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Comment by erstorreyk | Hacker News Reader

https://stylometry.net/user?username=O__________O

I mean you'll have to trust me when I say I don't - since if I did I would obviously claim that I don't - but I have a strong match with 3 users where I'm in their top 20. But I don't have an alternate HN account as I don't see any need for separate identities for the ideas I hold on HN. Where as if I want nuanced discussion on Reddit without someone trolling my post history and discounting anything I say because 4 years ago I once posted on a subreddit they don't approve of - I do need an alternate Reddit account. So I will admit to having at least one alternate Reddit account.

Moreover - since Nadya is my "primary" pseudonym, I deliberately make it easy for people to find me across social platforms: https://nadyanay.me/identities

Based on this list you can assume I am Nyu, Nadya, NadyaNayme, or Yuno in a number of places. Three of those names are common and so are commonly already taken by the time I create an account somewhere - so it isn't an exact science. For example - the account "yuno" also exists on HN but isn't me. If it were I'd have capitalized the "Y" and this account wouldn't exist.

As far as I have been made aware - nobody has ever identified any of my other personas as belonging to me.

stylometry.net is hot garbage. Zero of the candidates that it identifies as being related to buildsjets are my actual alternate accounts. The DBCooper one is interesting, it sounds like a username I might use, but it's still not me.

Stylometry is probably mostly useful if you have a small number of suspects with a decent-sized public corpus that you want to match against a book/set of blog posts etc. Even then it's just going to be statistical.

FWIW, none of those are even scored even slightly high, so I don't think it is claiming something horribly incorrect.

And his actual alternative accounts may not have enough content to be included in the search.

On the other hand, for me, both of the bolded accounts were indeed my alts.

Yep, like I said, I have very healthy expectations of how to maintain anonymity. Fortunately GPT will largely fix the issue of statistical analysis of variations in writing style between one writer and another. Stylometry been around a long time, as with all security, you have to know you threat model, and adjust accordingly. To my knowledge stylometry never made me less anonymous.

Assuming your GPT prompts aren't logged

Plenty of open source GPT projects, though if you’re at point of a local machine being trusted, likely have larger issues.

Can you give insight into how that top 10 chart demonstrates anonymity?

Sure, feel free to point out how it makes me less anonymous.

Not saying these are necessarily all yours but the cluster of accounts O__________O, billme, saycheese, wonderous, endlessly, nxzero, v2hle0thslzrav2 are all in each others top 5 or so which is usually a sign of a good match and unless you are saying that you never revealed any identifying info in any of the several hundred comments you have made there is likely some loss of anonymity. If you used a VPN consistently on one account but didn't on one of your earlier accounts then the whole point of the VPN goes right out the window if someone say gets a subpoena.

One of the advantages to being anonymous all the time is nothing is tied to an identity; not an IP address, not a physical address, etc.

I just really didn’t understand why that list was posted and then why you responded to it the way you did. Is it because it identified a common writing style that is shared by some others?

I guess that the rest of the users in the list aren't him / her, or the user accounts that belong to this person are also anonymous?

They need to expand their dataset beyond HN, why would I have two HN accounts? Maybe if I had a public persona that mattered... but I mostly want to be anonymous once to avoid issues with my employer.

But if they expanded their dataset to other sites like reddit I would be concerned.

For me, it's that I generally default to public for professionally-related things. But every once in a great while I want to comment on something that is obviously about my present or a past employer if you know who I am. I could certainly just not do that but, given as I did, I didn't want it to be under my regular identity.

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