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Comment by AdmiralAsshat | Hacker News Reader

Seems incredibly prone to false positives. For example, I can guarantee that I'm not the AdmiralAsshat on Reddit, Gmail, or Twitter, because that username was already taken by the time I tried to sign up for them.

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You always need to balance Precision and Recall. For something like this, you want to be exhaustive.

I've worked on search engines, and depending on who is using them, that balance gets struck differently on the ROC curve. For legal matters, for example, they want every record that might match. For ad-hoc (google style) queries, nobody reads the second page so you care more about Precision @ 20 (or really, at 3)

Somewhat offtopic, I'm curious about this "nobody reads the 2nd page" meme...

I find myself reading pages 2-5 quite often, because page 1 just didn't give enough results, and I doubt I'm that much in a minority ?

(I'm talking about actual generalist searches, not people that use a global search engine as a replacement to bookmarks or directly searching, for instance, Wikipedia.)

I imagine that each additional page presentation is exponentially less likely to be reached and considered a 'reputable' result by someone normal.

If I'm looking for a specific issue I'll sometimes try out things as deep as 10 or more pages of search results if nothing on the first 100 ish hits selects the issue, but then only if I can't think of any keyword variations to use that might get me a better result match. I don't expect the average user to go even remotely that far.

Source: https://www.sistrix.com/blog/why-almost-everything-you-knew-...

TLDR: on the second results page, each result gets <1% click through rate.

So it‘s not nobody, but statistically speaking not very many.

That's not how statistics work. I consider myself a frequent visitor of the second results page, but even for me the CTR of the results on the second page are < 1 %, because I almost always find the thing I want on the first page.

The question ought to be "conditional on not finding the result on the first page, how likely is the user to go to the second page versus balk, or re-try a different query?"

I'm fairly confident that number is higher than 1 %, but I don't have the data.

Or alternatively, a number "significantly less than 1%" is still massive when multiplied by the number of searches google gets.

But how much is this affected by my caveat inside the parentheses ?

I always read the 2nd page because the 1st is all SEO crap.

There are types of queries that people discount. Navigational queries for instance, that essentially use Google as a spellcheck + DNS.

And many queries that are solved with 0 visits, thanks to the information being pulled out from the wiki, or giving up and rephrasing the query.

After those, then yes, most queries will be answered by the first page. It's what retrieval is optimized for.

> You always need to balance Precision and Recall. For something like this, you want to be exhaustive.

Respectfully disagree. You're right in principle if you build a tool like that for yourself. But since this is Open Source, you have to take into account that people who don't understand that will use the tool as well and then use that as "evidence" in whatever arguments they're having with someone.

Hopefully they read one sentence about what the tool does before using it. If they don't, their arguments will be weak due to their own sloppiness in research, which doesn't seem like a new problem.

the thing is, people who want to use this for defamation don't have an incentive to sanitize the data - the message might stick around regardless of whether it has any merit (we've seen this happening even at the most publicly scrutinized national level, imagine how much fewer defenses smaller players have)

Defamation is definitely one problem with this tool. Once there is “evidence”, it can be (ab)used without consequence by someone, because they can simply point at the tool output. If the output is usually “good enough”, it will provide an alibi for their actions: “I didn’t make a mistake, the computer did.”

Nobody who bothers to check what the tool does will be swayed by this. If someone wants to make shit up, and their audience will not bother to spend 30 seconds looking at their "sources", they could just write a script that outputs whatever they wanted and then point at that script.

You are putting a lot of faith in people to do that diligence. Most people will take the “evidence” at face value. And yes, people do write scripts to generate material to defame or hurt others.

You're making my point. People take evidence at face value, so a program like Maigret makes no difference. Why bother using Maigret when you can just make stuff up?

> Respectfully disagree. You're right in principle if you build a tool like that for yourself. But since this is Open Source, you have to take into account that people who don't understand that will use the tool as well and then use that as "evidence" in whatever arguments they're having with someone.

Respectfully disagree with you respectfully disagreeing - this line of thinking can be used to argue against almost any information sharing.

i.e. Should we stop governments releasing statistics that might be misinterpreted by an uninformed press? Should we stop open access to medical journals because untrained readers might use them for incorrect medical advice? Should we stop companies releasing public annual reports, because investing consumers that are untrained in reading financial documents might misinterpret them?

Actually, there is a recent ~"law"? (discussed on HN) that essentially forbids publishing research that may be misinterpreted by the pronoun people (i.e., any research can be banned).

Do you have a link / source for this?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32595767

I'm just stating that I think the data is likely a priori garbage (without a lot of sanitizing work), in the hope that that message spreads faster than the use of the tool. I think having that discussion is both important and preferable to censorship.

Frankly, </Hikaru>

> But since this is Open Source,

You can add the functionality you would like it to have, and share with the others.

