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Comment by ufmace | Hacker News Reader

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 I've ever heard of before.

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If 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.

The people at 0.4-0.6 with me do share some interests. That's cool on its own.

I 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.

Well I must be stereotypical myself because it found me at 0.8 !

>The problem is writing styles change over time.

Will be interesting if we could plot the writing style divergence over time.

I got matched with my old account with a score of only 0.45

I have no alts. The highest match for me is about 0.66.

Interesting. The highest non-me account is under 0.4 on my page. I do not believe that I have such a unique writing style - especially since half my posting is on mobile and therefore possibly slightly different than my desktop posts.

My closest is 0.4879. I know I tend to be wordy but I thought I had a pretty generic style as well. This is definitely a fascinating demonstration.

Feeling better about my high of 0.49 now

0.6 is not high enough to indicate an alt

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