stylometry
Security and privacy
stylometry author attribution
SHOW HN2022
How HN took it
61 positive, 181 neutral or asking, 3 mixed, 65 critical, out of 310 comments about the project. Thread score +0.00.
Privacy: 1 for, 39 againstPerformance: 20 for, 18 againstIdea: 25 for, 2 againstExecution: 5 for, 4 againstDesign: 4 for, 1 against
The thread, comment by comment
Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.
positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker
What HN said
What people liked
Accurately found old alternate accounts for some users
From 2 comments
Wow. 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…
sillysaurusx on HNOh wow, it's really sure that I'm stavrosk, which I am: https://stylometry.net/user?username=stavros The next person is 30% less certain, that's huge! This would basically…
stavros on HN
Interesting tool for self reflection on writing tone
From 1 comment
This 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…
drc500free on HN
Objections
Creepy and enables deanonymization and loss of anonymity
From 3 comments
After 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…
jsnell on HNThis 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?
4qz on HNThe 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…
bscphil on HN
Many false positives
From 2 comments
Wow. 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…
sillysaurusx on HNWell 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?
bhaney on HN
Requests
Support for Reddit or other sites
From 2 comments
Anything like this for Reddit? Would translating to other language and back defend against this algorithm?
SnowHill9902 on HNThe 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…
bscphil on HN
Show a countermeasure or live feedback while writing
From 1 comment
How 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…
DenisM on HN
Questions
What threshold means probably the same person?
From 1 comment
I 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…
ufmace on HN
Where does the data come from?
From 1 comment
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?
4qz on HN
Alternatives named
Unabomber stylistic analysis by FBI
From 1 comment
This 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,…
rcarr on HN