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Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts
Author here. This site lets you put in a username and get the users with the most similar writing style to that user. It confirmed several users who I suspected were alts and after informally asking around has identified abandoned accounts of people I know from many years ago. I made this site mostly to show how easy this is and how it can erode online privacy. If some guy with a little bit of Python, and $8 to rent a decent dedicated server for a day can make this, imagine what a company with millions of dollars and a couple dozen PhD linguists could do.
Here's Paul Graham:
https://stylometry.net/user?username=pg https://stylometry.net/user?username=pg
Here are some frequent HN commenters: (EDIT: Removed due to privacy concerns)
- bumble_bee900 4y agoIt's accurate enough that I had to create a new account now :) I guess it's difficult to evade it as the word frequency certainly catches all about the countries I frequently refer, programming languages, interests etc.
- JKCalhoun 4y agoThe asymmetry is interesting. I have no alts but of course it nonetheless reported accounts similar to mine. Running then the most similar person to my account did not put me in their top 20.
- rglover 4y agoIt's moments like this I'm proud to have my insanity on full display without obscurity. Was surprised to see a bunch of ~30% matches despite not having any alts.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- nostylometry 4y agoThis is absolutely bonkers. I tried it with my alt and it got my original correct! So I'm writing this comment with a fresh account which hopefully will not get correctly linked too lol
- AviationAtom 4y agoNow I can find my HN doppelganger
- ALittleLight 4y agoOf the top ten accounts listed for my name two of them are me.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- saurik 4y agoWhy are some users bold?
- srean 4y agoThe non-bold are dead accounts I think
- saurik 4y agoIt isn't due to a mere property of the user, as, for example, cushman is not bold as the #2 result for tptacek but is bold as the #2 result for icambron.
- costco 4y agoSay you see user2 listed in bold on user1's page. That means that user1 is also in user2's top 20 users. In my experience it is often an indicator of a good match (but not always). I should probably explain that on the site.
- layer8 4y agoInstead of making it binary, you could use a gradient indicating the strength of the mutual correlation (like how HN colors downvoted comments).
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- srean 4y agoI tried it on a few user-ids that I strongly suspected were owned by the same person. My hunches stand corroborated. Not sure who is corroborating whom though, me or the script. Good job.
- nvr219 4y agoI only got 0.9999999999999992 for myself :(
- noncoml 4y agoNaturally Born Imposter
- p4bl0 4y agoIt's funny that I only match at 0.9999999999999982 with myself while all other username I tried matched with themselves at 1.0 ^^.
- stavros 4y agoOh wow, it's really sure that I'm stavrosk, which I am: https://stylometry.net/user?username=stavros https://stylometry.net/user?username=stavros The next person is 30% less certain, that's huge! This would basically identify any alt I might have with near certainty.
- jvolkman 4y agostavrosk doesn't have any posts/comments? What's it using to match?
- stavros 4y agoIt's my old username.
- costco 4y agoHuh... seems there are some inconsistencies between what's presented on news.ycombinator.com and the Firebase API. Glad it matches for you though :)
- stavros 4y agoI guess they just didn't go back and reparse, not a big problem. I don't think people change their username frequently :P
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- rogual 4y agoFunny thing is, it thinks I'm you, but it doesn't think you're me! https://stylometry.net/user?username=rogual https://stylometry.net/user?username=rogual I'd have thought this stylometry thing would be commutative.
- stavros 4y ago
- ufmace 4y agoI wonder what's a reasonable threshold for "probably the same person". I've never had an alt on HN, and when I searched myself, it found 3 other users above 0.6, none of whom I've ever heard of before.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- costco 4y agoIf it's >0.9 is you can almost guarantee it's an alt but I've seen certain matches at 0.6. The problem is writing styles change over time. Another idea I had was converting the scores which are just cosine similarity scores into percentiles (so 0.99 would be 99th percentile of certainty) to make them more human interpretable.
- bonzini 4y agoThe people at 0.4-0.6 with me do share some interests. That's cool on its own.
- throwup 4y agoI make new accounts every so often and the accounts of mine that it found have a score of around 0.3. I'm not actively trying to defeat stylometry but it's possible I just have a particularly unremarkable writing style.
- xwolfi 4y agoWell I must be stereotypical myself because it found me at 0.8 !
- forgotpwd16 4y ago>The problem is writing styles change over time. Will be interesting if we could plot the writing style divergence over time.
- throwdbaaway 4y ago
- Yeahsureok 4y agoOn the how to avoid section: Isn't running comments through a randomised translator a few times then back considered a countermeasure also? Also think it's probably poor form to list users as examples without their permission.
- costco 4y ago> On the how to avoid section: Isn't running comments through a randomised translator a few times then back considered a countermeasure also? Yes. > This may be out of line but isn't pg on here with a different username, Levenschtein distance of one that's not included? Or is that just a very motivated 13yo account who writes a lot of admin-esque comments. What other pg account are you referring to? I want to see it so I can see what my algorithm missed. > Also think it's probably poor form to list users as examples without their permission. You're right. I'll remove that - I just wanted some examples especially for people on phones who don't feel like typing. Thanks for the feedback.
- jacooper 4y ago> However, using automated methods like machine translation services do not appear to be a viable method of circumvention. https://www.whonix.org/wiki/Stylometry https://www.whonix.org/wiki/Stylometry
- saurik 4y agoIt would be convenient if the usernames linked to the comment pages on Hacker News (to avoid having to copy/paste and URL hack, which is made even slightly more annoying because for some reason when I tap and hold the usernames to copy them your markup--I haven't looked at why yet--is causing an extra space character to get copied on the left).
- honkler 4y agoNot today. You fail, I win.
- costco 4y agoNice. Just out of curiosity are you taking any countermeasures or varying your writing style across accounts in any way?
- psychphysic 4y agoMy second closest match was 0.35 but searching people where they have matches 0.5-0.75 I suspect that's mostly to do with number of posts leading to better statistics.
- honkler 4y agoyeah I vary my writing styles. Much of the stuff I post through this account is controversial, to say the least. So I have to take "measures".
- peacelilly 4y agoThis is creepy.
- noncoml 4y agoI think the word you are looking for is uncanny
- the_cat_kittles 4y agopretty cool- i think there should be a term for two accounts that have each other as the top most similar account. kinda sad i dont have one :(
- layer8 4y agoStylotwins?
- philosopher1234 4y agoWe’re pretty close me and you — closer than my actual alts
- the_cat_kittles 4y agohello friend! but... id never use an m dash
- philosopher1234 4y agoWell… I would never use a lowercase word after an exclamation point! …Because I’m on mobile
- dvh 4y agoMake a fundraiser and start doing it for other sites.
- costco 4y agoIt would be possible for Reddit because Pushshift.io archives all the comments there and Reddit is still pretty small. I'd probably need to make things a lot faster. Doing it on a specific subreddit would be very feasible. I'll think about it but I don't actually know if I really want to do that because for instance I've been banned from subreddits before but I don't want a ban from when I was 12 years old to follow me around forever because my writing style hasn't changed. Moderation is the most obvious application of this kind of software.
- rand_user_100 4y ago> I'll think about it but I don't actually know if I really want to do that because for instance I've been banned from subreddits before but I don't want a ban from when I was 12 years old to follow me around forever Insightful that your personal experience and impact on you personally affects your decision. I invite you to think about the impact of the products you build in your CS career by putting yourself in the shoes of other people as well. Some products should not be built, even though it's easy to build them.
- SpelingBeeChamp 4y agoWhat other easily-built products do you think should not exist?
- aaron695 4y ago
- julienreszka 4y agowhy is my username not exactly equal to 1? https://stylometry.net/user?username=julienreszka https://stylometry.net/user?username=julienreszka
- costco 4y agoPython/floating point rounding error. It doesn't mean anything.
- gus_massa 4y agoIt would be nice to make the names clickable. I don't think the list of pg alternate account is accurate. I checked a few. They have many oneliners that is typical of pg, but the topics and style don't look similar. I searched a few more and got better results. :) I searched myself (that I know that I have no alternate accounts). I recognize a few users that are interested in similar topics, and I discuss/upvote them many times. But I didn't recognize most of the user of the list.
- costco 4y ago> I searched myself (that I know that I have no alternate accounts). I recognize a few users that are interested in similar topics, and I discuss/upvote them many times. But I didn't recognize most of the user of the list. It's based purely off frequency of the 200 most common English 1 word phrases, 2 word phrases, 3 word phrases, 1 character sequences, 2 character sequences, and 3 character sequences. Topic does not really have anything to do with it. If I had more time I probably would've done a smarter model that accounted for things like that.
- gus_massa 4y agoOne is also a mathematician. It's trivial that we overuse some technical words even if it's unnecessary. Another is form Argentina, so I guess the native language leaks, for example using words derived from latin that are not idiomatic. And there are a few more, that is a honor to be "confused" with, but I have no clue why.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- chronogram 4y agoWell done, it found my ancient old account.
- jaredsohn 4y agoAmusingly can't run it on the author since not enough comments
- macintux 4y agoMy nearest match is only at 0.406. It'd be interesting to see who the most unique commenters are, but it's also quite possible it wouldn't be flattering.
