It seemed to me that it is case-sensitive, right? Maybe make it not case-sensitive or if that's not possible at least mention it somewhere, e.g. by putting it into the label of the input box as "Username (case-sensitive)".
> It compares the semantic meaning of your comment history with those of all other users, and finds the top ten users whose comment histories are most similar to yours.
So maybe it's comparing comments from entire history of the account and not just the recent ones and therefore hard for me to compare? Would it be possible for you to tweak it so that it only compares lets say the most recent 30 or 50 comments?
Yea, 3 years is a long period. I think by default you should compare only past 30-60 comments and have options for comparing past year and past 3 year. If that works well, you could actually build a "dating app for intellectually curious" ones. Might be easier to do using Reddit data too.
It is. I just picked that because it was an already provided option and I recognized that name. I few pages of comments I compared the accounts of didn't see much similar but OP also replied that it compares 3 years worth of comments so it's hard for me to notice it.
> A reminder that BigQuery (as used in the query in this link) is the best way to play with Hacker News data; don't scrape HN data manually!
The `bigquery-public-data.hacker_news.full` table appears to be up to date with the most recent HN data as well (table last updated today).
However, I'm not 100% sure the query is correct for unilaterally getting all links, as running the query on the full dataset returns the same results as running it from 2006-2015. And I value my sanity enough to not fuss around with the regex.
In fact, considering that unknown third-parties freely gather such similarity scores and correlate accounts, across different sites—by now it's a given that one's alt accounts have to adhere to different stylistic choices.
Do you retain any user data? Since most users are probably looking up their own username, it would be a simple task to match and log HN usernames and their respective IPs.
Hah, I’ve thought the same thing. I think I’d enjoy working with myself quite a bit. As a housemate, though, I doubt we’d cross boundaries often. Very thankful to be married to someone who truly complements me.
If you recognize your doppelganger, it's probably because you have an interest in the same topics. Your opinions and your posting style may be different—or even opposite—but from a certain perspective, you have more in common with each other than most.
I'm skeptical that this tool does a good job of identifying semantic meaning of a comment, but I bet it gets the topic right.
My #1 match was an account[1] banned for "posting unsubstantive comments and repeatedly breaking the guidelines". Now, I may be biased, but I don't think that's accurate :v
That is doubtful. We don't shadowban established accounts: we tell them why we're banning them and why: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... Shadowbanning on HN, at least for the last 7 years, has been reserved for spammers and serial trolls. It's possible that we made a mistake and neglected to tell you, but it's far more likely that we did tell you.
We don't ban people for criticizing PG, as anyone can easily see for themselves by using HN Search or looking at any recent thread from paulgraham.com.
If you're going to make a claim about why you think you were banned, you should provide a link so readers can make up their own minds. When it comes to "I was banned" stories, people say all kinds of things, most of which don't hold up against the actual record.
You banned me 2 days after the comment for saying that YC can be as or more exploitative than China's deals with African countries and I said that the parent defending YC but condemning China was acting on a base of racism and ethnocentrism. You can see how he brought a bunch of low-quality links I refuted them and you came 2 days later(I just realized that now) and banned me.
Oh well, I suppose you will be ban me again. BB cannot be criticized.
That doesn't link to a banned account. I assume you mean this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26659584. We told you we were banning you in that very thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26678745. Comments like "I must conclude you are a dumb person letting his latent racism to take over or you are aware you are acting on bad faith and you just dont care" are obviously against the rules here and have nothing to do with PG, YC, China, or any particular topic.
Moreover, we'd warned you and asked you may times to follow the site guidelines before that:
If you break the rules that often and ignore that many warnings, it's not surprising that you'd end up getting banned. This was not a shadowban and not because you criticized some particular person.
All this is a pity because you posted many interesting comments in the past and we would much rather have you as a contributing user. The sad truth, though, is that the harm you cause by breaking the site guidelines exceeds the good you contribute with the interesting comments—so I don't think we made the wrong call.
As Cardinal Richelieu apocryphally said"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."
I dont doubt you can present a similar set of "warnings" for any undesirable who refuse to toe the corporate line you are ordered and paid to maintain. All those rules are ambiguous, opaque, arbitrary and subjectively interpreted and enforced, but you know that.
