Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Reproducing Hacker News writing style fingerprinting

antirez.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 168 posts

Re: Reproducing Hacker News writing style fingerprinting

#111

Post by 6510 »

WhyNotHugo wrote: post #98
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 think “should” and “ought to” end up being equivalent. I prefer to avoid such absolutes and portray causality instead. For example, in place of “you should not do drugs at work” I prefer “if you take drugs at work you’ll get in trouble”.

I often times go back to replace the instances of "should" wiht "could" as I could not tell people what to do. “you could not do drugs at work”

Re: Reproducing Hacker News writing style fingerprinting

#113

Post by leetrout »

mtlynch wrote: 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

Re: Reproducing Hacker News writing style fingerprinting

#114

Post by chrismorgan »

dayvigo wrote: post #54
chrismorgan wrote: post #27

I 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.

My impression is that iOS is the only major platform to even support automatically curlify quotation marks. Maybe some Android keyboards are more sensible about it, but none that I’ve used make it anything but manual.

Re: Reproducing Hacker News writing style fingerprinting

#115

Post by SoftTalker »

WhyNotHugo wrote: post #98
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 think “should” and “ought to” end up being equivalent. I prefer to avoid such absolutes and portray causality instead. For example, in place of “you should not do drugs at work” I prefer “if you take drugs at work you’ll get in trouble”.

Nothing wrong with implying that people ought to behave according to mainstream social norms.

Re: Reproducing Hacker News writing style fingerprinting

#116

Post by selcuka »

6510 wrote: post #110
legohead wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn't catch my original account when I tried it, not anywhere in top 100. But, if I do the reverse (search using my original account), this one shows up as #2. The main difference between the accounts is this one has a lot more posts, and my original account was actively posting ~11 years ago.

I never knew A can be like B without B being like A.

The matching score is probably the same, or very close in both ways, but this fact does not necessarily help in a three-way scenario:

    A  B: 80%
    A  C: 90%
    B  C: 70%
When you search for A the best match will be C, but if you start with B it will be A. If one of the accounts has a smaller sample set as in GP's case, the gap could be quite big.

Re: Reproducing Hacker News writing style fingerprinting

#117

Post by selcuka »

qsort wrote: post #28

Have you tried to analyze whether there is a correlation between "closeness" according to this metric and how often users chat in the same thread? I recognize some usernames that are reported as being similar to me, I wonder if there's some kind of self-selection at play.

Maybe we like comments written closer to our style more, and that motivates us to respond to them.

Re: Reproducing Hacker News writing style fingerprinting

#119

Post by chongli »

Joker_vD wrote: post #75
albumen wrote: 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…

I have occasionally used the construct “you owe it to yourself to X”. I think it works well at conveying the sentiment that the person in question may be missing out on something if they don’t do X.

“You should” has a much more generic and less persuasive sentiment. “Why should I?” is a common and easy response which now leaves the suggester having to defend their suggestion to a skeptical audience.

Re: Reproducing Hacker News writing style fingerprinting

#120

Post by generalizations »

SoftTalker wrote: post #115
WhyNotHugo wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think “should” and “ought to” end up being equivalent. I prefer to avoid such absolutes and portray causality instead. For example, in place of “you should not do drugs at work” I prefer “if you take drugs at work you’ll get in trouble”.

Nothing wrong with implying that people ought to behave according to mainstream social norms.

Interestingly, when most people simply choose to do what most people choose to do, you get an emergent 'herd mentality' which can lead to some very strange places. It is also sensitive to very small purturbations - which in real terms means, the one person who does manage to think for themselves may find they have an outsized effect on the direction of the crowd.

I think this mentality is also where the term 'sheeple' comes from.

Post reply on HN