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Show HN: Find Your Hacker News Doppelgänger
- dtnewman 5y agoSays username doesn’t exist
- gk1 5y agoI see results for your username. Try again? I can’t share direct link.
- akmittal 5y agoShows my username as inactive or not valid
- mywacaday 5y agoI got that as well, worked on third try
- Iasluhar 5y agoYup, same.
- gk1 5y agoIt works for me when I enter your name. Try again?
- _Microft 5y agoIt seemed to me that it is case-sensitive, right? Maybe make it not case-sensitive or if that's not possible at least mention it somewhere, e.g. by putting it into the label of the input box as "Username (case-sensitive)".
- MaxBarraclough 5y agoSame here. I've tried Firefox and Edge, same result in both.
- jasonvorhe 5y ago> Error: Received no response from server Code: 1ST Not working for me.
- gk1 5y agoTry again? The app is hosted by Streamlit which is still in beta.
- mywacaday 5y agoAll you have to do now is figure out people's sexual preference and you have a dating app
- flixic 5y agoFor some reason I think HN userbase might not be the most gender-balanced.
- Leparamour 5y agoCodegrindr
- 1_player 5y ago"It's not her you're sexually attracted to, it's my code. Just face it, Dinesh, you're gay for my code. You're code gay." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7bkbv4u1tc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7bkbv4u1tc
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Geee 5y agoThere's a Tinder extension for VSCode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfd8RyAJh6c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfd8RyAJh6c
- andyxor 5y agoLeetcodegrindr
- mikewarot 5y agoI just found people who actually agree with me on HN... kinda cool.
- Leparamour 5y ago>I just found people who actually agree with me on HN You're still wrong though :D
- DyslexicAtheist 5y agoget enough accounts and you're scaling being wrong :P
- busymom0 5y agoI tested with dang's username and I really don't see the similarities between the comments on: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dang https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dang and https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=porphyrogene https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=porphyrogene or https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=julianeon https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=julianeon Your site does state: > It compares the semantic meaning of your comment history with those of all other users, and finds the top ten users whose comment histories are most similar to yours. So maybe it's comparing comments from entire history of the account and not just the recent ones and therefore hard for me to compare? Would it be possible for you to tweak it so that it only compares lets say the most recent 30 or 50 comments?
- gk1 5y agoIt currently compares past 3 years of comments, so yeah the similarity may not be apparent from just the recent comments. We did this so it would work even for the less active users. But I think your suggestion might work, too.
- busymom0 5y agoYea, 3 years is a long period. I think by default you should compare only past 30-60 comments and have options for comparing past year and past 3 year. If that works well, you could actually build a "dating app for intellectually curious" ones. Might be easier to do using Reddit data too.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- busymom0 5y agoLooks like the site crashed :( Gives "Please wait..."
- lordnacho 5y agoIsn't dang a bit of a special case? How many people comment about the rules of the site?
- gk1 5y agoHey all, if you see an error please try again! Might just be HN hug of (temporary) death.
- fit2rule 5y agoGonna add shadowban'ed accounts option?
- magnio 5y agoFor some users I searched, the most similar user is a throwaway account, which is somewhat eye-opening and unnerving.
- notRobot 5y agoI was just about to point that out! I tried a friend's account and the second match was a throwaway that I know for a fact is theirs.
- gk1 5y agoThat’s a really interesting and unintended use case…
- sohei 5y agoHow did you gather the comment histories? Would you mind sharing a copy?
- gk1 5y agoSee description at the bottom. We used the Hacker News API to pull data into BigQuery. From there we ran them through an embedding model and indexed the embeddings in Pinecone. The actual similarity search is done with Pinecone. (https://www.pinecone.io https://www.pinecone.io)
- busymom0 5y agoUsing Google BigQuery is one way. This comment might be of use: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25075318 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25075318 > A reminder that BigQuery (as used in the query in this link) is the best way to play with Hacker News data; don't scrape HN data manually! The `bigquery-public-data.hacker_news.full` table appears to be up to date with the most recent HN data as well (table last updated today). However, I'm not 100% sure the query is correct for unilaterally getting all links, as running the query on the full dataset returns the same results as running it from 2006-2015. And I value my sanity enough to not fuss around with the regex.