For more fine tuned solutions, there is always a DoD contractor available near you :-)

Yup; for common/short usernames it's all too common for other folks to register using the same identifier.

The end result seems to be that this tool decides you're interested in "dating", "porn", "stocks" and tags you with a "ru" country code - despite not owning any of the accounts that the determination has been based off of.

The README should come with a disclaimer really.

Isn't it obvious just from reading one sentence about what it does? As it clearly says, it's based on username only, so multiple people's results may be mixed in the dossier if they share a username. We don't need a disclaimer for every thing that a moment's thought can reveal.

The people that use this tool to dig up dirt on someone will love to see a mixed bag, because it could be useful to cast shade on their actual target. This tool will be abused on purpose.

That makes no sense. They could just make stuff up, it wouldn't be any more or less believable.

Have you ever been part of a civil lawsuit? The lawyers will absolutely lie through their teeth to make their cases. They will introducw any “evidence” that they think will help them. Would you really trust a jury or a judge to understand and believe that this report is not accurate? Having been through the process, let me tell you straight up: you should not put your faith in the justice system.

Not sure where the rant about the justice system came from. You are making my point — people willing to lie through their teeth can just make up any report they like, the existence or accuracy of Maigret changes nothing.

I intentionally steal nicknames I've seen. I'm an asshole as well, so sometimes it works out. I have 13 different nicknames so far that I use/have used since 1997, though I tend to rotate between all of them regularly. I DO hope they try to use "AI" to track me. That will be fun.

I have never used the same nickname on multiple sites. Often when I get a new device, I just make a new account. Especially for HN and Reddit.

That almost seems a shame because smeagull is a fantastic username.

…that’s an interesting behavior

What's the benefit? It sounds like you might have to explain yourself one day if someone posts something racist/horrible.

I look at it differently, even if someone isn’t going around posting racist/horrible things, people and tastes change over time. I’ve been a part of fandoms that are now seen as cringey or toxic. I’ve also grown up more as a person and I look back at a lot of my old comments as sophomoric. I write differently, and my opinions on things have changed as well. I’ve had people dig through my post history on sites like Reddit to try and find a “gotcha” based on some remark I made years ago.

All in all, I personally feel like it is a good thing to cycle through usernames throughout life.

I'm dropping some hot takes on hacker news tonight, so I agree. Although the idea that you can stay anonymous is probably naive. Between database leaks and AI text analysis, good luck.

> I’ve been a part of fandoms that are now seen as cringey or toxic.

—BuyMyBitcoins

Joking aside, there's definitely value to rotating usernames frequently. I've started using random strings on various sites because I really don't see an up side (for me) to being trackable from site to site and definitely across time. (I use very long random strings for my banking usernames because I don't trust them to have enough bits of entropy in their passwords.)

What about the case where (s)he's the one that posts the dirty things?

Seems like the solution is built-in to their strategy. If you get accused of being racist because a racist on twitter uses the same handle, just make a new handle and start over.

It’s not so much of a benefit, as that some of us simply don’t care what others think. Actions speak louder than words and all that.

A Internet comment from 10 years ago might cost you a job, or it might cost a friendship. But at least I’m not living a facade about being a perfect and flawless individual, and that helps me sleep better at night.

Some annoying people seem to have used my gmail to sign up for things like Twitch. I have all the three factor authentication stuff set up, so I don't think they can get in to click the "verify" links, but I wonder if this sort of tool would be able to verified that the account was... verified. Probably not.

I get email all the time for a Jason Fruit in Chicago who uses my email address as a dummy. I even called him once to ask him to stop. He didn't.

The annoying this is, my email address is based on my name, which is fairly unique (no relation to my account name here), to the point where I'm nearly 100% certain that it is intentional (gotten from a leak of emails which have signed up for some service or another).

My wife has a firstname@gmail.com account and she gets a lot of other peoples’ emails including some rather sensitive stuff (bank statements, employment info, etc.)

Me too. It is the same guy each time though. He has a dot in his addres and I think it is dropped in many hand written signups.

My Gmail is first.last name. I get very sensitive documents for a lawyer with my same name who resides in Texas. We've actually had some decent conversations over the years.

I used to have a similar-enough email to a dentist office in Texas and would get a lot of patient scans / files as well. Reached out a dozen times before it finally stopped.

I had that happen once.

It was a recipt for a medical purchase, at first I thought I was getting scammed. What tipped me off was the email was sent to firstnamelastname@gmail.com and NOT firstname.lastname@gmail.com. That was the day I realized google would even do that.

I ended up using the phone number in the email to contact the person and forwarded the email. And yes, they had my first and last name :)

Yup! I ended up having to look him up via the states bar association's website. Was able to get his bar association email which was different then the gmail. It's the only contact I have in google contacts because it happens about 3 times a year.