- pubby 4y ago0.35 is my nearest. In hopes of lowering it even further, here are some nonsensical opinions never expressed on HN before: 1) Programming peaked with COBOL 2) Paul Graham is responsible for 90% of SIDS cases 3) There's no reason to use car when cdr exists.
- joisig 4y ago0.2506 is my nearest match
- costco 4y agoThat's the lowest I've seen yet. You must write uniquely :)
- xwolfi 4y agoWow... how !
- psychphysic 4y agoHmmm, doesn't seem to work. But you have convinced me (and many others?) to search our alts consecutively and so now do know who has alts?
- franze 4y agototally on spot my current and my old account
- samwillis 4y agoSticking myself in (I haven't ever had another account) my closest match (at 0.43) is the maintainer of an Open Source project which I have occasionally commented about. They are also British, as am I. My guess is that as they commonly mention the project and I have on a number of occasions, that has formed the link. Plus maybe usage of common British terms, but that seems far less significant. It's super interesting! It would be good if there were more controls to filter the type of words and language that are used for the matching algorithm. So you could say exclude words not in the dictionary. I wander how that would effect my link with this other person.
- notacoward 4y agoSeems pretty spot-on to me. I tried it with two accounts I was already certain were alts - based on other factors like favorite topics and common enemies as well as style/tone - and the top hits for both were the ones I would have expected.
- kiernanmcgowan 4y agoLove a little NLP project on a public dataset - thanks for sharing!
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- 4qz 4y agoThis is an evil website. We won’t have any anonymity soon. The highest match is my years old banned account that I forgot about. Where did you get the data from?
- faeriechangling 4y agoIt’s just statistics. I recall that during his whistleblowing, Snowden intentionally took anti-stylometry measures.
- woodruffw 4y agoHN has an Algolia-based API. It’s also very easy to crawl. I wouldn’t call this evil, however: it’s merely demonstrating a technique that you should be aware of, if you’re a privacy-conscious person. It looks like they also provide some resources for avoiding stylometric detection.
- nanidin 4y agoI would bet my bottom dollar that the likes of Reddit and Google already have models to turn a corpus of text into probable demographic data and models to measure the similarity of users.
- JadeNB 4y ago> This is an evil website. We won’t have any anonymity soon. The highest match is my years old banned account that I forgot about. Where did you get the data from? I'd way rather have someone tell me "look at all the things I can find out about you" so that I can act accordingly (whatever that means!) rather than what we've mostly actually got, which is companies silently exploiting my data and doing everything they can to mumble reassuring but legally ineffective formulas assuring me that they deeply respect my privacy.
- costco 4y agoHN Firebase API. I just wrote a program in C++ with libcurl to get https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/1.json https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/1.json, https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/2.json https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/2.json, https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/3.json https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/3.json, ...
- medellin 4y agoHow much writing do you need to analyze results? Would changing account every X sentences eliminate this?
- costco 4y agoCurrent minimum is 10000 characters. In my own tests accuracy was still pretty good at 3-5000 but I instituted the 10000 minimum to reduce false positives. Yes it would, if you read the advice page on avoiding detection that is one of the things I recommend. Unfortunately HN moderators do not really like that.
- Trouble_007 4y agoNice work! Thank you, of course I plugged in the obvious HN usernames Edit to add; Would be nice to have the https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=username https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=username links included.
- Trouble_007 4y agoAnd perhaps rounding to 3 or 4 decimal places?
- ed25519FUUU 4y agoVery cool! And really a shame that you’re not allowed to delete an old alt account or comments on HN! It follows you forever apparently.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- sillysaurusx 4y agoWow. This gives a lot of false positives, but it found all ~10 of my old accounts over the years. The most interesting thing is that my writing style changed pretty drastically since a decade ago. Searching for my oldest account matches my earliest usernames, whereas searching this account matched the rest. The details of the algorithm are fascinating: https://stylometry.net/about https://stylometry.net/about Mostly because of how simple it is. I assumed it would measure word embeddings against a trained ML model, but nothing so fancy.
- FormerBandmate 4y ago> sillysaurus3 > sillysaurus2 Tbf a human could have found a bunch of them relatively easily
- echelon 4y agoIt works like a charm for me too. I put in my username and found my pre-echelon alt, possibilistic. (Echelon was taken when I registered possibilistic, but it must have been unused and dropped.)
- costco 4y agoYeah top 20 is a little excessive because in my own tests I found that top 20 is only marginally more accurate than top 10. You can get a more academic explanation [here](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09296174.2011.533591?journalCode=njql20 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09296174.2011.53...). I was amazed too because it seemed too easy!
- sillysaurusx 4y agoFWIW, top 20 was necessary for mine. The bolding was a brilliant move. Several of my accounts were ranked 10-20, but popped out due to the bolding.
- justusthane 4y agoWhat does the bolding indicate?
- Semaphor 4y agoMy alt accounts (not really, all below 0.5) seem to also be European or German Firefox users. Good for us ;)
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y agoThis found an old account that I forgot I even had but with a lot of false positives. Neat!
- 00F_ 4y agoive had maybe a hundred throwaway accounts on HN over the past ten years. generally, i make an account, say something that is apparently wildly offensive to someone else, get flagged and down-voted and then muted or hell-banned. then i make another account because i never did anything wrong and start the process over again. ive emailed the admins, tried to reason with the admins, it never does any good. the power is held by power-users who flag people -- most of the power of an admin at the end of the day but without any of the accountability. as long as they are following the mainstream dogma, its all good. anyway, this app was able to identify a lot of my accounts. but a lot of the matches werent me. bold matches were almost all me. but i know there are many more matches than those that were listed. it mainly showed my most recent accounts. i think most people would get a sick feeling in their stomach if they tried this app. i dont think people are prepared for a world where you can type someones name into an app like this and produce everything ever recorded online that was created by that person. not only this but everything highlighted and summarized to answer any question about that person. this is what advanced ai will bring us. an information implosion where the planet-sized ocean of data that is just floating all around us suddenly and violently coalesces into the objects of our new societal calculus. violent is a good word. and this is just the change that one can see coming with ai.
- costco 4y agoYou are definitely right. Part of the reason I chose the 10,000 character minimum was so that people using throwaways in the true sense would be entirely excluded. I don't plan on keeping this up forever and I too would not feel comfortable if this was deployed at scale.
- ayewo 4y agoWould you be open to open sourcing the code when you decide to shutdown the service?
- stupendous_luck 4y agoYou really don't need advanced AI to do it. Just a bunch of scrapers and some run of the mill statistics. And guess what, it's been done by many companies already. They just don't care to create such a site.
- ruined 4y agodidn't find a single one of my alts. nice
- costco 4y agoI obviously don't expect you to help me but do they have at least >10000 characters written and are you varying your writing style in any way?
- CrypticShift 4y agoIngenious idea. At the very least, this is just about finding people who write like us, the same way we seek those with similar tastes (music...) How long before large commercial indexers start offering an efficient (AI based ?) stylometry to agencies and states ? wait... do you think the NSA is already doing this?
- A4ET8a8uTh0 4y agoThey would be silly not to ( apart from creepish profiling of an entire globe population you also get to potentially identify bots ). We all have mannerisms that can easily 'betray us' online. I honestly thought my writing style is more unique, but as it turns out it is somewhat common.
- CrypticShift 4y ago> I honestly thought my writing style is more unique You just showed another possible use case for this kind of tools: "How unique is my writing style ?"
- sitkack 4y agoIt isn't writing style, but more of phrase selection. If you lean on the same phrases (n-grams), then you will be very very close in a high dimensional space. Colloquialisms are the biggest tell, you should eschew them.
- woodruffw 4y agoStylometry is an old hat technique; you can assume that intelligence services around the globe regularly apply it. (Statistical stylometry is a little newer and more rigorous than manual stylometry, which essentially involved a human being's judgement call around the similarity of documents.)
- CrypticShift 4y agoWhat about "deep leaning" stylometry ?
- woodruffw 4y agoNeat work! Out of curiosity: do you filter sentences than begin with ‘>’, indicating a block quote from another user? That might improve the accuracy a little here, if you don’t already.
- costco 4y agoYep!
- robocat 4y agoPerhaps explain in the about what you filter out? Along with what the bolding means?! Do you filter out anything else (like spaced/indented/monospace text/code, or even quoted text, which is often not written by the user?). Super thanks for this - interesting!
- costco 4y agoTurns out that there may have been some glitches in the way I was filtering lines beginning with >. For explanation of bolding see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755466 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755466. I didn't attempt to filter anything else out though filtering out code would probably help a little bit.
- tomrod 4y agoIs it weird that my rating is very low compared to alternative options? I have no alts, but I'm curious how similar others might write to me.
- sillysaurusx 4y agoHa, gruseom shows up for pg, which is dang’s old account. A worthy successor. This is a fascinating way to find similar HN users who aren’t the same person. It’s a surprisingly great recommendation engine. “If you like pg, you might also like…” Sure, the privacy concerns are valid, but the cat’s out of the boot. Might as well enjoy the benefits. montrose is almost definitely pg. Someone who talks about ancient history, Occam’s razor, VCs and startups, uses the phrase “YC cos” (relatively uncommon), etc. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17112567 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17112567 Nicely done. One of the best hacks I’ve seen in a long time.
