Thanks for the linked article. Interesting indeed.

It's a pretty large sample of text and I'm fairly sure that it is large enough that the match will be a close one.

Then there is 'stylistic' analysis, another angle of attack, mostly to do with the way you write, not just the words themselves.

Thanks for the exchange. :)

"fully agree"

comma followed by etc with a period in middle of sentence , etc. can

use of e.g. with a period after each letter.

well-known with a hyphen high-end with a hyphen likes to use colons correctly.

no misspellings. odd. proper use of punctuation. strange. I'd say the writer fails the Turing test and is a robot.

People who commented shortly before the throwaway account are also good candidates, as are people who seem to comment around the same time on other days.

Unless they use multiple browsers.

That's depressing.

Meanwhile, "[space]-[space]" rather than "--" for "—" is idiosyncratic, and since HN preserves original spaces in comments, ".[space]" rather than ".[space][space]" rules a few more of us out.

It’s not idiosyncratic, it’s British.

Heh. I see what you did there.

(Updated: "&" usage, "ain't", starting a sentence with a conjunction.)

BTW, I strongly suspect stylistic analysis would work a lot better given the small corpus available for each user, though that idea goes out the window when someone deliberately tries to mask themselves.