tech/webdev magazine

April 29, 2025

Reproducing Hacker News writing style fingerprinting

Tuesday, April 29, 2025 Teklinks

About three years ago I saw a quite curious and interesting post on Hacker News. A student, Christopher Tarry, was able to use cosine similarity against a vector of top words frequencies in comments, in order to detect similar HN accounts — and, sometimes, even accounts actually controlled by the same user, that is, fake accounts used to uncover the identity of the writer.

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