- costco 4y ago> motrose is almost definitely pg. Someone who talks about ancient history, Occam’s razor, VCs and startups, uses the phrase “YC cos” (relatively uncommon), etc. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17112567 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17112567 I had this hunch too. It's either pg or someone trying really hard to be pg.
- roughly 4y agoI mean, this is HN - > someone trying really hard to be pg describes half the site.
- asveikau 4y ago> Someone who talks about ancient history, Occam’s razor, VCs and startups, I think these are all common topics among HN readers and commenters.
- VyseofArcadia 4y ago> but the cat’s out of the boot It's my first time hearing that variant. Usually its, "the cat's out of the bag" where I'm from. Do you mean boot in the UK sense, what Americans would call the trunk of a car? Or do you mean a sturdy piece of footwear? Obligatory xkcd https://xkcd.com/2390/ https://xkcd.com/2390/
- 4y ago
- McDyver 4y agoWould this work for Fernando Pessoa and all his heteronyms? :)
- pugworthy 4y agoStrip leading/trailing white space from the name if it says no match.
- SnowHill9902 4y agoAnything like this for Reddit? Would translating to other language and back defend against this algorithm?
- costco 4y ago> Anything like this for Reddit? No but it would be easily adaptable especially given that Pushshift is archiving every Reddit comment. Based on some of the feedback I'm getting here I don't know if I should open source this even though it really wasn't that hard to make. > Would translating to other language and back defend against this algorithm? Yes. But then you have to send your original comment to a translation company so there are privacy concerns there too.
- EMIRELADERO 4y ago> Based on some of the feedback I'm getting here I don't know if I should open source this even though it really wasn't that hard to make. I'd say you should. I'd rather see this as being publicly and freely available to everyone rather than some shady "Big Tech" analytics company. If the "weapons" exist, I would feel more comfortable knowing everyone can access them, not just an elite that can use it for their own (selfish) purposes.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 4y agoI am genuinely torn, because my initial reaction was almost the exact opposite, but the comparison to a weapon does ring true. And there is indeed an argument to be made for level playing field. At the very least, maybe counter-measures can be developed.
- Terretta 4y agoPeople don't usually understand privacy risks till their own curtains fall down.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- wizofaus 4y agoWhat match level would you expect to see between two randomly chosen individuals?
- iHateStylo 4y agoThank you for this.. I thought I was being careful but evidently it's not enough. It found 13 of my previous accounts with the topmost being 0.4937 and lowest one being 0.3616 bold. All the bold ones were right, some correct matches weren’t bold.
- rmelhem 4y agonice one. are you using gpt3 under the hood?
- costco 4y agoI'm not that smart - my site is basically just doing some calculations on word frequencies. You can read https://academic.oup.com/dsh/article-abstract/17/3/267/929277 https://academic.oup.com/dsh/article-abstract/17/3/267/92927... and https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09296174.2011.533591?journalCode=njql20 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09296174.2011.53... and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755898 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755898 for more information.
- sillysaurusx 4y agoDon’t sell yourself short. Simplicity is smart. It’s astonishing how often the simplest thing turns out to be exponentially more effective than the so-called smart thing. I can’t get over how phenomenal this is. Please put every one of your side project ideas into production!
- isoprophlex 4y agoSimplicity is the greatest form of sophistication! Great work! One small nit from a user experience point of view..: it'd be easier on the eyes if you just truncated those cosine similarity scores (or whatever score you're using) after the, say, 5th digit. Showing the entire float is kinda messy to my eyes.
- rmelhem 4y agocool and thanks for the clarification. i ask that mainly because of the request limit of openai, which is something that makes many scalable ideas unfeasible
- Dma54rhs 4y agoIts easy to write complicated systems, it takes a genius to make it simple.
- dunham 4y ago
- andsoitis 4y agowe leave fingerprints everywhere
- nr2x 4y agoHoneypot to see what accounts are tested in sequence? ;-)
- costco 4y agoI turned off nginx logging if that makes you feel any better. Of course there's no way for you to verify that because I'm just a random guy on the internet but I will tell you that I am a civic minded citizen who is concerned about privacy and the Internet.
- nr2x 4y agoOnly half kidding, but I’d I were state Intel it’s what I’d be doing. :D
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- atum47 4y agoat what threshold is it considering alt account?
- costco 4y agoThere is no threshold. This site does not make any call as to whether a user is an alt or not. It just gives the users with the most similar word choice and from there it is up to you to decide (is there a very specific detail that both accounts mention, do they post at similar times, etc). I will say bolded accounts are substantially more likely to be alts though. But obviously it is not guaranteed that every user has an alt.
- zxcvbn4038 4y agoHow long until this becomes the algorithm for a dating site? “Find hot single women who write just like you”
- forgotpwd16 4y agoWouldn't be surprised if dating sites already used similar algorithms.
- bornfreddy 4y agoWouldn't be surprised if most of the women on a specific dating site had very high similarity scores.
- dysoco 4y agoDo dating sites really use clever algorithms to match up people together? I was under the impression that, the less likely you are to meet your perfect match, the more you're going to use the app. In my experience I don't see a relevant list of potential matches aside from gender and age preference, it's all completely random, even frequently I see people outside the settings I've specified (i.e. men or older women).
- nrp 4y agoThis seems like a great way to hire freelance copywriters/ghost writers too. I would absolutely hire someone I knew could match my tone well for writing generic unattributed copy.
- Komodai 4y ago
- jl6 4y agoRebrand it as a soulmate-finder?
- elteto 4y agoIncredible! There was a very active throwaway account here a while back that I always enjoyed interacting with. I suspected the person had more than one account and this found one that is incredibly close, down to the topics.
- jsnell 4y agoAfter a few tries on boring accounts, I thought to try the account of somebody who was notorious for an incident outside of HN, and had a (deservedly) bad time at HN for a couple of years before the account went dark. And yeah, there's a bunch of high confidence (.6-.8) hits for that account, and from a quick browse of the comments of the recently active ones, they look really likely to be alts. Like, all three that I looked at had comments that made it very clear it was this person writing pseudonymously. (E.g. writing on their signature issue, and saying they couldn't go into more detail due to fear of self-doxxing; or somebody literally saying that the alt's claims reminded them of the public writings of the notorious guy years ago). Obviously I'm not naming the account, but this functionality turned out way creepier than I thought the moment I tried it on the account of somebody who has a reason to disassociate from an existing public persona, but still wants to participate here.
- kcarter80 4y agoCould you elaborate on why it's obvious why you won't name the account?
- notduncansmith 4y agoMaybe to avoid attracting any extra attention to this user? Also, as someone who’s read HN for a few years, it only took me 2 guesses to find an account that the above comment describes (and not necessarily the same person).
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- sillysaurusx 4y agoIt was a classy move by jsnell, too. Thank you. (I don’t know who the comment is talking about, which is how it should be. There’s no need to blow someone’s cover in a highly visible way. Even if they were satan, they’d still be welcome on HN as long as they’re writing substantive, interesting comments that follow the guidelines.)
- gavinray 4y agoI've complained a lot about Haskell and now it thinks I like Haskell =( Needs sentiment analysis IMO, otherwise you'll get "Here's a bunch of people who are JUST LIKE YOU", except they use a similar grammar style but hold opposite opinions on the same nouns.
- ahmedalsudani 4y agoServes you right for disparaging The One True Language! Ok, fine, we'll present Idris with a fig leaf.
- layer8 4y agoIt just thinks you engage a lot with Haskell. These are people with who you have something to talk about. :)
- ggerganov 4y agoI really liked the informative and straight-to-the-point about page - describing how the algorithm works in a way that is easy to understand. All the important details are summarised there. Well done! Edit: From the "How to avoid .." page, there is the following sentence: > Also, most authorship identification algorithms have poor accuracy when working with small amounts of words. This means the optimal strategy would be discarding an account either after every comment or after a small number of comments. Unfortunately, this is against HN rules and may result in a ban. Can you clarify what this means and why it would result in a ban?
- costco 4y ago> Can you clarify what this means and why it would result in a ban? I have seen dang respond to users multiple times asking them to stop making new accounts especially but not always if it's to avoid rate limiting. I don't know if there's an official policy but it's definitely something I recall.
- krisoft 4y ago> Can you clarify what this means Imagine that for every new comment you want to post you would create a brand new account which you would use precisely once and never again. Then the stylometry would have just a few words and wouldn’t have enough corpus to get a reliable signature. If a lot of people does this it would be hard to figure out which account belongs with which human. ( Of course if you alone do this, your messages will stick out like a sore thumb. See xkcd 1105 ) > why it would result in a ban? Because this practice is especially discouraged in the guidelines: “please don't create accounts routinely. HN is a community—users should have an identity that others can relate to.”
- stupendous_luck 4y agoAt the same time, HN doesn't let you delete comments. Maybe with some GDPR magic.
- krisoft 4y ago
- mysterydip 4y agoI was curious to use this on myself to see if anyone writes like me. Closest was a .51 confidence, so I guess not?
- notduncansmith 4y agoThis has been a great way to find people whose commentary I enjoy!
