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 6

aaron695 3 days ago|

[dead]

andrewmcwatters 3 days ago||

Well, well, well, cocktailpeanuts. :spiderman_pointing:

I suspect, antirez, that you may have greater success removing some of the most common English words in order to find truly suspicious correlations in the data.

cocktailpeanuts and I for example, mutually share some words like:

because, people, you're, don't, they're, software, that, but, you, want

Unfortunately, this is a forum where people will use words like "because, people, and software."

Because, well, people here talk about software.

<=^)

Edit: Neat work, nonetheless.

cratermoon 3 days ago||

I noted the "analyze" feature didn't seem as useful as it could be because the majority of the words are common articles and conjunctions. I'd like to see a version of analyze that filters out at least the following stop words: a, an, and, are, as, at, be, but, by, for, if, in, into, is, it, no, not, of, on, or, such, that, the, their, then, there, these, they, this, to, was, will, with

antirez 3 days ago||

The system uses on purpose those simple words, since they are "tellers" of the style of the user in a context independent way. Burrows papers explain this very well, but in general we want to capture low-level structure, more than topics and exact non obvious words used. I tested the system with 10k words and removing the most common words, and you get totally different results (still useful, but not style matching), basically you get users grouped by interests.

cratermoon 3 days ago|||

>The system uses on purpose those simple words, since they are "tellers" of the style of the user in a context independent way.

Yes, that's good! I didn't state my interest clearly, though. I'd like to see the "analyze" result with the stop words excluded, not for the style comparison part, but for the reasons you state and others.

yorwba 3 days ago|||

I think grouping users by interests would be a more interesting application. Most users don't have multiple accounts, but everyone probably shares some interests with other users, whom they might enjoy discovering.

SchemaLoad 3 days ago|||

Pretty sure the point here is to demonstrate how governments or other surveillance orgs can easily find your alt accounts even if you use Tor or any number of security tools.

alganet 3 days ago|||

There's already plenty of those running everywhere.

alganet 3 days ago||

That seems to be a misconception.

The usage frequency of simple words is a powerful tell.

andrewmcwatters 3 days ago|||

I can understand the nuance of your assertion, but looking at the data returned by these results suggests it's not really all that powerful at all.

There are so many people that write like me apparently, that simple language seems more like a way to mask yourself in a crowd.

alganet 3 days ago||

You can definitely mask writing style. If you can do that only by using simple words, I am not so sure.

cratermoon 3 days ago|||

Indeed, some writing styles make frequent use of words like "that" and "just".

scoresomefeed 3 days ago|

The original version nailed all of my accounts with terrifying accuracy. Since then I make a new account every few days or weeks. Against the rules I know. And I’ve learned a lot about HN IP tracking and funny shadowbanning-like tricks they play but dont cop to. Like I get different error messages based on the different banned ips I use. And j see different behavior and inconsistency with flagged messages (like one that got upvoted a day after it was flagged and not visible to other users).

AlexeyBelov 2 days ago||

What you're doing makes HN worse, unfortunately.

FergusArgyll 3 days ago||

Care to write it all up somewhere? Sounds interesting