News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate... by Aachen on Saturday November 26, 2022 @04:54PM (#33757186)
Usernames aren't random enough to be safe as a simple MD5. Perhaps with a strong bcrypt, but similar to PIN codes, it might be better to give partial information like "is the second character an ...", assuming nobody else made similar statements. Or give the first ~two hex characters of the hash, so that it would match 1/(16²)rd of the usernames. I'm sure there's also a clever way for a zero-knowledge proof here, probably something with diffie-hellman using the name as your random integer or something, but I'm too sick to think about this stuff right now. Privately sharing data publicly is hard.
Re:Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate... by ahmedalsudani on Saturday November 26, 2022 @05:02PM (#33757254)
Another problem is that it's a small set. If you had a list of all HN users, you could compute md5 for all of them in seconds.
Re:Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate... by lzooz on Saturday November 26, 2022 @04:59PM (#33757232)
Good point - I've been running john on that md5 for a couple minutes :)
Re:Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate... by wizzwizz4 on Saturday November 26, 2022 @05:06PM (#33757287)
Why use John? Just run down the list of Hacker News usernames; it'll take less time. (Or, better still, don't; just because the privacy's theoretically compromised doesn't mean we have to exploit that.)
Re:Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate... by lzooz on Saturday November 26, 2022 @05:22PM (#33757440)
I don't think there's a public list of all HN usernames is there?

Found this, it includes 250k usernames, but it's not there. https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/hacker-news/hacker-news-corp...

Re:Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate... by meta2023 on Saturday November 26, 2022 @05:44PM (#33757627)
The username in question isn't in this dataset but maybe it was created in the past 10 days, as the max(timestamp) is Nov 16th, 2022.

https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/details/y-combi...

Re:Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate... by lzooz on Saturday November 26, 2022 @06:34PM (#33758121)
It isn't there, and given the "story" it happened years ago so it should be there, so I guess we've been played.
Re:Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate... by phreeza on Sunday November 27, 2022 @02:23AM (#33761146)
Unintentionally played I might add... But I will leave it at that.
Re:Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate... by phreeza on Sunday November 27, 2022 @02:20AM (#33761134)
I think the intention of the post not mentioning the handle was just to prevent old discussions from flaring up or so? The post doesn't really contain any new information on the person that would be worth obscuring. So I just thought I'd hash it to prevent that. But it seems I actually screwed up the hashing so I will leave it at that.