- hgsgm 4y ago
- stephc_int13 4y agoWhat is the threshold to be reasonably confident that two accounts are from the same individual? I ever had only one account here and the closest match is at 0.47.
- jimhi 4y agoAmazing and I thought my doxxing tool was terrifying - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32278871 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32278871 I am afraid to combine all these methods
- lijogdfljk 4y agoYea.. i guess it's time to stop bothering with alt accounts/etc. I'll just make one account, maybe differently named on different services (makes scraping just a _pinch_ easier) but aside from that all i can do is modify/remove old posts. Bit of a shame for useful posts/discussions.. but the internet is getting really.. finger print laden.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- oliwary 4y agoCool! I wonder if it could be run backwards, to identify the users on hackernews with the most unique voices.
- karol 4y agoAre you going to try it on Twitter?
- msla 4y agoIt puts almost all of my old accounts decently near the top, but my original account is almost comically low.
- anpat 4y agoThis needs to exclude who’s hiring post because it confuses me with a few of my wonderful former colleagues!
- operator-name 4y agoWhat does the bold signify? For example when I search for dang (https://stylometry.net/user?username=dang https://stylometry.net/user?username=dang) the 4th most likely user is not bold whereas the 16th is?
- costco 4y agoSay you see user2 listed in bold on user1's page. That means that user1 is also in user2's top 20 users. In my experience it is often an indicator of a good match (but not always).
- operator-name 4y agoHuh, that's a somewhat non intuitive property.
- silasdavis 4y agoIt is a bit, but if stylometric equality was a thing you'd expect it to be symmetric, so if stylometric simmilarity is a thing....
- serhack_ 4y agoSee also: https://serhack.me/articles/unveiling-anonymous-author-stylometry-techniques/ https://serhack.me/articles/unveiling-anonymous-author-stylo...
- bscphil 4y agoThe scary thing is that once you have this data, finding HN matches for individual targeted users on other sites becomes trivial, even if those sites are harder to scrape. I bet most people here have an anonymous Reddit account, for example. If you wanted to know who was behind a particular Reddit account, you could feed it into something like this and compare the results with HN, where accounts are less likely to be anonymous. Or build a database based on blogs, Github comments, etc. Also, since this uses only word frequency, there are probably relatively easy improvements to make that would make it even more powerful, like looking at particular runs of words that are unique. Some expressions or figurative language only show up in combinations of words, and tend to be highly style specific.
- faeriechangling 4y agoThus proving the only actually anonymous community in practice is 4chan, and that’s why it’s so toxic.
- sbierwagen 4y agoIf you define “toxic” as “people disagreeing with you”, sure. That was what the entire internet was like until maybe 2005.
- ben_w 4y agoI'm old enough to remember when 4chan was self identifying as the Internet's hate machine, before xkcd referenced it as such: https://xkcd.com/591/ https://xkcd.com/591/ Sometimes people insist that's all role-play and irony; others insist that if it ever was, it certainly isn't now. But regardless, I remember pre-2005, and it wasn't all like what I saw the two times I looked at 4chan. Bits were. Bits were much worse. But mostly, mostly, people were kinder… at least, unless political tribalism came up.
- philosopher1234 4y ago“People disagreeing with you” describes almost none of the conversation on 4chan
- paulpauper 4y agoInserting random Unicode blank, 1/4, 1/2, or zero space characters into your writing may help thwart it too, if you are paranoid
- zimpenfish 4y agoWould thwart this tool, presumably, but not anything which considered spacing ("do they use double space after a sentence?") and punctuation, etc., as markers.
- UncleEntity 4y agoHuh, that’s how I signal my KGB handler…
- musicale 4y ago> I made this site mostly to show how easy this is and how it can erode online privacy looks like it can indeed > Here are some frequent HN commenters: (EDIT: Removed due to privacy concerns) How surprising that someone might object to being included in a demonstration of the erosion of privacy! Is the site opt-in or opt-out?
- Aachen 4y agoI doubt they asked 78k users for permission when there's no standardized way of reaching out if you're not a site admin. It's opt out if anything.
- bee_rider 4y agoYou opt into making your writing publicly available when making posts on this site. I’m not sure what Ycombinator’s user agreement* says about this, but it is pretty obvious that they haven’t done anything to prevent it (and it isn’t clear what they could do). * and I mean they author of the tool is here making posts, so I guess they have agreed to the TOS, but clearly someone who hasn’t agreed to it could also make this tool and scrape out publicly available posts without agreeing to anything.
- StrangeDoctor 4y agoHave you done any data analysis on distributions of similarity? How similar you'd expect any 2 people to be given English focused around tech? Or any other interesting stats you'd like to share? Very nice clean site, great work.
- rcarr 4y agoOne way to get around this legitimately would be by posting a lot of quotes/lyrics/excerpts and the like thus fooling the algorithm unless it had a way to filter them out
- kevmo314 4y agoThere's someone (michaelmior if you're around!) with a false positive 0.46 match to me. Maybe we could be friends :)
- bagels 4y agoNot sure if that is a false positive. It just lists the top 20 accounts ranked by similarity score. Under 0.8 or so is unlikely to be a 'positive'.
- drc500free 4y agoThis is a super interesting tool for self reflection. Looking at the top 10 similar accounts to mine, it gives me an arms-length view of how other people probably interpret my tone. I appear to be a well-educated, over-confident know-it-all.
- bhaney 4y ago> I appear to be a well-educated, over-confident know-it-all. Don't we all?
- sdwr 4y agoI hate us insufferable nerds. !
- seydor 4y agowe must be a good match
- drc500free 4y agoI'd love a version of this where you enter two usernames and get a match score.
- pavlov 4y agoMy #3 match is cstross, and now I’m convinced that my life-long secret dream of being a successful sci-fi novelist is basically a matter of typing. (Ideas? Character development? Ruthless editing? Developing an audience? Having a publisher? What do I need of those when the Computer told me I’m practically a genius…)
- shagie 4y agoI'd suggest giving the back story to Agent to the Stars by John Scalzi a glance. http://www.scalzi.com/agent/ http://www.scalzi.com/agent/ > In the summer of 1997, I was 28 years old, and I decided that after years of thinking about writing a novel, I was simply going to go ahead and write one. There were two motivations for doing so. First, I was simply curious if I could; I'd had up to that time a reasonably successful life as a writer, but I'd never written anything longer than ten pages in my life outside of a classroom setting. Two, my ten-year high school reunion was coming up, and I wanted to be able to say I'd finished a novel just in case anyone asked (they didn't, the bastards). > In sitting down to write the novel, I decided to make it easy on myself. I decided first that I wasn't going to try to write something near and dear to my heart, just a fun story. That way, if I screwed it up (which was a real possibility), it wasn't like I was screwing up the One Story That Mattered To Me. I decided also that the goal of writing the novel was the actual writing of it -- not the selling of it, which is usually the goal of a novelist. I didn't want to worry about whether it was good enough to sell; I just wanted to have the experience of writing a story over the length of a novel, and see what I thought about it. Not every writer is a novelist; I wanted to see if I was.
- rcarr 4y agoThis is somewhat similar to how they ended up catching the Unabomber. The FBI were literally at a dead end. They ended up posting one of his letters/manifestos in the paper, somebody recognised a turn of phrase the unabomber used that was unusual and reported it as possibly being their brother, FBI investigated the lead and it lead them straight to him. Excerpts from wiki: > Before the publication of Industrial Society and Its Future, Kaczynski's brother, David, was encouraged by his wife to follow up on suspicions that Ted was the Unabomber.[91] David was dismissive at first, but he took the likelihood more seriously after reading the manifesto a week after it was published in September 1995. He searched through old family papers and found letters dating to the 1970s that Ted had sent to newspapers to protest the abuses of technology using phrasing similar to that in the manifesto.[92] > In early 1996, an investigator working with Bisceglie contacted former FBI hostage negotiator and criminal profiler Clinton R. Van Zandt. Bisceglie asked him to compare the manifesto to typewritten copies of handwritten letters David had received from his brother. Van Zandt's initial analysis determined that there was better than a 60 percent chance that the same person had written the manifesto, which had been in public circulation for half a year. Van Zandt's second analytical team determined a higher likelihood. He recommended Bisceglie's client contact the FBI immediately.[96] > In February 1996, Bisceglie gave a copy of the 1971 essay written by Ted Kaczynski to Molly Flynn at the FBI.[87] She forwarded the essay to the San Francisco-based task force. FBI profiler James R. Fitzgerald[98][99] recognized similarities in the writings using linguistic analysis and determined that the author of the essays and the manifesto was almost certainly the same person. Combined with facts gleaned from the bombings and Kaczynski's life, the analysis provided the basis for an affidavit signed by Terry Turchie, the head of the entire investigation, in support of the application for a search warrant.[87] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kaczynski https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kaczynski
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- culi 4y agoSimilar to how they make adversarial fashion[0][1] in order to not be tracked by face id AI, I wonder if we can make adversarial stylometry tools to run your comments through in order to anonymize it .. [0] https://hackaday.com/2022/10/20/render-yourself-invisible-to-ai-with-this-adversarial-sweater-of-doom/ https://hackaday.com/2022/10/20/render-yourself-invisible-to... .. [1] https://adversarialfashion.com/ https://adversarialfashion.com/
- carewell 4y agoOP links to a paraphrasing tool on their website.
