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Reproducing Hacker News writing style fingerprinting

antirez.com

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Re: Reproducing Hacker News writing style fingerprinting

#3

Post by antirez »

tptacek wrote: post #2

This is an interesting and well-written post but the data in the app seems pretty much random.

Thank you, tptacek. I was able to verify, thanks to the Internet Archive caching of "pg" for the post of 3 years ago, that the entries are quite similar in the case of "pg". Consider that it captures just the statistical patterns in very common words, so you are not likely to see users that you believe are "similar" to yourself. Notably: montrose may likely be a really be a secondary account of PG, and was also found as a cross reference in the original work of three years ago.

Also note that vector similarity is not reciprocal, one thing can have a top scoring item, but such item may have much more items nearer, like in the 2D space when you have a cluster of points and a point nearby but a bit far apart.

Unfortunately I don't think this technique works very well for actual duplicated accounts discovery because often times people post just a few comments in fake accounts. So there is not enough data, if not for the exception where one consistently uses another account to cover their identity.

EDIT: at the end of the post I added the visual representations of pg and montrose.

Re: Reproducing Hacker News writing style fingerprinting

#5

Post by antirez »

formerly_proven wrote: post #4

I'm surprised no one has made this yet with a clustered visualization.

Redis supports random projection to a lower dimensionality, but the reality is that projecting a 350d vector into 2d is nice but does not remotely captures the "reality" of what is going on. But still, it is a nice idea to use some time. However I would do that with more than 350 top words, since when I used 10k it strongly captured the interest more than the style, so 2D projection of this is going to be much more interesting I believe.

Re: Reproducing Hacker News writing style fingerprinting

#10

Post by antirez »

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?

When they are rarely used (a small amount of total words produced), they don't have meaningful statistical info for a match, unfortunately. A few users here reported finding actual duplicated accounts they used in the past.
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