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Who am I: A mind reader (don't forget to view source)

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Re: Who am I: A mind reader (don't forget to view source)

#131

Post by indralukmana »

xor-ed-wolf wrote: post #126
indralukmana wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

same with me, my first reaction is WHAT KIND OF SORCERY IS THIS!? 1.Technology 2.Gaming 3.Programming

Did you ever heard of cold reading?

hey thanks, i just googled it.

I knew something about it (like reading expression or something, from watching 'the mentalist'), but i did not know what it was called.

but CMIIW the technique used in the linked app is categorized as 'hot reading' right? because it somewhat gather information from our "browsing history". Somewhat same technique used by google for user 'profiling' maybe?

just a little bit of assumption.

Re: Who am I: A mind reader (don't forget to view source)

#132

Post by espadrine »

keerthiko wrote: post #75

I could probably post a similar gizmo on HN with a results static page that says Your interests are: (some subset of) Programming Science Technology Games With literally no scripting, and everyone would find it "reasonably accurate" :D

> Your interests are: (some subset of) Programming Science Technology Games

Me being me, I clicked on random grey squares. I got exactly that.

There is a selection bias from the choice of URLs it provides.

Re: Who am I: A mind reader (don't forget to view source)

#133

Post by kephra »

staccatomeasure wrote: post #93
keerthiko wrote: post #75

I could probably post a similar gizmo on HN with a results static page that says Your interests are: (some subset of) Programming Science Technology Games With literally no scripting, and everyone would find it "reasonably accurate" :D

fwiw, my results were very wrong

The selected sites are very biased towards things you can do in front of a computers.

So this nice "Who am I?" trick only shows an intersection of my interest with those of the author. e.g. its completely missing my 3 main hobbies, as sailing, sewing and vaping had not been on his list of selected sites.

Re: Who am I: A mind reader (don't forget to view source)

#137

Post by iopq »

yzzxy wrote: post #49
danbruc wrote: post #17

Obvious question - how was the list of URLs compiled? Some are really specific like YouTube channels. On the other hand there are only 15 categories and there are probably a lot of people that would not get a single match or only something very generic like Wikipedia.

The coolest way would be cold, hard natural selection from Alexa top sites, possibly with weighting placed to relevant sites at the introduction of the dataset. Perhaps I will fork.

Your interests are: Google, Facebook, Youtube, Yahoo

Re: Who am I: A mind reader (don't forget to view source)

#138

Post by pbhjpbhj »

cynwoody wrote: post #57
lewisflude wrote: post #2

This was really accurate to me. It seems they're using a:visited on several domains to create the "red square" effect.

Yes. And the only reason you have to click the red squares is to let it know which ones are red. If you try to look up the color of a square using GetComputedStyle, it always comes back gray. That was the resolution of privacy Bug 147777† (":visited support allows queries into global history"). † https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=147777

What about if you make a screen capture from the page and use coordinates to read back the colours and correlate with the URLs? Seems a possibility based on http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9250505/how-to-upload-a-s....

Re: Who am I: A mind reader (don't forget to view source)

#139

Post by abritishguy »

I had a very similar idea a while back, except I was measuring onAnimationFrame times with a carefully crafted CSS stylesheet to determine which links were being painted as :visited automatically and completely hidden from the user.

Accuracy varied a lot between computers but in ideal circumstances (only browser running) it would have ~90% accuracy on each of 25 links I was testing against - the test took about 8 secs to run though.

Interestingly it never worked particularly well in chrome - chrome seemed to stop painting :visited elements after a certain amount which prevented it from working.

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