151–160 of 562 posts
After a few tries on boring accounts, I thought to try the account of somebody who was notorious for an incident outside of HN, and had a (deservedly) bad time at HN for a couple of years before the account went dark. And yeah, there's a bunch of high confidence (.6-.8) hits for that account, and from a quick browse of the comments of the recently active ones, they look really likely to be alts. Like, all three that…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What does the bolding indicate?
The explanation is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755466 As far as I’m concerned, it’s the killer feature of the app. The top 20 results may be noisy, but the bolded results have a signal to noise ratio close to infinity.
How long until this becomes the algorithm for a dating site? “Find hot single women who write just like you”
Maybe we could be friends :)
I appear to be a well-educated, over-confident know-it-all.
nice one. are you using gpt3 under the hood?
I'm not that smart - my site is basically just doing some calculations on word frequencies. You can read https://academic.oup.com/dsh/article-abstract/17/3/267/92927... and https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09296174.2011.53... and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755898 for more information.
Ha, gruseom shows up for pg, which is dang’s old account. A worthy successor. This is a fascinating way to find similar HN users who aren’t the same person. It’s a surprisingly great recommendation engine. “If you like pg, you might also like…” Sure, the privacy concerns are valid, but the cat’s out of the boot. Might as well enjoy the benefits. montrose is almost definitely pg. Someone who talks about ancient histor…
> motrose is almost definitely pg. Someone who talks about ancient history, Occam’s razor, VCs and startups, uses the phrase “YC cos” (relatively uncommon), etc. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17112567 I had this hunch too. It's either pg or someone trying really hard to be pg.
> someone trying really hard to be pg
describes half the site.
Excerpts from wiki:
> Before the publication of Industrial Society and Its Future, Kaczynski's brother, David, was encouraged by his wife to follow up on suspicions that Ted was the Unabomber.[91] David was dismissive at first, but he took the likelihood more seriously after reading the manifesto a week after it was published in September 1995. He searched through old family papers and found letters dating to the 1970s that Ted had sent to newspapers to protest the abuses of technology using phrasing similar to that in the manifesto.[92]
> In early 1996, an investigator working with Bisceglie contacted former FBI hostage negotiator and criminal profiler Clinton R. Van Zandt. Bisceglie asked him to compare the manifesto to typewritten copies of handwritten letters David had received from his brother. Van Zandt's initial analysis determined that there was better than a 60 percent chance that the same person had written the manifesto, which had been in public circulation for half a year. Van Zandt's second analytical team determined a higher likelihood. He recommended Bisceglie's client contact the FBI immediately.[96]
> In February 1996, Bisceglie gave a copy of the 1971 essay written by Ted Kaczynski to Molly Flynn at the FBI.[87] She forwarded the essay to the San Francisco-based task force. FBI profiler James R. Fitzgerald[98][99] recognized similarities in the writings using linguistic analysis and determined that the author of the essays and the manifesto was almost certainly the same person. Combined with facts gleaned from the bombings and Kaczynski's life, the analysis provided the basis for an affidavit signed by Terry Turchie, the head of the entire investigation, in support of the application for a search warrant.[87]
After a few tries on boring accounts, I thought to try the account of somebody who was notorious for an incident outside of HN, and had a (deservedly) bad time at HN for a couple of years before the account went dark. And yeah, there's a bunch of high confidence (.6-.8) hits for that account, and from a quick browse of the comments of the recently active ones, they look really likely to be alts. Like, all three that…
Hopefully this raised awareness means that people who actually need anonymity will be more likely to know to take precautions.
I really liked the informative and straight-to-the-point about page - describing how the algorithm works in a way that is easy to understand. All the important details are summarised there. Well done! Edit: From the "How to avoid .." page, there is the following sentence: > Also, most authorship identification algorithms have poor accuracy when working with small amounts of words. This means the optimal strategy woul…
Imagine that for every new comment you want to post you would create a brand new account which you would use precisely once and never again. Then the stylometry would have just a few words and wouldn’t have enough corpus to get a reliable signature. If a lot of people does this it would be hard to figure out which account belongs with which human. ( Of course if you alone do this, your messages will stick out like a sore thumb. See xkcd 1105 )
> why it would result in a ban?
Because this practice is especially discouraged in the guidelines: “please don't create accounts routinely. HN is a community—users should have an identity that others can relate to.”