- robertlagrant 4y agoClicking on my top match (0.61) - I can see the similarity. I also note they quote the same way, with a > symbol. I wonder if that helps!
- birdyrooster 4y ago
- phnofive 4y agoIf you want to ask HN to remove your data, send a message to hn@ycombinator.com.
- CharlesW 4y agoNot to diminish one bit how you're feeling, but the bright side is: Today you know this is easily done (information you didn't have yesterday), that the creator had no intention of "outing" you specifically, and that you can take steps to obfuscate this specific aspect of your posts that connects your public alts.
- sdwr 4y ago
- wizzwizz4 4y agoYes, sadly. In this case, it'd be an arsehole move, but good point.
- nwiswell 4y agoI don't have an alt but it would be cool to meet my stylometry-neighbors. I'm curious whether the writing similarity translates to oral communication too
- dibt 4y agoSince it looks for similar word usage, false positives seem to appear more often when specific topics are talked about, like stocks or crypto. Does this ignore stop words? Or do all words have the same weighting? I wonder if only focusing on stop words would give a more accurate measure. Maybe we are more comfortable with certain stop words more than others? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_words https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_words "Stop words are the words in a stop list (or stoplist or negative dictionary) which are filtered out (i.e. stopped) before or after processing of natural language data (text) because they are insignificant."
- costco 4y agoAll words have the same weighting. I don't ignore stop words, in fact most of the ngrams I use are compromised almost entirely of stop words. Maybe it'd be more effective if I ignored them.
- AtlasBarfed 4y agoWhat's a high correlation number?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- timeon 4y agoI had hard time to understand some comments made by my closest match. I guess this is good reality check. I need to learn how to write more legible posts now.
- FartyMcFarter 4y agoSorry, what did you mean? :P
- bhaney 4y agoWell now I'm self conscious about my closest match being an 0.34 when so many other people are reporting much closer matches with accounts that aren't alts. Do I write weirdly?
- spapas82 4y agoSame for me, the closest match is 0.36. But I expected that because I don't speak english very well so the pool of candidates is small.
- klohto 4y ago0.36 here! Out of curiosity, are you a native speaker?
- CobaltFire 4y agoMy closest is 0.40, so I’m right there with you. Native English speaker as well.
- nephanth 4y ago.31 here! I'm a non-native speaker tho, so it wouldn't surprise me if I had weird speaking habits
- SkyMarshal 4y agoOddly, I am not an exact match to myself. > Most likely candidates: skymarshal: 0.9999999999999997 The other few usernames I tested (pg, dang, some random ones from this thread) all matched themselves at 1.0.
- lettergram 4y agoDid something similar in 2018 (still running locally) which could damask anyone https://twitter.com/austingwalters/status/1041894765439201281 https://twitter.com/austingwalters/status/104189476543920128... Made both Metacortex.me and insideropinion.com The idea being you don’t actually need an active directory. It would drop in, figure out all the users (provided one account was on the AD) and would monitor everyone’s skill sets, morale, schedule, etc. Worked super well for what it was / is.
- Wistar 4y agoI have only ever had a single account but it returned 19 possibles with no confidence above .54 but 11 bolded. My own account was listed at the top with a confidence of .9999.
- Macha 4y agoYeah, I have a bunch of bolded mutuals but none above 0.45. I think I have had one or two alts in the past, but probably they didn't make the 10000 word threshold for inclusion (nor can I remember their names to check if they work in inverse).
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- dibt 4y agoThis doesn't seem to include text from submissions. I ran it on Brian Armstrong's temp account from here, and it said it didn't write 10,000 characters: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3754664 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3754664 EDIT: Or maybe it's something else because Brian only wrote less than 6k characters. But then why can my account be looked up? Also, I would guess quoted replies are included, which muddies the analysis. Seems to be a very naive implementation. Much more can be done, but this was probably just a quick project.
- costco 4y agoQuoted replies shouldn't be included unless there's a bug on my end. Submission text is not included though I probably should have.
- harryvederci 4y agoMy runner-up has a rating of 0.42378790667730715 C'mon guys, work harder. That's not even close! :-D Btw, I myself am only at 0.9999999999999999 so I guess I need to work harder at being myself.
- throwaway5434q 4y agoWow. This is insane, it found my old accounts. So throwaway obviously (because I'm a bit of an asshole) but this really is amazing. It also highlighted another account that's not me, but looking through their comments i don't see any resemblance to me either.
- godisdad 4y agoCan we find Satoshi with this?
- drpancake 4y agoA few people have tried that e.g. https://web.stanford.edu/class/archive/cs/cs224n/cs224n.1184/reports/6858026.pdf https://web.stanford.edu/class/archive/cs/cs224n/cs224n.1184...
- thisisnotapipe 4y ago[dead]
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- pkos98 4y agoSorry dang, aka sctb: https://stylometry.net/user?username=dang https://stylometry.net/user?username=dang
- Macha 4y agoIn this particular case, it seems to be picking up the stock moderation responses as it looks like sctb was a moderator account until 2019.
- Ros2 4y agoI interviewed years ago with someone who let me know that they use a pseudonym as an employee and their chosen name even got posted as the author for articles they wrote for the company. They were very concerned about their privacy. I know their blog, which is their HN username, and this tool found their other account. Perhaps ironically, this person stood out a lot because of this and I didn't forget them.
- davebillyhock 4y agoThis found an alt that I created specifically to see if I could write artificially to defeat this kind of analysis. I have seen other tools like it posted to HN, but none before had found that account. I guess I need to up my game.
- CharlesW 4y agoIf you don't mind sharing, are you "writing artificially" purely in your head, or are you using techniques like intermediate translations?
- davebillyhock 4y agoNo mechanical means, but I have referred to a thesaurus occasionally. Mostly I tried to change my sentence structure, not just words. It requires actually thinking differently, in a way. Which makes it difficult to know how well I'm communicating.
- crtified 4y agoI imagine this would be quite difficult in practise, due to all the subliminal factors behind a person's writing choices. For example, as somewhat illustrated here, your personal vocabulary is a kind of fingerprint. As you mention, using a thesaurus can somewhat alleviate that, but if a thesaurus is only changing a small % of your words, then it will only have a suitably small % effect upon analysis. To go yet further might (I suspect!) entail methods such as directly lifting and using other people's sentences to convey your own thoughts. But even then, "your own thought patterns" are still informing the manner of the post, to some extent, so over time increasingly robust analysis may still find patterns to hook into.
- neodypsis 4y agoI wonder if someone will come up with a Grammarly-like tool which you can feed with sample writings to help you increase/lower the similarity score of a new text you are writing.
- DenisM 4y agoHow about this for countermeasure: As you're typing out a comment the software gives you a list of accounts you're becoming similar to. That way you can adjust your writing as you type.
- bornfreddy 4y agoSounds great, except there are many different similarity measures. Which one does the algorithm use?
- wizzwizz4 4y agoWhy not all of them? Which metrics are closer would tell you which aspects of your writing you need to focus on.
- kaba0 4y agoSomeone linked it in the thread: https://github.com/psal/anonymouth https://github.com/psal/anonymouth
- pessimizer 4y agoForget countermeasures, go covert. Write a comment, have the comment be rewritten before submission in order to resemble a targeted account.
- Bhurn00985 4y agoJust a heads up that for everyone who doesn't like to link their alt accounts, maybe not use this tool to see if it works. Unless the author would run this against all HN user accounts, no need to flag the ones "of interest".
- throwboi123 4y agoThat’s why I always use throwaway :) everywhere. Reddit. HN. Twitter. Everywhere. I’ll spam every site with my throwaways. Long live throwaways.
- kaba0 4y agoThat’s the point of this post, that you are not safe by throwaways at all, because all of your throwaways can be linked together purely by your textual style.
- SpelingBeeChamp 4y agoNo they can’t. If you only have a small amount of text to work with, stylometry is unreliable.
- dsr_ 4y agoI like the way some usernames are only 0.9999999 correlated with themselves. Perhaps 6 or 7 digits is enough?
- jll29 4y agoThe method used, i.e. to calculate the cosine of the two authors' word vectors, is poorly suited for stylometric analysis because it is based on a poster's lexicon and the word frequencies of each word, but ignoring stylistically relevant factors like word order. Also, the cosine of the vectors of word frequencies conflates author-specific vocabulary and topics; in other words, my account is grouped (with >51% similarity, according to the demo) with someone probably because we wrote about similar things. A strong stylometric matcher ought to be robust against topic shifts (our personal writing style is what stays constant when we move from writing about one topic to writing about another topic, just like our personality is what stays constant about our behavior over time - of course styles do change, but the premise then has to be that such changes happen very slowly). Stylometrics/authorship identification is interesting and has led to some surprising findings, e.g. in forensic linguistics (Malcolm Coulthard wrote several good books about the topic). This paper lists some other features that could be used and compares a bunch of techniques: https://research.ijcaonline.org/volume86/number12/pxc3893384.pdf https://research.ijcaonline.org/volume86/number12/pxc3893384...
