4 ms·

They might've extracted useful information from your IP address/geolocation or your useragent, ie maybe figuring out you're accessing the site from tech company

by vbo 9y ago

They might've extracted useful information from your IP address/geolocation or your useragent, ie maybe figuring out you're accessing the site from tech company X's network. Given tech companies ratio of male to female employees, they may have been able to infer you are male. Also, tech companies pay well, so that's another information nugget about you, etc. The more signals they have, the more precise the outcome.

EB-Barrington 9y ago
Yes, agree. So I should add, just for discussion: 1) I'm self employed. 2) I'm always connected via a VPN connected to a continent that isn't my home continent. 3) I haven't connected to the internet via a "company" network in over five years. I could infer that you are male from the way you type, and I guess you're somewhere between 25 and 35. I haven't looked up your username or anything else, it's just a "feeling". Given millions of paragraphs of text linked to millions of known demographic and other data points (provided by Facebook), a paragraph is all a well-tuned system would need to make quite accurate assumptions about the person who typed the paragraph. Again, likes are not required anymore.
- RyanZAG 9y ago
  > I could infer that you are male from the way you type, and I guess you're somewhere between 25 and 35. I haven't looked up your username or anything else, it's just a "feeling". I think you only really need one or two obvious tells for something like that. The guy you replied to used ", etc.". I think that alone puts him into the bracket you've given, so I'm fairly sure you're correct here. Looking forward to hearing if you are.
- vbo 9y ago
  You could also do sentiment analysis on your dataset and link it to likes. Basically the more signals you have the more you can narrow down your classifications or correlations. Btw, your inference is correct. Course, one could argue that it is informed by 25-35 males being one of the most common demographics on HN.

by vbo 9y ago

EB-Barrington 9y ago

Yes, agree. So I should add, just for discussion: 1) I'm self employed. 2) I'm always connected via a VPN connected to a continent that isn't my home continent. 3) I haven't connected to the internet via a "company" network in over five years. I could infer that you are male from the way you type, and I guess you're somewhere between 25 and 35. I haven't looked up your username or anything else, it's just a "feeling". Given millions of paragraphs of text linked to millions of known demographic and other data points (provided by Facebook), a paragraph is all a well-tuned system would need to make quite accurate assumptions about the person who typed the paragraph. Again, likes are not required anymore.

RyanZAG 9y ago
> I could infer that you are male from the way you type, and I guess you're somewhere between 25 and 35. I haven't looked up your username or anything else, it's just a "feeling". I think you only really need one or two obvious tells for something like that. The guy you replied to used ", etc.". I think that alone puts him into the bracket you've given, so I'm fairly sure you're correct here. Looking forward to hearing if you are.
vbo 9y ago
You could also do sentiment analysis on your dataset and link it to likes. Basically the more signals you have the more you can narrow down your classifications or correlations. Btw, your inference is correct. Course, one could argue that it is informed by 25-35 males being one of the most common demographics on HN.