Reproducing Hacker News writing style fingerprinting

Posted by grep_it 3 days ago

Reproducing Hacker News writing style fingerprinting(antirez.com)

325 points | 154 commentspage 4

Uptrenda 2 days ago||

I knew that this was possible but I always thought it took much more... effort? How do we mitigate this, then? Run our posts through an LLM?

formerly_proven 3 days ago||

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

PaulHoule 3 days ago||

Personally I like this approach a lot

https://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/generated/sklearn.ma...

I think other methods are more fashionable today

https://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/manifold.html

particularly multi-dimension scaling, but personally I think tSNE plots are less pathological (they don't have as many of these crazy cusps that make me think it's projecting down from a higher-dimensional surface which is near-parallel to the page)

After processing documents with BERT I really like the clusters generated by the simple and old k-Means algorithm

https://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/generated/sklearn.cl...

It has the problem that it always finds 20 clusters if you set k=20 and a cluster which really oughta be one big cluster might get treated as three little clusters but the clusters I get from it reflect the way I see things.

antirez 3 days ago|||

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.

layer8 3 days ago||

Given that some matches are “mutual” and others are not, I don’t see how that could translate to a symmetric distance measure.

antirez 3 days ago||

Imagine the 2D space, it also has the same property!

You have three points nearby, and a fourth a bit more distant. 4 best match is 1, but 1 best match is 2 and 3.

layer8 3 days ago||

Good point, but the similarity score between mutual matches is still different, so it doesn’t seem to be a symmetric measure?

antirez 3 days ago||

Your observation is really acute: the small difference is due to quantization. When we search for element A, that is int8 quantized by default, the code paths de-quantize it, then re-quantize it and searches. This produces a small loss of precision, like that:

redis-cli -3 VSIM hn_fingerprint ELE pg WITHSCORES | grep montrose

montrose 0.8640020787715912

redis-cli -3 VSIM hn_fingerprint ELE montrose WITHSCORES | grep pg

pg 0.8639097809791565

So why cosine similarity is commutative, the quantization steps lead to a small different result. But the difference is .000092 that is in practical terms not important. Redis can use non quantized vectors using the NOQUANT option in VADD, but this will make the vectors elements using 4 bytes per component: given that the recall difference is minimal, it is almost always not worth it.

throAwOfCou 2 days ago||

I rotate hn accounts every year or two. In my top 4, I found 3 old alts.

This is impressive and scary. Obviously I had to create a throwaway to say this.

Lerc 3 days ago||

Used More Often by dang.

don't +0.9339

alganet 3 days ago||

Cool tool. It's a shame I don't have other accounts to test it.

It's also a tool for wannabe impersonators to hoan their writing style mimic skills!

shakna 3 days ago|

I don't have other accounts, but still matched at 85+% accuracy for a half dozen accounts. Seems I don't have very original thoughts or writing style.

Frieren 3 days ago|||

My guess is that people from the same region and similar background will have more and closer "alters". So, if you are Californian-American then there is many people that will speak similar to you in HN. If you are a Satawalese speaker then you may be quite alone in your own group.

(The Satawalese language has 460 speakers, most of who live in Satawal Island in the Federated States of Micronesia.)

pc86 3 days ago||

You couldn't have just picked a European country, you had to flex on us with Satawalese? :)

alganet 3 days ago|||

It's a fingerprinting tool, not a profiling tool. You can't draw such conclusions from it.

What a profiler would do to identify someone, I imagine, requires much more. Like the ability to recognize someone's tendency of playing the victim to leverage social advantage in awkward situations.

shakna 3 days ago||

85% is surprisingly high for fingerprinting, hence self-deprecation over insulting the author by poking at efficacy. I wouldn't have expected my Australian spelling, Oxford comma, or cadence to be anything close to the Californian Rust enthusiasts I apparently match against. Especially as there's no normalization happening - so even the Burrows-Delta method shouldn't match my use of "gaol" or "humour" that often.

But, limiting to the top couple hundred words, probably does limit me to sounding like a pretentious dickhole, as I often use "however", "but", and "isn't". Corrections are a little too frequent in my post history.

I'd expect things might be a tiny bit looser with precisions if something small like stop words were removed. Though, it'd be interesting to do the opposite. If you were only measuring stopwords, would that show a unique cadence?

alganet 3 days ago||

I don't know dude, don't take it personally.

wizzwizz4 3 days ago||

PhasmaFelis and mikeash have all matches mutual for the top 20, 30, 50 and 100. Are there other users like this? If so, how many? What's the significance of this, in terms of the shape of the graph?

tablespoon is close, but has a missing top 50 mutual (mikeash). In some ways, this is an artefact of the "20, 30, 50, 100" scale. Is there a way to describe the degree to which a user has this "I'm a relatively closer neighbour to them than they are to me" property? Can we make the metric space smaller (e.g. reduce the number of Euclidean dimensions) while preserving this property for the points that have it?

rcpt 3 days ago|

Searched my nearest neighbor and found someone who agrees with my political views.

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