Very cool. Also a bit surprising — two of my matches are people I know IRL.
Reproducing Hacker News writing style fingerprinting
51–60 of 168 posts
Re: Reproducing Hacker News writing style fingerprinting
#52I wonder if such an analysis could tease apart the authors of intentionally anonymous publications. Things like peer review notes for papers or legal opinions (afaik in countries that are not the USA, the authors of a dissenting supreme court decision are not named).
Re: Reproducing Hacker News writing style fingerprinting
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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".
Are you saying there's a connection between "ought" and "owe"? All I see is "I don't want to hear any criticism".
The etymology makes a connection through old English. Oxford dictionary also contains this meaning:
> used to indicate duty or correctness
A duty to others is something you owe them; think, a duty of care and its lack, which is negligence.
Re: Reproducing Hacker News writing style fingerprinting
#54I 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 th…
Curly vs. straight quotes is mainly a mobile vs. desktop thing AFAIK. Not sure what Mac does by default, but Windows and Linux users almost exclusively use plain straight quotes everywhere.
Re: Reproducing Hacker News writing style fingerprinting
#55Very cool. Also a bit surprising — two of my matches are people I know IRL.
Are you all from the same town? Another user reported this finding.
Re: Reproducing Hacker News writing style fingerprinting
#56we have Dissociative Identity Disorder, I wonder if our different personalities would also have different fingerprints? we do have different writing styles
Re: Reproducing Hacker News writing style fingerprinting
#57Well, 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
The system uses on purpose those simple words, since they are "tellers" of the style of the user in a context independent way. Burrows papers explain this very well, but in general we want to capture low-level structure, more than topics and exact non obvious words used. I tested the system with 10k words and removing the most common words, and you get totally different results (still useful, but not style matching), basically you get users grouped by interests.
Re: Reproducing Hacker News writing style fingerprinting
#58Did not find any of the alt accounts I've used since 2007. Which is good.
Re: Reproducing Hacker News writing style fingerprinting
#59I noticed that in my top 20 similar users, the similarity rank/score/whatever are all >~0.83. However, randomly sampling from users in this thread, some top 20s are all Is there anything that can be inferred from that? Is my writing less unique, so ends up being more similar to more people?
Also, someone like tptacek has a top 20 with matches all >0.87. Would this be a side-effect of his prolific posting, so matches better with a lot more people?
Re: Reproducing Hacker News writing style fingerprinting
#60I noticed that in my top 20 similar users, the similarity rank/score/whatever are all >~0.83. However, randomly sampling from users in this thread, some top 20s are all Is there anything that can be inferred from that? Is my writing less unique, so ends up being more similar to more people? Also, someone like tptacek has a top 20 with matches all >0.87. Would this be a side-effect of his prolific posting, so matches…
It's not "less unique" as the structure of the sentence is what matters: the syntax. But you simply tend to use words with balanced frequency. It's not a bad thing.