- fit2rule 5y agoDoesn't work for shadowbann'ed accounts, alas the more interesting case...
- formerly_proven 5y agoIs it intentional that this only works once and then the page needs to be reloaded to enter another name?
- gk1 5y agoNo, it might be resource constraints, trying to handle the traffic.
- Leparamour 5y agoNice idea. Do you retain any user data? Since most users are probably looking up their own username, it would be a simple task to match and log HN usernames and their respective IPs.
- oefrha 5y agoSo my HN doppelgänger according to this tool is someone I don't hold in high regard, and even clashed with once. Cool...
- k__ 5y agoWhy not. In the past I often had the impression I wouldn't get along with myself. Now, that I'm more chill and less confrontative, I think I would like to meet myself.
- 1123581321 5y agoHah, I’ve thought the same thing. I think I’d enjoy working with myself quite a bit. As a housemate, though, I doubt we’d cross boundaries often. Very thankful to be married to someone who truly complements me.
- beebeepka 5y agoI have unintentionally trolled myself more than once due to people necroing old forum threads. Yeah, I talk a lot of shit but I've got nothing on my old self.
- edflsafoiewq 5y agoWell, to meet your doppelgänger is an ill omen after all.
- slavik81 5y agoIf you recognize your doppelganger, it's probably because you have an interest in the same topics. Your opinions and your posting style may be different—or even opposite—but from a certain perspective, you have more in common with each other than most. I'm skeptical that this tool does a good job of identifying semantic meaning of a comment, but I bet it gets the topic right.
- wheybags 5y agoMy #1 match was an account[1] banned for "posting unsubstantive comments and repeatedly breaking the guidelines". Now, I may be biased, but I don't think that's accurate :v 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=franciscrick1 https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=franciscrick1
- ur-whale 5y agoThink of minority report and it'll all become clear.
- technologia 5y agoI got a bunch of empty accounts and one startup launch post. Not sure how that qualifies as a doppelgänger
- Sr_developer 5y agoI was not banned, my old account was simply shadow-banned. I had high karma fwiw , but I criticized PG. I think that was too much.
- dang 5y agoThat is doubtful. We don't shadowban established accounts: we tell them why we're banning them and why: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20banned&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... Shadowbanning on HN, at least for the last 7 years, has been reserved for spammers and serial trolls. It's possible that we made a mistake and neglected to tell you, but it's far more likely that we did tell you. We don't ban people for criticizing PG, as anyone can easily see for themselves by using HN Search or looking at any recent thread from paulgraham.com. If you're going to make a claim about why you think you were banned, you should provide a link so readers can make up their own minds. When it comes to "I was banned" stories, people say all kinds of things, most of which don't hold up against the actual record.
- Sr_developer 5y ago
- k__ 5y agoMy top 5 didn't post for over a year. Corona probably got all of them :(
- dane-pgp 5y ago'There can be only one.'
- BiteCode_dev 5y agoHandy to find people using several identities, spammers with multiple accounts or to uncover throwaways.
- Leparamour 5y agoHow would you even discern which is which? I have several abandoned HN accounts because I switch to a new account after a while in order to not leave to much PII for doxxing. I don't care about karma at all. This tool didn't offer any of them as doppelgangers, although (in theory) I should match my own style 100%.
- kkoncevicius 5y agoI think currently it is a bit biased towards users with low comment count. Top similar user for me had 4 comments, top 2 only 1 comment. Then top 5 and top 6 again had 1 comment each. Maybe the similarity score can be weighted by the number of comparisons somehow?
- gk1 5y agoI wonder if there are simply more users with low comment numbers. But yes we considered only including users above some karma score, and still might do that in the future.
- kkoncevicius 5y agoThis depends on how the similarity is measured. If it is measured as % of agreement between comment texts then it's more likely to have better agreement with someone who has fewer comments rather than more. For example I suspect that if we generated 1000 random users with random gibberish comments and varied their comment numbers from 1 to 10 or so, the top similarities would be biased towards low comment-count random users. This would be because having one randomly generated comment match your style is easier than having 2 randomly generated comments match the same style. And if that's the case then the same issue would transfer to comparing real users. @busymom0 suggested a great solution in this thread - only do comparisons based on "n" (like last 50) comments. This way every similarity would be measured using the same number of comments and users with low comment counts would be excluded automatically.
