often not written by the user?). Super thanks for this - interesting!

Turns out that there may have been some glitches in the way I was filtering lines beginning with >. For explanation of bolding see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755466. I didn't attempt to filter anything else out though filtering out code would probably help a little bit.

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

#545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also enjoyed reading one of my style-partner’s posts. The most noticeable similarity is that we both clearly have strong opinions about some things, and like to share information, but also like to be clear about our unknowns or opinions. So, lots of “sounds likes,” “probably,” “could be” and so on. The downside is, I guess, this could be seen as a bit weasel-word-y or indirect.

> like to be clear about our unknowns or opinions. So, lots of “sounds likes,” “probably,” “could be” and so on. Commonly called just “hedging” like hedging your bets.

That’s a kinder description than I gave it in my next paragraph, so thanks I suppose.

I do think it is an under-emphasized aspect of honesty, though, that we should be clear about our level of experience/understanding. Especially online — people like to discuss things, even (especially?) when we are just getting started. So if we’ve picked up opinions through osmosis and we start repeating them without testing them, we’re really just amplifying some possibly-incorrect viewpoint (and if we’ve picked it up, there’s a good chance it is already widespread in the community, which is bad if it is wrong).

And I mean, more concretely a measurement is not complete without the error bars!

Often this doesn’t really matter, because it is just chit-chat anyway. But it is nice to keep in mind.

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

#546

Alone out here in the 0.30s. the three times I've used a throwaway account, they've been for a single post on a single topic, so no surprise they did not get picked up by this analysis I guess. Does a low correlation with other users imply higher susceptibility to de-anonymization if I were using alts regularly?

Probably. It means your writing is more unique and using an alt would be another "very unique" but only similar to yours.

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

#548
post #158

This is somewhat similar to how they ended up catching the Unabomber. The FBI were literally at a dead end. They ended up posting one of his letters/manifestos in the paper, somebody recognised a turn of phrase the unabomber used that was unusual and reported it as possibly being their brother, FBI investigated the lead and it lead them straight to him. Excerpts from wiki: > Before the publication of Industrial Socie…

As I recall, one of the clinchers was his use of the phrase, "you can’t eat your cake and have it too" as opposed to the now-predominant variant "you can’t have your cake and eat it too."

I often wonder if stylometry can be used to positively identify a person based not on general word frequency, but by a single phrase or two which are rare in general but commonly used by the individual. In theory this could be relatively easy to find given a large corpus. You'd pick out the top few n-grams for short phrases by an individual and identify the ones which are most overly-represented compared to the rest of the population.

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

#550
post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why didn't you use the google bigquery? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10440502

I was aware there was a HN dataset on BigQuery but I had never used a library to work with it before and when I played around on the website the posts I got were all from 2015 at the latest. It probably would've made my work easier but there's not really anything I can do about it now.

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