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- MikePlacid 4y ago> based on a poster's lexicon and the word frequencies of each word, but ignoring stylistically relevant factors like word order. Interesting. I was expecting to be grouped with other Russian speakers and I am (based on some nicknames). But I thought the most telling feature will be exactly word order - it’s absolutely relaxed in Russian. Word frequencies? Well, probably the absence of articles, lol (but I swear to God that I often spend some extra time trying to insert as many articles in my texts as I could).
- implements 4y agoThere’s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiolect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiolect : ”Language consists of sentence constructs, choice of words, and expression of style. Accordingly, an idiolect is an individual's personal use of these facets. Every person has a unique idiolect influenced by their language, socioeconomic status, and geographical location.”
- rand_user_100 4y agoOn one hand, thank you for showing us all how easy it is to make something like this. No doubt organizations with more resources already have more sophisticated systems in the same vein. On the other hand, can we agree that this product is unethical? In many cases, when a person uses an alt, it is a direct and strong signal that they do not wish their other posts to be associated. So this product is circumventing the explicit will of the person, and making it available to anyone with zero effort i.e. there is no barrier to getting this info. I met someone about 10 years ago who said they built this at a university. And their argument also was "actually this enhances privacy because it lets you know something something something". And yet their research grants were coming from one source only. It can be used for good, but most often it won't.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago<< On the other hand, can we agree that this product is unethical? It does create a high level of discomfort, because it illustrates well what privacy advocates try talking about to the population at large, but all that said.. how is it any different from regular scraping and analyzing it any other way? This is a real question.
- rand_user_100 4y agoIt's different because you're removing all barriers to access and making it easy and convenient to stalk/dox people. Imagine you get the urge to track someone, but in order to do that you have to spend a week writing some new software. That's a barrier. And because of it you may change your mind because it's a lot of work with little payoff. But if that info is just one click away, it's a whole different ballgame.
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- dragonwriter 4y ago> On the other hand, can we agree that this product is unethical? No.
- seydor 4y agoWell the only solution is too have too many alts so that nobody can believe you can possibly have that many
- dsr_ 4y agoThis is interesting. I'm 0.566 correlated with logfromblammo -- and while we are definitely not the same person, I could easily imagine writing a sentence such as: "For some bizarre reason, management has not yet assigned a task to their programmer underlings to automated themselves out of existence. I can't imagine why." which is theirs, not mine, from about a year ago. I like that. On the other hand, I'm nearly as correlated with peterwwillis: 0.5485 -- who has no comments and no submissions.
- costco 4y ago> On the other hand, I'm nearly as correlated with peterwwillis: 0.5485 -- who has no comments and no submissions. This is due to the Firebase API not updating when users ask the admins to move their comments to another account.
- matsemann 4y agoYeah, I got a good match with my previous nick here. Which to me proves the tool works well.
- lifeisstillgood 4y agoI had a similar experience finding my most likely alt (.50 suggesting I am a unique snowflake as I have always thought :-), my most likely alt is writing certainly in a style I appreciate and on subjects I often mention.
- ThrowawayTestr 4y agoHaha, you got me and my main account. That's spooky.
- Retr0id 4y agoIt didn't find my alt, but the second match is one of my twitter mutuals - I wonder if we've inadvertently borrowed style quirks from each other.
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- jefftk 4y agoTried my account thinking "I don't have any alts" but it turns out I do! In 2018 I changed my username from "cbr" to "jefftk" and it pulled that right up: https://stylometry.net/user?username=jefftk https://stylometry.net/user?username=jefftk
- seydor 4y agodoes it use the most used words or least used?
- yyt554 4y agoFun exercise would be to find all accounts that suddenly stopped posting around today and correllate them with new accounts created around today. All those scared folks who naively think that it's not too late yet. Busted.
- thr0v_awway 4y agowriting from throwaway: Holy shit, it works really, really good. It found all of my older accounts.
- F_r_k 4y agoFound my phone account; I'm quite impressed, really !
- soneca 4y agoI have two accounts. This one, “soneca”, that is my first one and most active by far, and another one that I use sometimes mostly for Show HN and few comments. When I searched the other one, “soneca” was the first guess, with 0.4. But when I searched “soneca”, the other one was not in the top 20.
- moneywoes 4y agoWhat algorithm is being used?
- interroboink 4y agoIt's described here: https://stylometry.net/about https://stylometry.net/about
- lifeisstillgood 4y agoHow much should we fear de-anonymisation ? A lot of discussion on the thread are over "how can we prevent this". I would like to know why should we not embrace this and similar technologies? The benefits in my view are large - online behaviour tracks back to real life - and epidemiology speaking the value of millions of test subjects across every question are invaluable - from traditional medicine to "mass psychology recommendations" I can guess some downsides (hiding from abusive exes) but am interested in studies, surveys, reports etc - any HN thoughts welcome
- rejectfinite 4y ago>online behaviour tracks back to real life This is good to you? Okay, let's just make it like China or SK where your login is your citizen ID and if you write bad things the bad word police will take you away. Also, no, I have no alts.
- lifeisstillgood 4y agoSo I am asking because my views are only challenged inside my own head, hence the need for external thoughts. But firstly the "governments will come and do bad things" argument - yes this is clearly and obviously a major problem - but not one solvable by technology in anyway. Fixing violent dictatorships is a IRL problem - one that requires enormous effort and sacrifices (see Ukraine for obvious example). We cannot pretend that a browser extension or a ground up rewrite of Twitter will defeat Putin or would have stopped Hitler. As for "free" countries (something like 120+ have open free elections), we still have online abuse for voicing opinions that some people don't like (anything from pro/anti Trump to LGBT and bitcoin etc). Those are real consequences but rarely government inspired and honestly I suspect we need better support for police in prosecuting such things - I mean a death threat is a death threat. In general my view seems to be we should have the same protections online as we do offline - and if those protections are "in theory only" that requires us to use our voting and other political power to chnage it - not to obfuscate IP addresses or so on. The upside of tech is so great it is worth spending IRL to defend agains the downsides
- 4y ago
- weinzierl 4y agoI played a little bit with it and it is baffling how well it finds accounts of people that know each other in real life. So it's not only good for finding alternate accounts but could be used to find peer groups.
- sitkack 4y agoInteresting, they are trading phrase-grams (just made that up) or lingo. That is really cool.
- Fnoord 4y agoCool stuff, thank you for sharing your findings! I don't do throwaway. I either post or STFU. I also STFU on darknet. Its why I found it fun to read/lurk on things like I2P back when it was new. And I know that on a pseudonymous account it is only a matter of time until it can be linked to another pseudonymous account. It would not surprise me if stylometry was used on Dread Pirate Roberts or the people behind The Pirate Bay or the people behind Wikileaks (Assange's sockpuppet accounts). Such can also have been used to verify afterwards instead of beforehand. Though with TPB since it was on clearweb an advanced adversary could have used correlation/timing attack to figure who wrote what. I'm having fun times recognizing other Dutch people though their usage of English language. For example, a distinctive word I see Dutch people use a lot is 'oke' instead of 'OK' or 'okay'. Its a red flag the person is native Dutch. I wonder if there are stylometry tools available for figuring if someone used physical vs touchscreen keyboard (I used Glider to write this post, spellchecker unavailable). And yes, organizations like secret service and police should use such tools as well. It is a known tool, why not use it for good? As with any tool, it can be used for good and evil. On HN this could be useful for the mod team (AFAIK nowadays only dang) to find banned people's sockpuppets. Cross-community could also be a fun project: find a HN user's Twitter or Reddit account. And I hope this method is also used to find Russian trolls on social media.
- ghaff 4y agoMost people greatly underestimate the power of linkage attacks on anonymity. And it doesn't even take fancy ML. In the context of healthcare records, I like to trot out this 25 year old example of an MIT grad student and the then-governor of MA. https://ischoolonline.berkeley.edu/blog/anonymous-data/ https://ischoolonline.berkeley.edu/blog/anonymous-data/
- aryc19 4y agoSo what are some good tools to obfuscate style?
- DrStrangeLoop 4y agoI tried dang's old account (gruseom) expecting to see his dang account listed. Nothing. Tried dang, sctb (a previous admin) was listed as closest match. I wouldn't rely on these results https://stylometry.net/user?username=gruseom https://stylometry.net/user?username=gruseom https://stylometry.net/user?username=dang https://stylometry.net/user?username=dang
- pvg 4y agoI wouldn't rely on these results You picked a user who posts a massive volume of repeat, template-y comments and found their former colleague who also posted piles of repeat, template-y comments, that being part of both of their jobs.
- DrStrangeLoop 4y agoThere are a few close matches to dang's style of template-y comments in the results. Afaik none of the listed accounts are Daniel. I picked dang as he is the figurehead of hn, and didn't want to inadvertently reveal some other user's identity.
- dragonwriter 4y ago> There are a few close matches to dang's style of template-y comments in the results. At least the #1 close match (sctb) was a comoderator with dang, so they were kind of alts as the official voice of HN.
- oblib 4y agoI've only had one account here. The highest match has a 0.624 score and the lowest a 0.572. I'm not sure if that means I'm unique or common but I'd like to know.