- scanr 5y agoMine resulted in amazing synchronicity, turns out someone had sent me a link to a blog post of theirs just this morning.
- phendrenad2 5y agoThis is cool. I can definitely see similarities in sentence length and style compared to my closest matches.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 5y agoEep. My doppelganger is a banned user who posted too many gender flamewar-baiting comments. Let it not be so!
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- axegon_ 5y agoSeems it picked up on some phrases I use which are not too common among the masses. Beyond that there's little to no relation between me and my doppelgangers.
- inglor_cz 5y agoThe first two people in the list did not look like me much. But the third one (NeedMoreTea) was an interesting hit, commenting in a similar fashion and exploring similar topics, not necessarily from the same perspective. I am now immersed in his comment history. Also, funnily, I really like tea and I drink ~ half a gallon a day.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- loves_mangoes 5y agoI have a throwaway Doppel whose only comments are about diet coke. Given that this is my 'pharmacology' alt account, it seems the author's pretrained word embeddings still associate Coca Cola with the old recipe =) NLP is hard!
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- sam_lowry_ 5y agoMany years ago, I built something similar for Drupal and its votingapi module. Just checked it, I was using Pearson's correlation coefficient between votes. It worked fast and was surprisinly accurate. You need access to voting history for that, of course.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- tomrod 5y agoWeird. It could not find me.
- vanattab 5y agoIt's case-sensitive
- _Microft 5y agoIf you encounter the error that "This user does not exist or does not have any activity.", check the case. They seem to be case-sensitive on this page. (I checked with correct and incorrect spellings of "dang", "pg", "TeMPOraL" and "_Microft".)
- morsch 5y agoYup, didn't work for me at first because it's case sensitive. Also, you're one of my doppelgangers, hello.
- _Microft 5y agoHello, hello, nice to hear that - I'll make sure to look through your comment history later!
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Salgat 5y agoDidn't work when I fixed casing until I refreshed the page.
- Sebb767 5y agoApparently I'm rather similar to jacquesm [0], while shantly [1] is the top match of both of us. Associativity seems to hold up. Also, I'm in a way on the front page (?), so I'm happy ;) [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=jacquesm https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=jacquesm [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=shantly https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=shantly
- hobs 5y agoI also had an extreme match for shantly - dunno why exactly though they seem like a reasonable poster. shantly 0.989 asark 0.988 intergalplan 0.988 jakobegger 0.988 gh-throw 0.988 moshmosh 0.988
- leephillips 5y agoIntriguing idea, but for me the criteria used to root out doppelgängers doesn’t lead to interesting results. My HN soul mates do not write like me, do not write about the same things, and do things I would never do, such as refer to Wikipedia articles.
- jcims 5y agoSame. I don't really recognize anything in the top four for me. Edit: I lied, top match 'asark' tends to share in my proclivity for the run-on sentence. Topically we're not really into the same things, so it has to be something along those lines.
- WalterGR 5y agoAre you sure? You, pseudolus, barry-cotter, and jbegley sure do post a lot of the same URLs...
- leephillips 5y agoI’ll take another look. EDIT: those users are not even on the list of my doppelgängers.
- graderjs 5y agoFinally we bring authorship attribution to expose secondary HN accounts. I've been waiting for this for years!
- hidden-spyder 5y agoStuck on "Please wait..." for me. :(
- gk1 5y agoTry now. We’ve upped the resources.
