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

How does it find the high similarity between "dang" and "dangg" when the "dangg" account has no activity (like comments) at all?

https://antirez.com/hnstyle?username=dang&threshold=20&actio...

Managed to find an alt I forgot I made and gave up using years ago. I do wonder about other high up people. Like what about our mutual histories makes us have similar word usage? Are we from the same areas or did we hang out in similar places online?

This is a bit tangential but I've noticed lots of comments aping the style of Matt Walsh. Not just on HN either, but probably more here than other places I visit.

Anyway, I guess this would be useful cluster the "Matt Walsh"-y commenters together.

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.

That makes me wonder two things. Firstly, if your can use this to find LLM generated content, which I guess would need similar instructions. Imagine instructing it to talk like a pirate, it would be quite different from a generic response.

Secondly, if you want to make an alt account harder to cross-correlate with your main, would rewriting your comments with an LLM work against this method? And if so, how well?

Very cool. Also a bit surprising — two of my matches are people I know IRL.

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.

I think it would be interesting to run this tool against Reddit, 4chan and Tweeter to find astroturf accounts. Does it look like a real browser to those sites or would it be blocked?

I remember the original post the author is referring to. I was captivated by it and thought it was cool. When I ran the original mentioned in the post, it detected my one of my alt's that I forgot about. OP's newer implementation using different methodologies did not detect the alt. For reference, the alt was created in 2010 and the last post was in 2012. Perhaps my writing style has changed?