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Reproducing Hacker News writing style fingerprinting

antirez.com

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Re: Reproducing Hacker News writing style fingerprinting

#21

Post by antirez »

hammock wrote: post #20

The "analyze" feature works pretty well. My comments underindex on "this" - because I have drilled into my communication style never to use pronouns without clear one-word antecedents, meaning I use "this" less frequently that I would otherwise. They also underindex on "should" - a word I have drilled OUT of my communication style, since it is judgy and triggers a defensive reaction in others when used. (If required,…

That's very interesting as I noticed that certain outliers seemed indeed conscious attempts.

Re: Reproducing Hacker News writing style fingerprinting

#23

Post by andrewmcwatters »

Well, well, well, cocktailpeanuts. :spiderman_pointing:

I suspect, antirez, that you may have greater success removing some of the most common English words in order to find truly suspicious correlations in the data.

cocktailpeanuts and I for example, mutually share some words like:

because, people, you're, don't, they're, software, that, but, you, want

Unfortunately, this is a forum where people will use words like "because, people, and software."

Because, well, people here talk about software.

Edit: Neat work, nonetheless.

Re: Reproducing Hacker News writing style fingerprinting

#24

Post by giancarlostoro »

delichon wrote: post #14
giancarlostoro wrote: post #6

I tried my name, and I don't think a single "match" is any of my (very rarely used) throw away alts ;) I guess I have a few people I talk like?

I got 3 correct matches out of 20, and I've had about 6 accounts total (using one at a time), with at least a fair number of comments in each. I guess that means that my word choices are more outliers than yours or there is just more to match. So it's not really good enough to reliably identify alt accounts, but it is quite suggestive.

I think if you rule out insanely common words, it might get scary accurate.

Re: Reproducing Hacker News writing style fingerprinting

#25

Post by croemer »

hammock wrote: post #20

The "analyze" feature works pretty well. My comments underindex on "this" - because I have drilled into my communication style never to use pronouns without clear one-word antecedents, meaning I use "this" less frequently that I would otherwise. They also underindex on "should" - a word I have drilled OUT of my communication style, since it is judgy and triggers a defensive reaction in others when used. (If required,…

Since you seem to care about your writing, I'm wondering why you used "that" here?

> I use "this" less frequently that I would otherwise

Isn't it "less than" as opposed to "less that"?

Re: Reproducing Hacker News writing style fingerprinting

#26

Post by hammock »

croemer wrote: post #25
hammock wrote: post #20

The "analyze" feature works pretty well. My comments underindex on "this" - because I have drilled into my communication style never to use pronouns without clear one-word antecedents, meaning I use "this" less frequently that I would otherwise. They also underindex on "should" - a word I have drilled OUT of my communication style, since it is judgy and triggers a defensive reaction in others when used. (If required,…

Since you seem to care about your writing, I'm wondering why you used "that" here? > I use "this" less frequently that I would otherwise Isn't it "less than" as opposed to "less that"?

Typo. Good catch

Re: Reproducing Hacker News writing style fingerprinting

#27

Post by chrismorgan »

I wonder how much curly quote usage influences things. I type things like curly quotes with my Compose key, and so do most of my top similars; and four or five words with straight quotes show up among the bottom ten in our analyses. (Also etc, because I like to write &c.)

I’m not going to try comparing it with normalising apostrophes, but I’d be interested how much of a difference it made. It could easily be just that the sorts of people who choose to write in curly quotes are more likely to choose words carefully and thus end up more similar.

Re: Reproducing Hacker News writing style fingerprinting

#28

Post by qsort »

Have you tried to analyze whether there is a correlation between "closeness" according to this metric and how often users chat in the same thread? I recognize some usernames that are reported as being similar to me, I wonder if there's some kind of self-selection at play.

Re: Reproducing Hacker News writing style fingerprinting

#30

Post by Joker_vD »

hammock wrote: post #20

The "analyze" feature works pretty well. My comments underindex on "this" - because I have drilled into my communication style never to use pronouns without clear one-word antecedents, meaning I use "this" less frequently that I would otherwise. They also underindex on "should" - a word I have drilled OUT of my communication style, since it is judgy and triggers a defensive reaction in others when used. (If required,…

> I prefer "ought to"

I too like when others use it, since a very easy and pretty universal retort against "you ought to..." is "No, I don't owe you anything".

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