- jl2718 5y agoThese matches suffer from a very common problem in recommendation engines, which is a tendency toward matching with the long tail of randomness. The problem is that your matching engine assumes perfect accuracy in vectorization, but actually, the vectorization is a sample from a distribution. The distribution of the vectorization comes from the idea that it is trained on a mix of information and randomness, and this model is just one instance of the randomness. There are some sources of randomness in the model that you control, and others in the data. To get better recommendations, you first need to get the distributions for each element of the vectorization. The simplest approximation would be a variance around the model output. Each item should have a variance determined by the amount of information available for that sample. Now you have another problem, which is finding the closest vector. A p-test will fail you because that is telling you the probability that you came from the same distribution, which is going to be the random distribution for almost all pairs. You might ask something like, the probability that the two points come from a distribution that is distinct from the random distribution. You’d have to form that distribution, asses probability of membership, and then probability of rejection from randomness. You could also consider doing this for each vector element and returning a negative sum of log probability to represent the amount of information shared between vectors. But ultimately, you need a truth set to test these methods against. This is easy. You just split each person into N people by randomly assigning their comments to one of N identities. This could also be used as an element of the variance. An easy way to start is by bootstrapping the randomness. In this case, there is probably a random initialization vector in the model. You can bootstrap the distribution of each vector element w.r.t. the IV by running the model many times with random initialization vectors. You are still using a fixed point for the training data noise, but this is a start. To bootstrap the training noise variance, you can train many models using random selection of the data, and the same IV. A good heuristic split is to decide how many times you will run the model, x, and then do random selection by 1/sqrt(x). Ex. Run 100 times with 1/10th of the data in each run. Then you have two distributions for each vector element, one for the data randomness, and one for the model randomness, but the mean from the model randomness is the most informative. Now add the data variance / sqrt(x) to get a rough approximation of the true variance. These are all hacky ways to get a decent improvement, and the formal methods will also give great improvement on top of that, but are easy to mess up and often quite expensive to bootstrap.
- leotaku 5y agoThis worked relatively well for my account. A major reason for my first match seems to have been both accounts talking about licensing issues and specifically GPL. Other matches seem to have shared some superficially similar political perspectives on HN.
- easton 5y agoIt works! My doppelgänger is my old account.
- motohagiography 5y agoDoes this mean I need to travel the earth and time to find the others so I can defeat them in single combat, because there can be only one ? Seriously, if you want Highlanders, this is how you get Highlanders. That said, after reading my doppegangers comment histories, I'd totally subscribe to their newsletters.
- runawaybottle 5y agoYou are admitting you love echo chambers and bubbles.
- dang 5y agoWould you please stop posting unsubstantive comments (like this one and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27572603 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27572603) and specifically not cross into personal attack? We ban accounts that do those things, and we've had to ask you more than once not to. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful. Note this one: "Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community."
- StefanKarpinski 5y agoIs this in any way distinguishable from just picking random accounts? There is no discernible similarity between the supposedly similar accounts that I can discern.
- benrbray 5y agoI'd be more interested to see a list of users who have commented the most on the same articles as me. Seems like a better way to measure interests, even if it's indirect. Of course, this wouldn't distinguish between doppelgangers and evil twins >:)
- achow 5y agoComments are often reply to someone else's point on things which may not be related to the original post.
- benrbray 5y agoOne idea is to rank users more highly when their comment is closer to mine in the comment tree. Also to weight users more highly when we both comment on an article that has relatively few comments.
- jcims 5y agoSome of my favorite HN threads remind me of bubble tracks in old school particle colliders. Just stacks of tangents that are hilariously off-topic but somehow, at times, still interesting and even informative.
- qart 5y agoYep, my doppels all seem to have participated in topics and threads that I ignored. We seem to have never interacted with each other, and I don't seem to have voted any of their comments.
- Supermancho 5y agoI have 2 accounts at over 1k karma. I generally start a new one when I make major moves (across multiple state lines or between countries). My accounts did not correlate, probably because they have been inactive at staggered intervals. > We took usernames and respective comment histories from the past three years However, putting the names in the Doppelganger search yielded very similar results and the comments of the users are from like-minded people. Well done.
- achow 5y agoAnother signal for matching could be user's 'Favorite'.
- hidden_news 5y agoFails to associate any of my alts.
- catern 5y agoI'm pleased to see that while most people have doppelgangers similar around >0.990, my most similar doppelganger has a similarity of 0.975. I'm a unique individual!
- onychomys 5y ago0.957 here. I'm twice as unique as you are!
- wizeman 5y ago0.939 here. I wonder who has the lowest top similarity score (pg has 0.88)!