The most ironic thing is that the measure you take with people who refuse to follow you faux-polite tone is censorship and virtual obliteration, something 1000 times worse. Most of the people I got personal (in argument) here were being racist/clasist/homophobic/ethnocentric but since they can shield themselves behind rhetorical what ifs and sing paeans to the geniuses of YC they have carte-blanche.
Give me a million times better the dysfunctional governments we all have before techno-fascists like you and your bosses, censoring anyone who does not suck up to them.
Not to contradict the Cardinal but your accounts have broken the site guidelines a lot more than the median commenter, and we really don't care about your views. Plenty of other commenters express similar views without getting banned. Actually we really, really, don't care. We're just trying to have an internet forum that doesn't suck.
It isn't about politeness, btw (let alone "faux" politeness) – you won't find that word, or that concept, in the site guidelines. It's about treating other people respectfully, and abstaining from garden-variety internet dreck. Let's not noble up the latter with self-flattering rhetoric.
I have to agree. Nothing stood out as being any way similar. It's hard to tell what their measure of similarity is here. This might be a case of let's just throw the data in, and see what comes out.
It caught users that use my style of dumping a ‘in line rhetorical saying’ in their posts. It’s not terrible, you’d have to laugh honestly at how predictable you are.
I did the search on my self trying to find similar souls share the passion about Godel theorem, viewing the current carbon-based civilization from the views of silicon-based civilization or the alien's, functional programming... But none of them are even close. This #1 match has some views I'm totally not familiar with but I have an opportunity (which I appreciated) to understand other views
In my opinion, this service doesn't have a good S/N ratio. Could give you irrelevant information.
I have several abandoned HN accounts because I switch to a new account after a while in order to not leave to much PII for doxxing. I don't care about karma at all.
This tool didn't offer any of them as doppelgangers, although (in theory) I should match my own style 100%.
That’s black box AI systems for you. Works in some cases, doesn’t work in others, fails hilariously occasionally; and people will make false accusations based on them.
I think currently it is a bit biased towards users with low comment count. Top similar user for me had 4 comments, top 2 only 1 comment. Then top 5 and top 6 again had 1 comment each.
Maybe the similarity score can be weighted by the number of comparisons somehow?
I wonder if there are simply more users with low comment numbers. But yes we considered only including users above some karma score, and still might do that in the future.
This depends on how the similarity is measured. If it is measured as % of agreement between comment texts then it's more likely to have better agreement with someone who has fewer comments rather than more.
For example I suspect that if we generated 1000 random users with random gibberish comments and varied their comment numbers from 1 to 10 or so, the top similarities would be biased towards low comment-count random users. This would be because having one randomly generated comment match your style is easier than having 2 randomly generated comments match the same style.
And if that's the case then the same issue would transfer to comparing real users.
@busymom0 suggested a great solution in this thread - only do comparisons based on "n" (like last 50) comments. This way every similarity would be measured using the same number of comments and users with low comment counts would be excluded automatically.
Seems it picked up on some phrases I use which are not too common among the masses. Beyond that there's little to no relation between me and my doppelgangers.
The first two people in the list did not look like me much. But the third one (NeedMoreTea) was an interesting hit, commenting in a similar fashion and exploring similar topics, not necessarily from the same perspective. I am now immersed in his comment history.
Also, funnily, I really like tea and I drink ~ half a gallon a day.
Many years ago, I built something similar for Drupal and its votingapi module. Just checked it, I was using Pearson's correlation coefficient between votes. It worked fast and was surprisinly accurate. You need access to voting history for that, of course.
239 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 242 ms ] threadNot working for me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7bkbv4u1tc
You're still wrong though :D
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dang
and
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=porphyrogene
or
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=julianeon
Your site does state:
> It compares the semantic meaning of your comment history with those of all other users, and finds the top ten users whose comment histories are most similar to yours.
So maybe it's comparing comments from entire history of the account and not just the recent ones and therefore hard for me to compare? Would it be possible for you to tweak it so that it only compares lets say the most recent 30 or 50 comments?
We did this so it would work even for the less active users. But I think your suggestion might work, too.
From there we ran them through an embedding model and indexed the embeddings in Pinecone.
The actual similarity search is done with Pinecone. (https://www.pinecone.io)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25075318
> A reminder that BigQuery (as used in the query in this link) is the best way to play with Hacker News data; don't scrape HN data manually! The `bigquery-public-data.hacker_news.full` table appears to be up to date with the most recent HN data as well (table last updated today). However, I'm not 100% sure the query is correct for unilaterally getting all links, as running the query on the full dataset returns the same results as running it from 2006-2015. And I value my sanity enough to not fuss around with the regex.