- WalterBright 4y agoOver in the D language forums, we welcome people who post under a pseudonym, and our policy is we won't allow attempts to unmask them. This is to protect high profile users who are secretly enjoying programming in D rather than the language they are supposed to use. And, of course, to protect users who feel they might be discriminated against if their background was known.
- bo1024 4y agoIt's very important for those people to be aware of these style analysis attacks! Glad this post is raising awareness.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- WaitWaitWha 4y agoI checked a few random user names and I am confused. - Why is the author costco[0] not in this lookup? [0]: https://stylometry.net/user?username=costco https://stylometry.net/user?username=costco
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Aachen 4y ago- Their first comment and submission were 4 hours ago. - The text on that page is accurate it seems.
- iambateman 4y agoThis is cool! If an account returns a high score for many accounts, does that also mean they’re relatively less original in style?
- thot_experiment 4y agoMaybe this is a good tool to find new friends. :P
- Lichtso 4y agoI wonder how much this can be improved if metadata is taken into account as well. Especially the distribution of common post dates and times modulo a week, which also exposes in which timezone somebody probably lives.
- jallasprit 4y agoMost likely candidates: pg: 1.0 montrose: 0.604073065373204 mattmaroon: 0.5900372458160795 natsu: 0.5519832271289953 rauljara: 0.5418566694533273 waterlesscloud: 0.5378996309342633 damoncali: 0.5292014150349463 gruseom: 0.5290151637991445 kemiller2002: 0.5254174524920762 jfengel: 0.5231938496089998 jamesaguilar: 0.5229081613163672 houseabsolute: 0.5219738531025365 danssig: 0.5195368367601849 austenallred: 0.519343009683366 loewenskind: 0.5177030083877397 baguasquirrel: 0.5153841099708854 asdfasgasdgasdg: 0.5146704002447524 aptwebapps: 0.5144149629369845 allenbrunson: 0.512802806408646 danielweber: 0.5123620795710832
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- throwawayhghcj 4y agoI’d like to request the author takes this offline please until the implications can be thought through. This is breaking anonymity that people incorrectly thought would not be revealed. For some it might be awkward, others it might be quite problematic.
- s3000 4y agoThis is nothing new, e.g: Analyzing stylistic similarity amongst authors https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10050603 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10050603 http://markallenthornton.com/blog/stylistic-similarity/ http://markallenthornton.com/blog/stylistic-similarity/ 37 points by lingben on Aug 12, 2015
- kaba0 4y agoI would agree with you but the genie is out of the bottle already. Nigh everyone can and could have reproduced these results, especially that archive.org and similar things exist. So, I don’t think it causes any new harm, if anything it gives you future risk aversion.
- IAmGraydon 4y agoThis is not complex and is a well known method that state actors have been using for quite a long time. Governments have FAR more advanced ways to track you than this, but it's good for people to realize it exists.
- silasdavis 4y agoThe top hit for me, though not a very high correlation (0.3 ish), is to my surprise someone I have met. I don't appear on their top 20 though.
- silasdavis 4y ago> imagine what a company with millions of dollars and a couple dozen PhD linguists could do. Could they do much better?
- setr 4y agoForget the alternate accounts — if two users are close in style, there’s a decent chance they should be friends. This is an HN friendship machine.
- interroboink 4y agoThis is one reason why I like legal doctrines such as "beyond a reasonable doubt." Even a 0.9 match in a tool like this could be a coincidence, if there are millions of users. But that won't stop people from casually believing "aha it must be an alt account", based on some anecdata. It's so easy for something like this to be turned into a tool for a witch hunt, targeting innocents.
- costco 4y agoBut a 0.8 or 0.9 match and something like Tor usage could be enough to justify a warrant. That's why I'm not sure I want to open source the code because I don't want to normalize this.
- yyt554 4y agoKeep in mind the potential to create false accusations by fabricating similar looking accounts.
- joxel 4y agoColinWright is Dang? Woah
- agumonkey 4y agoOh god, that thing starts with direct focus on the search field, opening it showed a bunch of old nicknames, I thought it was the result of some study.
- joshstrange 4y agoVery interesting, .59 is my lowest, .64 is my highest match, none of these accounts are one of my alts. Though to be fair the handful of times I've used a throwaway I used it for a single comment so I didn't give it much to go off.
- scotty79 4y agoFunny thing would be to find most unique user account stylistically. Which user has lowest best match? Mine is 0.58 so I'm really not that unique.
- zimpenfish 4y agoFractionally more unique with a best match of 0.547.
- SevenNation 4y ago> ... This site works primarily by analyzing for each user the frequencies of the most common words and phrases in the English language. Accordingly, the easiest way to avoid being identified is to simply use different words than you ordinarily would when writing. More sophisticated models than the one I made can use punctuation, comma usage, and capitalization to identify you so try alternating those as well. Services like Quillbot can help with you this but depending on your circmstances you may not want to send your writings to a third party service. HN offers many other threads which could be tied together, including: - time of posting - ratio of replies to top-level comments - comments being mainly upvoted or downvoted - sentiment (mostly angry, dismissive, questioning, etc.) - most common topics (keyword analysis of post being replied to) - ratio of new posting to post replies - first-to-comment on a post - lone comment on a post - etc... It seems very likely that sooner or later every pseudonym for posting content will get discovered and linked. The lesson here is don't post anything that would cause you undue shame or harm if linked directly to your legal name.
- lostmyacctoops 4y agoI'd be very curious to know if these algorithms can link very different types of text. I'm not surprised that my style is "derivable" on HN, but what if you included my slash-fic pieces, my research papers, etc, would it still "catch" me? Also, talk about a chilling effect. I was already vaguely aware of this, and now I'm overthinking every word I'm thinking/typing.
- jonnycomputer 4y agoI'm gathering that they just took a bag-of-words approach to this; basically comparing word frequencies. Writing across content types (fiction vs technical writing for example) will probably show different word frequencies, especially technical jargon, and so on. More sophisticated approaches are possible. And yes, potentially very chilling. If you want to post truly anonymously, you might want to run your words through some kind of filter first.
- uberduper 4y agoI would have expected to be a closer match to myself. > uberduper: 0.9999999999999991
- afarviral 4y agoIm tempted to use it to find likeminded friends :)
- CobaltFire 4y agoInteresting; I must have a fairly unique style as there are no matches over 0.40 for me. I’m a native English speaker as well, so I’m unsure how to feel about that.
- schappim 4y agoInteresting that the Op doesn't come up in the search: https://stylometry.net/user?username=costco https://stylometry.net/user?username=costco
- Aachen 4y agoTheir first comment and submission were 4 hours ago. Text on the page is accurate it seems.
- Beltalowda 4y agoNot surprising considering the account had no activity before today.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- spaniard89277 4y agoI changed my nickname so my employer can't find me here. I'm not amused by this.
- sedatk 4y agoI have no alternate accounts, and all my matches are below 0.4 for whatever it’s worth.
- jonnycomputer 4y agoObviously the next thing to do is make this a popup on someone's account name when you hover over it.
- elorant 4y agoSounds like a nice tool to find friends. You locate people who might think like you.
- jonnycomputer 4y agoWell, one of the closest on my list is my twin, so there's that.
- alpacabag 4y ago
- ChrisMarshallNY 4y agoInteresting, but it gave me 20 accounts, and I know that I only have this one.
- costco 4y agoSorry for any misunderstanding, read https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33756725 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33756725
- zem 4y agoheh, I looked up the top bold hit for my name and they really do sound a bit like me (:
- antirez 4y agowriting "antirez" shows accounts with spanish names (none is mine). I guess Italian and Spanish speakers write very similarly English, but on HN there are a lot more Spanish speakers than Italian ones so that's what I get.
- costco 4y agoIt seems the accuracy for nonnative speakers is not nearly as good as it is for native speakers. The algorithm could definitely use some work.
- neodypsis 4y agoHow do you protect yourself from impersonators?
- Arathorn 4y agoIt found my old account (ara4n; i lost the password) at 0.63. More amusingly it found my cofounder too, who hardly ever posts here (at 0.48)
- kfichter 4y agoDoes anyone here have a reasonably wide variety of similarity ratings? I'd love to see the difference between a 0.2 and a 0.8 for the same account.
- balls187 4y agoNo alt, and the highest match is 0.36 And that accounts last several comments were flagged as dead. I'm a native speaker, but my english succcccks.
- RepAgent 4y agoWhat's up with cluster of users like: j_s,password4321,carolinew,colinwright,kuharich etc. https://stylometry.net/user?username=j_s https://stylometry.net/user?username=j_s https://stylometry.net/user?username=carolinew https://stylometry.net/user?username=carolinew https://stylometry.net/user?username=colinwright https://stylometry.net/user?username=colinwright https://stylometry.net/user?username=password4321 https://stylometry.net/user?username=password4321 Lowest match for j_s is 0.80 and all but one is black.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- notduncansmith 4y agoOn a cursory glance it looks like a cluster of users that post links, especially with italicized quoted excerpts.