- jointpdf 5y ago0.849 for me
- DyslexicAtheist 5y agoYou're all individuals https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QereR0CViMY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QereR0CViMY
- boomskats 5y ago0.866. Feels lonely :(
- riidom 5y ago.886 here, let's feel special instead :D
- DFHippie 5y agoI think the algorithm might have trouble with negation, questions, irony, jokes, etc. My top matches seemed inclined to comment on similar topics but with different opinions. Granted, my matches topped out at 0.972, so maybe I'm an outlier.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- dijit 5y agoMy number 1 doppelgänger is a Swedish person. I’m British and I’ve been living in Sweden for 7 years now, and it’s only just occurring to me that this could be affecting the way I form comments.
- DyslexicAtheist 5y agoare you using the "bork bork bork" extension to form comments perhaps? http://www.snert.com/Software/bork.html http://www.snert.com/Software/bork.html
- Cybotron5000 5y agoThis is fantastic! Thank you! :D (…schmerk de herdygerdy, bork, bork, bork…)
- NmAmDa 5y agoMy adblock prevents site from loading, Lol.
- 11thEarlOfMar 5y agoIt's bi-directional for me. I am my #1 match's #1 match. Should be that way in general, right?
- mind-blight 5y agoIt probably depends on the accounts, and the algorithm. If the comparison algorithm uses some sort of distance calculation between 2 users to figure out how close they are, then you could have single directional relationships. If my comments are on an island of weirdness, you may be the closest person to me while still being really far away. If your comments are relatively normal, you might have a lot of people around who are closer than me. That would make you my doppelganger, but not make me yours. Edit: I just checked my doppelganger (barry-cotter), and I'm not even in his list :p. I've seen that username appear in a couple other comments under this post. I wonder if there are a few super normal users that a lot of people are closest to.
- joshuaissac 5y agoMy matches have each other within their top matches, but none of them have me in their top ten. I have a lower similarity score with my top match, compared to my matches' similarity scores with their tenth closest matches. So it is that island scenario that you described.
- Aeronwen 5y agoThe person you're a closest match to, could have a closer match to someone else. Same with their closest match, and so on.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- krick 5y agoNo. There's no reason for it to be symmetric, there can be unlimited number of your closest neighbour's closest neighbours, that are closer to him than you are. I mean, it's literally measuring distance between dots in the n-dimensional space, and if you'll ask your question about the dots on the paper, the answer will be obvious to you. FWIW, I'm not even on my #1's list.
- jliptzin 5y agoIt says I have no comment history
- whydoineedthis 5y agoI don't exist, according to the site
- EamonnMR 5y agoSame here. Maybe they only index people with a certain threshold number of comments or amount of karma.
- CrazyStat 5y agoSame.
- gk1 5y agoIt’s case sensitive, try again?
- CrazyStat 5y agoI tried with proper case and it still didn't work. Then I just mashed the button a few times and it said username found but error getting history, so I mashed the button a few more times and it eventually worked. Do probably just backend overloaded. I skimmed through my top matches and one of them appears to have attended the same undergrad as me, so that was interesting.
- pimlottc 5y agoYeah, that’s kinda a downer.
- pc86 5y agoI looked through the first half dozen and it seems pretty on point (similarity scores are high .98x's).
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- briefcomment 5y agoLooks like it's not loading at the moment. Really curious to try this out. Edit: Nvm, just not loading in Safari
- gk1 5y agoTry now, it was updated to handle the load better.
- mlang23 5y ago"You need to enable JavaScript to run this app." I wish HN had a tag to identify JS-only submissions. And a filter feature to allow me to not show them at all.
- audiometry 5y agoIt couldn’t find my account, huh? Oh it’s case sensitive. I’d change that.
- gnicholas 5y agoMost of the listed accounts for me have no activity in recent months, and the ones that do engage on different topics (they are quite technical; I am not).
- johannes1234321 5y agoHello my Doppelgänger, you are on place two for me :-D
- gnicholas 5y agoInteresting. You seem like a closer match than the ones on my list. Looks like we're in different countries (US here), but we both comment on legal/tax matters. Are you a lawyer, by chance? I'm a former tax lawyer.
- johannes1234321 5y agoHi, nö I'm not in the legal space but software developer. But the rule based system of law combined with the complexities of human society is something I consider interesting.
- lovetocode 5y agoIt says I don’t exist. Dark.
