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Reproducing Hacker News writing style fingerprinting

antirez.com

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Re: Reproducing Hacker News writing style fingerprinting

#31

Post by xnorswap »

I wonder how much accuracy would be improved if expanding from single words to the most common pairs or n-tuples.

You would need more computation to hash, but I bet adding frequency of the top 50 word-pairs and top 20 most common 3-tuples would be a strong signal.

( The nothing the accuracy is already good of course. I am indeed user eterm. I think I've said on this account or that one before that I don't sync passwords, so they are simply different machines that I use. I try not to cross-contribute or double-vote. )

Re: Reproducing Hacker News writing style fingerprinting

#32

Post by alganet »

andrewmcwatters wrote: post #23

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…

That seems to be a misconception.

The usage frequency of simple words is a powerful tell.

Re: Reproducing Hacker News writing style fingerprinting

#33

Post by Frieren »

It works for me. The accounts I used long time ago are there in high positions. I guess that my style is very distinctive.

But I also have seen some accounts that seem to be from other non-native English speakers. They may even have a Latin language as their native one (I just read some of their comments, and, at minimum, some of them seem to also be from the EU). So, I guess, that it is also grouping people by their native language other than English.

So, maybe, it is grouping many accounts by the shared bias of different native-languages. Probably, we make the same type of mistakes while using English.

My guess will be that native Indian or Chinese speakers accounts will also be grouped together, for the same reason. Even more so, as the language is more different to English and the bias probably stronger.

It would be cool that Australians, British, Canadians tried the tool. My guess is that the probability of them finding alt-accounts is higher as the populations is smaller and the writing more distinctive than Americans.

Thanks for sharing the projects. It is really interesting.

Also, do not trust the comments too much. There is an incentive to lie as to not acknowledge alt-accounts if they were created to remain hidden.

Re: Reproducing Hacker News writing style fingerprinting

#34

Post by shakna »

alganet wrote: post #22

Cool tool. It's a shame I don't have other accounts to test it. It's also a tool for wannabe impersonators to hoan their writing style mimic skills!

I don't have other accounts, but still matched at 85+% accuracy for a half dozen accounts. Seems I don't have very original thoughts or writing style.

Re: Reproducing Hacker News writing style fingerprinting

#35

Post by jcims »

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 (also?) felt the 'words used less often' were much easier to connect to as a conscious effort. I pointed chatgpt to the article and pasted in my results and asked it what it could surmise about my writing style based on that. It probably connected about as well as the average horoscope but was still pretty interesting!

Re: Reproducing Hacker News writing style fingerprinting

#36

Post by cratermoon »

andrewmcwatters wrote: post #23

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…

I noted the "analyze" feature didn't seem as useful as it could be because the majority of the words are common articles and conjunctions. I'd like to see a version of analyze that filters out at least the following stop words: a, an, and, are, as, at, be, but, by, for, if, in, into, is, it, no, not, of, on, or, such, that, the, their, then, there, these, they, this, to, was, will, with

Re: Reproducing Hacker News writing style fingerprinting

#37

Post by layer8 »

antirez wrote: post #11
layer8 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that some matches are “mutual” and others are not, I don’t see how that could translate to a symmetric distance measure.

Imagine the 2D space, it also has the same property! You have three points nearby, and a fourth a bit more distant. 4 best match is 1, but 1 best match is 2 and 3.

Good point, but the similarity score between mutual matches is still different, so it doesn’t seem to be a symmetric measure?

Re: Reproducing Hacker News writing style fingerprinting

#38

Post by cratermoon »

alganet wrote: post #32
andrewmcwatters wrote: post #23

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…

That seems to be a misconception. The usage frequency of simple words is a powerful tell.

Indeed, some writing styles make frequent use of words like "that" and "just".

Re: Reproducing Hacker News writing style fingerprinting

#39

Post by tobr »

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,…

> Again, my thought on good, interesting writing is that these are to be avoided.

You mean, ”I think this should be avoided”? ;)

Re: Reproducing Hacker News writing style fingerprinting

#40

Post by lolinder »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #24
delichon wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Actually, the way that these things work is usually by focusing exclusively on the usage patterns of very common (top 500) words. You get better results by ignoring content words in favor of the linking words.
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