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Reproducing Hacker News writing style fingerprinting

antirez.com

141–150 of 168 posts

Re: Reproducing Hacker News writing style fingerprinting

#141

This is great example of what's possible and how true anonymity, even online, is only "technological threshold" anonymity. People obsessed with biometrics might not consider this is another biometric. Instead of just HN, now do it with the whole internet, imagine what you'd find. Then imagine that it's not being done already.

None of my throwaways and not even my old account shows up. We are not at that level yet. ymmv.

Re: Reproducing Hacker News writing style fingerprinting

#142
Dang's analysis was funny:

don't site comment we here post that users against you're

Quite a stance, man :)

And me clearly inarticulate and less confident than some:

it may but that because or not and even these

I noticed that randomly remembered usernames tend to produce either lots of utility words like the above, or very few of them. Interestingly, it doesn't really correlate with my overall impression about them.

Re: Reproducing Hacker News writing style fingerprinting

#143

This is exactly why HN needs to allow us to delete accounts.

It wouldn't change anything though. Unless you delete your comment / account a few minutes after you post, it's gonna get scraped and saved into a DB almost instantly. After that, the fact that HN deleted them won't save you from this.

Re: Reproducing Hacker News writing style fingerprinting

#144

This is great example of what's possible and how true anonymity, even online, is only "technological threshold" anonymity. People obsessed with biometrics might not consider this is another biometric. Instead of just HN, now do it with the whole internet, imagine what you'd find. Then imagine that it's not being done already.

This technique yields so many false positives and negatives, it's practically useless. Possibly it works reliably for mono-lingual, prolific writers. Someone like the Qanon shaman (or whatever the name was) might be picked up, if it doesn't happen to be a collective.

Re: Reproducing Hacker News writing style fingerprinting

#145
post #93

> Well, the first problem I had, in order to do something like that, was to find an archive with Hacker News comments. Luckily there was one with apparently everything posted on HN from the start to 2023, for a huge 10GB of total data. This is actually super easy. The data is available in BigQuery.[0] It's up to date, too. I tried the following query, and the latest comment was from yesterday. SELECT id, text, `by` A…

My favorite which is also up to date is the ClickHouse playground. For example: SELECT * FROM hackernews_history ORDER BY time DESC LIMIT 10; https://gh-api.clickhouse.tech/play?user=play#U0VMRUNUICogRl... I subscribe to this issue to keep up with updates: https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/issues/29693#issuec... And ofc, for those that don't know, the official API https://github.com/HackerNews/API

I didn't know there was an official API! This explains why the data is so readily available in many sources and formats. That's very cool.

Re: Reproducing Hacker News writing style fingerprinting

#146

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 passwo…

Maybe there isn't enough data for each user for pairs, but I thought about mixing the two approaches (but had no time to do it), that is, to have 350 components like now, for the single word frequency, plus other 350 for the most common pairs frequency. In this way part of the vector would remain a high enough signal even for users with comparable less data.

Re: Reproducing Hacker News writing style fingerprinting

#147

so the website processes only comments older than 2023? not very useful for more newer users like me :/

I discovered the data is available up to date. Maybe soon or later I'll repeat and extend the analysis, potentially also using multiple ways to compute the vectors, including SBERT (or better SModernBERT).

Re: Reproducing Hacker News writing style fingerprinting

#149
post #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.

Funnily enough, my top 10 words used less often are as follows:

you, are, have, they, at, an, we, if, do, to

I'm frankly not quite sure how I've avoided them given how common they are.

Re: Reproducing Hacker News writing style fingerprinting

#150
post #74
post #33

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…

> Probably, we make the same type of mistakes while using English. That is most likely the case. Case in point: My native language doesn't have articles, so locally they're a common source of mistakes in English.

It would be fun to have a tool try guess your native language, based on your English writing.
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