- croisillon 5y agoI don't comment much, my next-to-last comment were 6 words including the word "underpaid" and now my "Doppelgänger" are all comments who had "underpaid" in their last comment...
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y agoI’d love to see stats on how well this matches accounts to themselves if you split an account’s comments into two pseudo-accounts and tried to match them.
- beebeepka 5y agoThat makes a lot of sense as control/sanity check. Then again, I don't think I always have the same style due to mood differences and whatnot.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y agoIf you split it randomly, the distributions over mood and style should balance out in the large.
- Tainnor 5y agoIt seems I have some overlap with qsort. Given the posts I have seen from that account, I take that as a compliment. I do wonder though if the model is smart enough to correct for when you quote other people, otherwise it might be measuring who you interact with much. BTW, I'm not sure of the privacy implications of this, maybe someone else can comment on this.
- dsr_ 5y agoHow many of us are Animats?
- egypturnash 5y agoMy #2 match seems to not exist. https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=danaliv https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=danaliv
- baby 5y ago“ This user does not exist or does not have any activity.” :( Edit: looks like it’s case sensitive, be warned people on mobile phones. Edit2: the person I matched with the most seems a bit aggressive in their comments. I guess I can learn something from this.
- brudgers 5y agoI think the weakness of this technique is in the normalization of the vectors. The close match comments don't look like mine because the content of my comments has to be massively compressed. The close matches appear to have been massively expanded. Or to put it another way [1], cosign similarity is not enough here. Magnitude also matters here. This is probably a case where traditional information retrieval methods should play some role. The data are not really big enough that a pure cosign similarity is warranted. [3] [1]: a phrase that my actual Doppelganger must use. [2] [2]: and also endnotes like these. [3]: performative erudition is what is absent from all my matches.
- jointpdf 5y ago(cosine, not cosign)
- JustResign 5y agoHey, they said it was _performative_ erudition
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- shawnz 5y agoThis works quite well for me, I see a list of people who all seem to have agreeable comments. All my similarity scores are in the range 0.988-0.986.
- mdaniel 5y agoI think the poor service is swamped, but it isn't doing itself any favors by hammering the /healthz and /status endpoint about once or twice a second
- MattGaiser 5y agoThe first account I found was banned, but the 2nd account found says a lot of the same things I do. I would send them in my place in a debate if I could not make it. Well done.
- runawaybottle 5y agoI need the following users to go away, there isn’t room for all of us: journalctl 0.994 thisisweirdok 0.994 veryworried 0.993 shantly 0.993 core-questions 0.993 not_a_cop75 0.993 lambda_obrien 0.993 LeoTinnitus 0.993 xwolfi 0.993 magashna 0.993 —————————- Edit: On a more serious note, how can we use this to find echo chambers and homogenized news sources? Keep rolling with this idea, I think it’s important.
- corobo 5y agoIf you get me and have always wondered why you never quite fit in, ask your GP about ADHD. While folks are saying people they get match up with them in comment style, keep in mind due to the nature of the tool they're looking for that. Also look for comments and opinions you're not similar in to disprove the match. I once made a Markov chain IRC bot that people would still be convinced was smart today because people discard the lines that make no sense when only looking to prove rather than also disprove
- jedberg 5y agoI broke it. It says I don’t exist or have any activity. :)
- sdenton4 5y agoThis is a nice case study on why it's good to predict distributions instead of raw values. Low comment accounts should have a high degree of uncertainty, which should translate into weaker similarity scores, of you compute the expected similarity of two accounts.
- susam 5y agoThis is fun! Here are the results I got: | Username | Similarity Score | |-----------------+------------------| | tosh | 0.939 | | app4soft | 0.931 | | beefhash | 0.930 | | joseluisq | 0.929 | | todsacerdoti | 0.929 | | pjmlp | 0.928 | | rbanffy | 0.928 | | blattimwind | 0.928 | | formerly_proven | 0.928 | | ducktective | 0.928 | I identified three usernames in this table right away! tosh, todsacerdoti, and pjmlp. In fact, I like the stories posted by tosh and todsacerdoti quite often and I like the comments posted by pjmlp very often.
- mancerayder 5y agoI'm probably late to the party, but is there a reader app people use for following specific people? Or are you just referring to whom you've favorited / following and have a good memory for names?
