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Reproducing Hacker News writing style fingerprinting

antirez.com

81–90 of 168 posts

Re: Reproducing Hacker News writing style fingerprinting

#81

How does it find the high similarity between "dang" and "dangg" when the "dangg" account has no activity (like comments) at all? https://antirez.com/hnstyle?username=dang&threshold=20&actio...

There is one dead comment by that user that mimics a "dang" comment. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16800379 ("Please don't post unsubstantive comments to HN.")

Re: Reproducing Hacker News writing style fingerprinting

#82

How does it find the high similarity between "dang" and "dangg" when the "dangg" account has no activity (like comments) at all? https://antirez.com/hnstyle?username=dang&threshold=20&actio...

It has a [dead] comment that says

> Please don't post unsubstantive comments to HN. [link to guidelines]

My guess is it was a parody/impersonator account.

You can enable "showdead" in your profile to see [dead] comments ans posts. Most of them are crap, but there are some false positives an errors from time to time.

Re: Reproducing Hacker News writing style fingerprinting

#83
PhasmaFelis and mikeash have all matches mutual for the top 20, 30, 50 and 100. Are there other users like this? If so, how many? What's the significance of this, in terms of the shape of the graph?

tablespoon is close, but has a missing top 50 mutual (mikeash). In some ways, this is an artefact of the "20, 30, 50, 100" scale. Is there a way to describe the degree to which a user has this "I'm a relatively closer neighbour to them than they are to me" property? Can we make the metric space smaller (e.g. reduce the number of Euclidean dimensions) while preserving this property for the points that have it?

Re: Reproducing Hacker News writing style fingerprinting

#86
post #72

It did find my "alt" (really an old account with a lost password), but the rest of the list – all users with very high match scores (0.8+) – is random. Taking a look at comments from those users, I think the issue is that the algorithm focuses too much on the topic of discussion rather than style. If you are often in conversations about LLMs or Musk or self driving cars then you will inevitably end up using a lot of…

It did find an old account of mine that got banned, top of the list. I have to say 500 words for fingerprinting, that's mindblowing.

It focuses on topic a lot, that's true.

Re: Reproducing Hacker News writing style fingerprinting

#87
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying there's a connection between "ought" and "owe"? All I see is "I don't want to hear any criticism".

Yes, "ought" is the past tense of "owe". At some point, the second alternative spelling "owed" was introduced to better separate the two meanings (literal and figurative), but it's still the same word; a similar thing happened with "flower" and "flour", those used to be interchangeable spellings of the same word but then somebody decided that the two meanings of that word should be separated and given specific spelli…

Good point about "should" - it's also a word that has lost its original meaning. Shall, should, will and would used to have different, more nuanced meanings comprared to how we tend to use them today.

The only place today I see "shall" used correctly where most would say "should" or "will," is in legal documents and signage.

Re: Reproducing Hacker News writing style fingerprinting

#89
Maybe I talk too much on HN. :)

When I ran it, it gave me 20 random users, but when I do the analyze, it says my most common words are [they because then that but their the was them had], which is basically just the most common English words.

Probably would be good to exclude those most common words.

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