Innit?
Do you retain any user data? Since most users are probably looking up their own username, it would be a simple task to match and log HN usernames and their respective IPs.
In the past I often had the impression I wouldn't get along with myself.
Now, that I'm more chill and less confrontative, I think I would like to meet myself.
Yeah, I talk a lot of shit but I've got nothing on my old self.
I'm skeptical that this tool does a good job of identifying semantic meaning of a comment, but I bet it gets the topic right.
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=franciscrick1
We don't ban people for criticizing PG, as anyone can easily see for themselves by using HN Search or looking at any recent thread from paulgraham.com.
If you're going to make a claim about why you think you were banned, you should provide a link so readers can make up their own minds. When it comes to "I was banned" stories, people say all kinds of things, most of which don't hold up against the actual record.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26656133
You banned me 2 days after the comment for saying that YC can be as or more exploitative than China's deals with African countries and I said that the parent defending YC but condemning China was acting on a base of racism and ethnocentrism. You can see how he brought a bunch of low-quality links I refuted them and you came 2 days later(I just realized that now) and banned me.
Oh well, I suppose you will be ban me again. BB cannot be criticized.
Not sure it is applicable since the linked comment’s author does not appear to be banned.
Moreover, we'd warned you and asked you may times to follow the site guidelines before that:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26127670
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25637111
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25400449
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24909805
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24513786
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23087338
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18102477
If you break the rules that often and ignore that many warnings, it's not surprising that you'd end up getting banned. This was not a shadowban and not because you criticized some particular person.
All this is a pity because you posted many interesting comments in the past and we would much rather have you as a contributing user. The sad truth, though, is that the harm you cause by breaking the site guidelines exceeds the good you contribute with the interesting comments—so I don't think we made the wrong call.
I dont doubt you can present a similar set of "warnings" for any undesirable who refuse to toe the corporate line you are ordered and paid to maintain. All those rules are ambiguous, opaque, arbitrary and subjectively interpreted and enforced, but you know that.
The most ironic thing is that the measure you take with people who refuse to follow you faux-polite tone is censorship and virtual obliteration, something 1000 times worse. Most of the people I got personal (in argument) here were being racist/clasist/homophobic/ethnocentric but since they can shield themselves behind rhetorical what ifs and sing paeans to the geniuses of YC they have carte-blanche.
Give me a million times better the dysfunctional governments we all have before techno-fascists like you and your bosses, censoring anyone who does not suck up to them.
Of course, all of them are toxic, but perhaps that's the point.
It isn't about politeness, btw (let alone "faux" politeness) – you won't find that word, or that concept, in the site guidelines. It's about treating other people respectfully, and abstaining from garden-variety internet dreck. Let's not noble up the latter with self-flattering rhetoric.
I’m gonna marry one of my doppelgängers.
Relying solely on co-sign similarity, every vector is likely to be surrounded by the vectors of low karma accounts.
Or no matter which direction you travel from earth, you will almost certainly be surrounded by vacuum.
In my opinion, this service doesn't have a good S/N ratio. Could give you irrelevant information.
Corona probably got all of them :(
I have several abandoned HN accounts because I switch to a new account after a while in order to not leave to much PII for doxxing. I don't care about karma at all.
This tool didn't offer any of them as doppelgangers, although (in theory) I should match my own style 100%.
bool AI(int id1, int id2){
Maybe the similarity score can be weighted by the number of comparisons somehow?
For example I suspect that if we generated 1000 random users with random gibberish comments and varied their comment numbers from 1 to 10 or so, the top similarities would be biased towards low comment-count random users. This would be because having one randomly generated comment match your style is easier than having 2 randomly generated comments match the same style.
And if that's the case then the same issue would transfer to comparing real users.
@busymom0 suggested a great solution in this thread - only do comparisons based on "n" (like last 50) comments. This way every similarity would be measured using the same number of comments and users with low comment counts would be excluded automatically.
Also, funnily, I really like tea and I drink ~ half a gallon a day.
Given that this is my 'pharmacology' alt account, it seems the author's pretrained word embeddings still associate Coca Cola with the old recipe =)
NLP is hard!