- susam 5y agoThe latter. I remember those three usernames.
- ant6n 5y agoWow, u recognize ppl on hn? I only recognize ppl I know In real life, everybody else is kind of anonymous.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- runawaybottle 5y agoOh, why don’t you all just get a room already.
- raarts 5y agoI feel including only my last 3 years of activity would not characterize me sufficiently. Why not all of it?
- aasasd 5y agoAlso this is the kind of service I would build if I wanted to figure out the ip of a user.
- meowster 5y agoYep. I'm using a VPN right now, but I only looked up my latest account. I'll look up my old HN accounts later on a different IP/VPN service.
- lenocinor 5y agoYeah. I wonder why more people here aren’t mentioning that this could be used to help unmask throwaway accounts for people who usually post here with a different account.
- surfsvammel 5y agoDoesn’t work on iPhone? Or just doesn’t work for me:(
- annoyingnoob 5y agoHug of Death https://i.ytimg.com/vi/dqwXjP5Qk6E/hqdefault.jpg https://i.ytimg.com/vi/dqwXjP5Qk6E/hqdefault.jpg
- masswerk 5y agoThe service is apparently overloaded. I'm falling into a connection timeout with every browser and it takes ages to even proceed to this.
- gk1 5y agoTry now, it was updated to handle the load better.
- yawaworht1978 5y agoI get a blank screen with a link to the hosting website on the bottom right. Chrome on Android mobile.
- jbverschoor 5y agosame
- gk1 5y agoI let them know, they’re trying to keep up with the load. Edit: Should be better now.
- rvba 5y agoSo does this tool connect IP address with account name?
- gorgoiler 5y agoCan you share the tool and its database as well as hosting it? Is it small enough to do so? I’d love to see / use your work but it feels weird to participate in allowing a third party to build up an (hn-username, ip-address) database.
- gk1 5y agoWe’ll write a longer how-it-works post soon, so you’ll be able to make your own version.
- eob 5y agoWould love to chat (ted@nludb.com) if you’re interested in using APIs like this in production. NLUDB is supplying folks with equivalent APIs both as a SaaS and a private cloud install. If you’re interested in rolling your own, a good place to start is the sentence-transformers Python package along with a KNN search service like Spotify’s Annoy. Pinecone, of course, looks awesome as well :-)
- hn8788 5y agoKind of weird looking at mine. I've got an old account that I don't use any more. It didn't show up in the list of similar accounts, and the list for this account and my old account were completely different.
- 0_gravitas 5y agoAll my doppelgangers seem much nicer than I am :^) Also one was a throwaway of a guy talking about his time on shrooms /shrug Edit: ah, one is most certainly not very nice ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- okareaman 5y agoI have bipolar disorder and can be "all over the map" as my ex used to say. I was pleased that my twins were similar, so maybe the model does a better job matching with varied and distinctive data - more signal to work with.
- vyrotek 5y agoInteresting! One of them is a banned account and another is a throw away. Bucephalus355 0.944 freehunter 0.943 sn_master 0.943 protomyth 0.943 zapttt 0.942 cmhnn 0.942 1cvmask 0.942 sabujp 0.942 Jkvngt 0.942 (Banned) GoinginSircles 0.942 (Throw away)
- supernova87a 5y agoBy the way, on a related question, I have an interest in being able to download all the things I've written on HN, but am not clever enough to hack together some tool to wget and parse my own user history. Has anyone seen a tool to do this?
- besnn00 5y agoWhere there is a will, there is a way! Really you should just start doing it and eventually you will get there; no such thing as not clever enough.
- meowster 5y agoNow, can we turn it into a matchmaking service?
- muzani 5y agoI'll probably match with a 51 year old Austrian woman who acts like a 22 year old, or my sister.
- jedwhite 5y agoNice use of your service for a Show HN! The number of comments about the Karma being divergent on people's matches suggest you could add a simple ensemble approach with a karma heuristic on top of the vector similarity search to help results. If the data used isn't already reflecting Karma, it could be a useful metric for representing a whole bunch of things (quality of comments, participation, length of time), and make the vector similarity more meaningful. It would be interesting to see if users perceive the results as higher quality if you added a simple Karma similarity filter (maybe 400 points or something based on the standard deviation of the average karma score), and then returned the closest matches filtered by that metric. Vector similarity search as a service looks like a good market. Out of interest, what would the cost translate to for running something like this in practice using the API as a customer?
