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Comment by SchemaLoad | Hacker News Reader

Don't even need to match passwords. You can find alt accounts by just matching word usage frequency and other language style. Anyone can do this with just the public comments. It's going to be awful.

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Trigram count can be enough. I saw a demo of that on HN users to look for alt account a year or two ago. Worked great. Found all my alts.

Was it this? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016

Sadly I cannot access https://stylometry.net/. :(

I really want to know what it would have said about me.

Edit: https://antirez.com/hnstyle does work though!

Oh yeah! I remember someone mentioning that on Twitter as well. Bookmarked

There's a big flaw with the algorithm that was detecting similarly between users: it only works if your different accounts discusses the same topics.

It doesn't though. It was going off usage of very common words like "its", "he", "and" rather than topic specific ones. Just that alone seems to work shockingly well. If you combined it with a few more data points like timestamps and topics of interest it would get even more accurate.

I can guarantee you it doesn't work in practice. If you put aside my former account, it mostly matches the current one with other rust developers and absolutely not with my alt (which doesn't discuss Rust at all).

I'm not questioning what would theoretically be possible to do, but the one that I saw failed the test.

Yeah, I believe it is called Stylometry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stylometry