He got a congratulations email on a bmw purchase one time. Had a good discussion about cars, we are both gear heads.

I'm subscribed to so many informal church groups in Alabama originally but "I've" since moved to Texas. I tried quite hard to clear up the confusion but with virtually no action ever taken, so now I just observe.

From those emails, it's nice seeing how people support each other and apparently I'm in demand giving scripture classes.

I'm french.

But my e-mail address has been used by real people to subscribe to services in Sweeden, Turkey and somewhere South America. At least language helps to sort things.

> What tipped me off was the email was sent to firstnamelastname@gmail.com and NOT firstname.lastname@gmail.com.

Dots don't matter in Gmail, so these email addresses are the same:

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7436150?hl=en

So far I haven't gotten anything that would give me moral compunctions to ignore, thankfully!

Your gmail is actually firstlastname periods are ignored and so are most things after a +. So your email could be fir.st.las.t+hackernewsapp @

I have an extremely common (for German-speaking countries) first-last name combination and I have firstlast@gmail.com (not used anymore, but I check it around once a week). I get so many confidential documents or personal photos.

The most hilarious/sad was the insurance provider domcura which advertised how they got some kind of award for their great processes, yet writing to 2 or 3 different service emails that they are sending me confidential documents resulted in nothing until I wrote to their data protection officer.

Hello Hans Maier!

Maier is only #34 in Germany, Meyer is #6, and mine, Wagner, is at #7 ;)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_most_common_surnam...

Here in the United States we choose “John Smith” as the most generic and common name for a man. What name would a German pick?

Curiously, for a supposedly common name I have never once met a John Smith.

It depends, probably Max Müller or Hans Müller, just anything Müller. Unlike the US, we don’t normally use a real name as placeholder name [0], the options there would be Max or Erika Mustermann (literally example or pattern man), for an average person it’s Otto Normalverbraucher (Otto Average-Consumer) and Lieschen Müller.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placeholder_name

Holy shit. I never made the connection with Otto Normalverbraucher. Thanks for making me click with this little piece of German trivia on the day German history was made! :)

Peter Müller (i.e. Peter Miller) would be a good generic one.

There was a John Smith who was briefly the leader of the Labour Party in the UK (he sadly died very soon after becoming leader from a heart attack), and I remember him saying that before he became well-known, when he checked into hotels with his real name the receptionist's often eyed him suspiciously, thinking it was a false name to cover up the fact he was checking in with his mistress.

I thought it was John/Jane Doe but I now realize that those are only for unidentified people (in police/judiciary contexts).

In Italy - for the record - it would probably be Mario Rossi (as an example on a mockup form), but conversionally it would be Pinco Pallino.

There are a few dedicated English wikipedia pages:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placeholder_name

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terms_referring_to_an_...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_placeholder_names_by_l...

it is interesting to see the slighty different use in the various languages.

This reminds me of gail.com: https://discu.eu/q/https://gail.com

Your current username at geronnimo mail dot kazooie? Fun fact: at email dot com is a functional AOL address, still recognized by all corporate services, even with completely made up user part. e.g. birdperson @ email dotcom

Nah, decided to make a clean break from previous accounts for this site.

Side question: do people still believe that email scrapers are unable parse “username at email dotcom” or “my username at gmail”? Or is it just a cultural thing?

Easy to solve: do a password reset on the website (in your case, twitch), take over the account, then close it.

bonus point for checking the activity to see if it looks human or if it's taken over by a bot.

I'm more surprised by the fact that people have used my standard username on not just one, but three porn sites, and that I am now a 31 year old camgirl from Thailand, a 36 year old man from Norfolk looking for love and a 31 year old man from South Africa.

This tool finds existence of accounts by username. It does not promise that all found accounts belong to the same human.

Project description in the README:

> Maigret collect a dossier on a person by username only...

The About field:

> Collect a dossier on a person by username from thousands of sites

"on a person" seems to imply that they'd belong to someone in particular. Obviously if you have any experience of creating accounts you'd know that's unlikely to be the case, and it's not written in a promissory tone. But it does imply it.

Sometimes I used other people's usernames too for this reason.

Please don't steal. You may be making it difficult for the people you steal from.

I often use the same username(s) on multiple forums where people discuss similar topics because I want other people who visit the same forums to recognise me as being the same guy.

I've found this username taken a few times, and it has bugged me every time. While it is from Tolkien's Elvish, it is obscure and then misspelled (actually a portmanteau). I've had to add a prefix, such as "TheReal" to it.

An interesting extension to this tool would be to let you specify the interests and the site you want to sign up to, and it would generate a username that fits that profile and is available on the specific site.

The next step is when Google blocks your account based on the behavior of said similar alias, in other parts of the internet tubes....

As a commissioned officer, you may be responsible for everything done in your name.

More rations of rum, i think thats how the british managed it. I wouldnt complain, much.

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