- jedwhite 5y agoPS Possibly you could add a floor (say less than 20 to exclude shill or throwaway accounts), or ignoring karma difference over a threshold (say 1000). I think applying simple filters based on common sense or domain knowledge can help vector similarity searches with sparse data or pollution. Just a random thought :)
- gk1 5y ago> Out of interest, what would the cost translate to for running something like this in practice using the API as a customer? We offer usage-based billing at $0.10 per GB of memory hour. (https://www.pinecone.io/pricing/ https://www.pinecone.io/pricing/) For this app, our eng team knows for sure but I think the entire index is less than 1GB so it would be just $73/month if we keep it running 24/7. Vector similarity search is new for most companies, so we want to make it very easy to try and test stuff out in production, without cost being a barrier. Even for larger volumes (40GB+) we offer volume and pre-commitment discounts.
- lucasnortj 5y agoGarbage app; doesn’t work
- ozzmotik 5y agodefinitely a neat way to find people that you may not have ever encountered before, as I certainly don't recognize anyone on my list: hardwaresofton 0.97 g82918 0.969 karmakaze 0.969 pushpop 0.969 abqexpert 0.968 breischl 0.968 forgotmypw17 0.968 dan-robertson 0.968 anaerobicover 0.968 tgbugs 0.968 definitely some good stuff to spend some time looking into though. thanks for sharing
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- mstade 5y agoRan it with my name and the top hit was nzeribe, which led me to this amazing thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27087795 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27087795 And here I was living my life thinking that Soft Cell's version of Tainted Love was the original...
- muzani 5y agoThere are 9 people with over a .99 match. It's the writing style of non-native English speaker who spends a lot of time on meme sites.
- Aeolun 5y agoMy doppleganger has stopped posting somewhere in 2020. Now I wonder what happened to an internet stranger.
- pelagic_sky 5y agoAs a designer on HN. The top 5 matches didn’t resonate as they were obviously developers who nerded out about code. My most relatable characteristic was some of our comments are heavily downvoted. :)
- 63 5y agoMy matches seemed pretty accurate in terms of general phrasing (I do a lot of 'I grew up in...' and 'I once knew someone who...'), but the subject matter was a bit concerning at times. Does the average account have so many judgmental downvote-heavy comments?
- rkagerer 5y agoWell, the first comment I saw from my top doppelganger match began "I have been one of the toxic persons in a workplace. I was young and immature and an ungrateful arrogant prick..." Reviewing additional posts I don't think we seem any more alike than a random pick.
- jimmydorry 5y agoInteresting that all of mine seemed to be quite well established in terms of account age and karma. | Username | Similarity Score | |-----------------+------------------| | boomboomsubban | 0.974 | | tgsovlerkhgsel | 0.973 | | fixermark | 0.972 | | shadowgovt | 0.971 | | stanferder | 0.971 | | xvector | 0.971 | | geofft | 0.971 | | drdaeman | 0.971 | | shkkmo | 0.971 | | frombody | 0.971 |
- mattst88 5y agoFirst two with the highest similarity score to me were banned. Hope that's not predictive!
- ksaj 5y agoOkay, the first one I got does actually write like me. It's funny because I didn't agree with what he says in his posts, but I totally recognize why it ranked highly similar to my writing. Oh gawd, now I'm sounding exactly like that guy... (I just need to add some parens.)
- Bayart 5y agoAll my matches seem to be contentious, argumentative people, and I can't say it's uncalled for. I don't think we would get along. I'm wondering how matching people completely randomly under the guise of of a fake algorithm would fare. Placebo matching if you will. The results in terms of social interactions might be more fruitful.
- pbhjpbhj 5y agoSo, we give this our username and it matches us to browser id/cookies/IP/whatever and sells the set to marketeers ... or?
- rcv 5y agoFrom the "How it Works" section: > We took usernames and respective comment histories from the past three years using the Hacker News API. Then we transformed them into vector embeddings using a pre-trained model, and loaded them into Pinecone.