- super256 4y agoAhhh, anyone remembers this hacking crew who leaked BLUEETERNAL and other NSA tools and exploits? Shadowbrokers. They were always communicating in some kind of meme-russian, and their texts were funny to read. [1] I believe their writing mostly defeated this kind of analysis, at the cost of looking like idiots (which was probably the reason no one sent them crypto-dollars to buy that stuff exclusively). Here's an excerpt: "Attention government sponsors of cyber warfare and those who profit from it !!!! How much you pay for enemies cyber weapons? Not malware you find in networks. Both sides, RAT + LP, full state sponsor tool set? We find cyber weapons made by creators of stuxnet, duqu, flame. Kaspersky calls Equation Group. We follow Equation Group traffic. We find Equation Group source range. We hack Equation Group. We find many many Equation Group cyber weapons. You see pictures. We give you some Equation Group files free, you see. This is good proof no? You enjoy!!! You break many things. You find many intrusions. You write many words. But not all, we are auction the best files." [1] https://archive.ph/20160815133924/http://pastebin.com/NDTU5kJQ#selection-623.4-640.0 https://archive.ph/20160815133924/http://pastebin.com/NDTU5k...
- super256 4y ago*EternalBlue
- canadiantim 4y agoWow... that's shockingly effective
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- chriskanan 4y agoI have no alternative accounts besides making a single throwaway account to post one "Ask HN" five years ago, but I have a decent number of matches above 0.5. I think this is due to the relatively uniform style of "who is hiring posts," since my matches did that in a similar way for other companies. I made many of those for about two years when I was at a start-up.
- andreareina 4y agoTrailing (and probably leading, didn't check) spaces confuse the user lookup.
- account-5 4y agoI wasn't aware this was even a thing! Scary stuff. 2 alts are listed but not with any great accuracy, so easy to dismiss. What an interesting topic.
- serf 4y agoI have no alts, but to those of you compared to me by this engine : "Hey, good lookin'!"
- MikePlacid 4y ago1. Interesting. I was kinda expecting to be grouped with other Russian speakers, and I am (based on some nicknames). Probably the frequencies of “the” and “a” are telling. But I swear to God that I sometimes spend some extra time trying to insert as much “the” and “a” in my texts as I could. 2. There is a Russian mnemonic verse, which can’t be properly translated to English, at least it’s beyond my humble capabilities. It goes: “Это я знаю и помню прекрасно: Пи многие знаки мне лишни, напрасны” The number of letters in the words give you the pi number: 3,1415… The meaning is: “I know and remember perfectly: too many signs (positions) of pi are useless and impractical”. Sometimes it’s nice to remember both things.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- dlkf 4y agoThe top hit on my list looked familiar. I looked at their recent comments and saw a discussion between that user and me. We were quoting eachother directly throughout. I wonder if this explains our similarity. And if so, could we tweak the algo by e.g. Removing text that is prepended with ”>”
- t0bia_s 4y agoPossibility to hide user comments in profile should be optional.
- el_dev_hell 4y agoThis is super impressive! Is there a common open source library (Python, JS, whatever) that implements something like this?
- ThrowSet 4y agoI find this tool to be disturbing. It is reality so I accept it. But I'm going to make effort to change my style between accounts. A question for the author (costco): You created that account in 2019 but you didn't post or submit a single thing until 4 hours ago. Why did you create an account almost 3 years ago for no purpose?
- user- 4y agoNow do one for reddit
- scarface74 4y agoIt found my “alternate” account. If someone puts my username in, it’s not hard to figure out which alternate is mine.
- vxNsr 4y agowow, this is way off on me, didn't find my alts and the bolded accounts on my list are from different countries, use language I'd never use (cusses) and I see I've downvoted some of them... I'd love to have the experience and or apparent wealth my "alts" have
- mygentys 4y agoAnd this is why I’m a reader and not a poster on HN :) The second that I found out that requesting deletion of an account and its posts needed a MANUAL request to a single user (dang) I noped out so fast But happy that the rest of you are still happy to contribute :)
- SanjayMehta 4y agoThis is great. One funny thing though, while your example says 1.0, for my own account it says 0.99lotsof9s4
- theGnuMe 4y agoThis could be a good idea for identifying bots.
- costco 4y agoNot sure if GPT3 at least if prompted right would have clearly identifiable style. Could probably detect converted call centers in Russia or Cambodia where 50 employees post on 10000 accounts though.
- spdustin 4y agoHave you tried including parts of speech (for example, as bigrams and trigrams) as part of the features considered in your model? I’ve had great success with stylometry that goes beyond TF-IDF with bags of words; including grammar patterns was shockingly good. (FWIW, it didn’t find my throwaways; my own model didn’t, either, because I knew that word choice wasn’t enough to avoid being outed by stylometry) Edit: by bigrams and trigrams, I mean reducing word to their parts of speech labels and using THOSE as word tokens. You’ll find that native English speakers have higher weights on some phrase construction patterns than, say, folks from Romania. TF-IDF is useful for these POS-grams (just made that word up) as well.
- costco 4y ago> Edit: by bigrams and trigrams, I mean reducing word to their parts of speech labels and using THOSE as word tokens. You’ll find that native English speakers have higher weights on some phrase construction patterns than, say, folks from Romania. TF-IDF is useful for these POS-grams (just made that word up) as well. That is a very good idea and when I update the site that will almost certainly be included :) Any other tips? Been reading papers for ideas and I think I may have to ditch the cosine similarity and go for something fancier soon. Thank you
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- hk1337 4y agoJokes on you, this is my one and only account.
- hobobaggins 4y ago> This means the optimal strategy would be discarding an account either after every comment or after a small number of comments. Unfortunately, this is against HN rules and may result in a ban. Is this? I thought that it was ok to have throwaway accounts, as long as they're not specifically to avoid a ban or something like that.
- mancerayder 4y agoWe knew this was possible and was coming, and probably around a few years. Fascinating from a technology perspective, terrifying from a long-term privacy perspective.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- a-dub 4y agowould probably work better with case and punctuation preserving n-grams, sentence length, paragraph length and use of whitespace stats. also maybe a tf-idf vector of top n words per user. also could maybe do a same phrase analysis across the corpus to find some hand picked features. timestamps could be interesting. or, of course, let the machine do it with comment2vec.
- abhaynayar 4y ago502 Bad Gateway
- costco 4y agoApologies for the downtime. It is up again and I'm looking into why uwsgi crashed.
- cbracketdash 4y agoThe website is down...
- costco 4y agoApologies for the downtime. It is up again and I'm looking into why uwsgi crashed.
- garbagetime 4y agoSite down? I'm keen to see if it catches my alts.
- tinodb 4y agoSame here, 502 consistently.
- costco 4y agoApologies for the downtime. Something crashed while I was asleep, should be working now. Not really sure how because the log indicates that uwsgi "gracefully exited," but I'm looking into it.
- costco 4y agoApologies for the downtime. Something crashed while I was asleep, should be working now. Not really sure how because the log indicates that uwsgi "gracefully exited," but I'm looking into it.
- kuramitropolis 4y agoWelp, so much commenting for me then.
- costco 4y agoSite seems to have been down when you commented this. If you want to try again it is up again :)
- chucksmash 4y agoAlone out here in the 0.30s. the three times I've used a throwaway account, they've been for a single post on a single topic, so no surprise they did not get picked up by this analysis I guess. Does a low correlation with other users imply higher susceptibility to de-anonymization if I were using alts regularly?
- reducesuffering 4y agoProbably. It means your writing is more unique and using an alt would be another "very unique" but only similar to yours.
- b800h 4y agoWell, interesting. This is one of the reasons we have the GDPR. @costco, if I were to make a GDPR erasure request, would you service it? And I'm no lawyer, but it seems like there's also an outside chance of a breach of section 171 here as well, which is a criminal offence committed by a person who reidentifies de-identified data. Plus - the laws have extraterritoriality. Vanishingly unlikely that you'd actually be pursued for it, but it's worth bearing in mind when you munge people's personal data.
- eps 4y agoIt's an EU law.
- b800h 4y agoWith extraterritoriality. And if identifying people in this way is covered (I'm not a lawyer, I'm not claiming it definitely is), then it's also possible that EU citizens using the tool are committing a criminal offence. The law seems to only apply where the deidentification has been made by the data controller, but HN admins changing someone's username, for example, if they ever do, would count. A person then using the tool to match another non-anonymous username to that account would seem to be caught. Important to stress how much of a technicality this is, but that sort of thing can be interesting sometimes.
- Ikatza 4y agoAre short sentences better for anonymity?
- laurex 4y agoThose interested in the implications of this kind of analysis might enjoy the book The Secret Life of Pronouns http://secretlifeofpronouns.com/ http://secretlifeofpronouns.com/
- ecec 4y agow
- sdsd 4y agoAll false positives for me - I want to reach out to the accounts that talk similar to me and see if we make good friends
- nickstinemates 4y agoThe bias is interesting here. https://stylometry.net/user?username=nickstinemates https://stylometry.net/user?username=nickstinemates Number 2 for me is someone I worked closely with for a few years, and then putting his name into this results in all of the people we worked with for a few years. So it seems content>style, or, we are all more alike than we thought.
- hamburglar 4y agoI’m guessing that a small corpus for a given account doesn’t produce a very good score? I’ve done throwaways a couple times in the past and this has not “outed” them.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]