Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts

Re:Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate... by bee_rider on Sunday November 27, 2022 @12:41PM (#33764805)

That’s a kinder description than I gave it in my next paragraph, so thanks I suppose.

I do think it is an under-emphasized aspect of honesty, though, that we should be clear about our level of experience/understanding. Especially online — people like to discuss things, even (especially?) when we are just getting started. So if we’ve picked up opinions through osmosis and we start repeating them without testing them, we’re really just amplifying some possibly-incorrect viewpoint (and if we’ve picked it up, there’s a good chance it is already widespread in the community, which is bad if it is wrong).

And I mean, more concretely a measurement is not complete without the error bars!

Often this doesn’t really matter, because it is just chit-chat anyway. But it is nice to keep in mind.

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Re:Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate... by fancybouncy on Sunday November 27, 2022 @02:24PM (#33765805)

> we should be clear about our level of experience/understanding

there are many languages that encode this info as mandatory grammatical affixes, it's called evidentiality.

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Re:Show HN: Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate... by bee_rider on Sunday November 27, 2022 @04:35PM (#33767230)

I hadn’t heard of that. Neat!

I find it interesting that the first example they use in the Wikipedia article is Turkish. I’ve only met a couple Turks, but they were all quite good engineers. I wonder to what extent embedding this kind of information in the language helps organize your thoughts.

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