Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts
Author here. This site lets you put in a username and get the users with the most similar writing style to that user. It confirmed several users who I suspected were alts and after informally asking around has identified abandoned accounts of people I know from many years ago. I made this site mostly to show how easy this is and how it can erode online privacy. If some guy with a little bit of Python, and $8 to rent a decent dedicated server for a day can make this, imagine what a company with millions of dollars and a couple dozen PhD linguists could do. Here's Paul Graham:…
Using stylometry to find HN users with alternate accounts launched on November 26, 2022 with 676 votes, #9 of 3,471 launches that month and more than 99% of that year's launches.
In plain words
This tool analyzes writing style to identify Hacker News users who may be operating alternate accounts. Users input a username and receive a ranked list of accounts with similar writing patterns. The creator built it as a demonstration of how stylometry can compromise online anonymity, requiring only basic Python skills and minimal server costs. It serves as a privacy awareness project highlighting capabilities that well-resourced organizations could scale significantly further.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
In the maker’s words, at launch
Author here. This site lets you put in a username and get the users with the most similar writing style to that user. It confirmed several users who I suspected were alts and after informally asking around has identified abandoned accounts of people I know from many years ago. I made this site mostly to show how easy…
Does a similar job
all alternatives →- MHMeet.hn – Meet the Hacker News community in your city2024 · ▲768
Hey HN! I just published https://meet.hn, a map to find hackers in your city. How it works? Demo of the signup process: https://x.com/meet_hn/status/1834918518904746329 1. Fill the form: username, city+country 2. Copy the text generated in the box below the form, and paste it in your HN description. 3. Click "Add me on the map" Optionnaly (it's recommended!) you can add links to your socials as well as some tags to showcase your interests. Why does it exist? I created this because, despite its harsh reputation on the internet, I love the HN community. I…
- HCHackerNewsers,com, find other hackers near you2010 · hackernewsers.com · ▲221
There's been lots of discussion recently about finding other HNers to talk to / bounce ideas off / work with, some Google spreadsheets were set up to share details but they were soon vandalised. I had a spare afternoon yesterday (which turned into a long day) and here's the result: http://www.hackernewsers.com/ It's only open to people with HN accounts, it lets you post your biography, location, skills etc. Anyway, I hope you like it and find it useful.
My recommendation engine for Hacker News2023 · hn-recommend.julienc.me · ▲314Hi! I’m Julien and I built a recommendation engine for Hacker News. I feel like this website is a gold mine. Every day, I find some very interesting stories about a topic. And sometimes, I want to find other stories covering that same topic but I can’t. Hacker News has years of history of awesome discussion and ressources. Unfortunately, I think HN Algolia isn’t helpful in searching these old threads. As a student, I want to learn a lot from this website. This is why I created HN Recommend. Input a sentence or the URL of an article, and get the most popular and similar posts from Hacker…
Exploring HN by mapping and analyzing 40M posts and comments for fun2024 · blog.wilsonl.in · ▲520Accessible end-to-end deep dive of crawling, embedding, projecting, and semantic searching all of Hacker News for my Hackerverse project.
I was tired of opening 2 tabs for every HN link, so I made a userscriptJul 2026 · github.com · ▲433HN is great for the links people share, but a big part of the value I get comes from reading the discussion around them. I realized I was always opening the article in one tab and the comments in another, constantly switching back and forth. I figured there was probably a simpler way, so I threw together this userscript to merge the two. 1. Clicking a link from Hacker News opens the article with a side panel containing the discussion. It doesn't require your credentials, is resizable, and is easy to tweak if you want to customize it. 2. If you land on an article that has previously been…
- MHMarkdown HN profiles at {user}.at.hn2024 · at.hn · ▲459
Very opportunistic toy project as I saw the domain was up for grabs: 'at.hn' is a little site where people can have their own subdomains for whatever their HN username is (opt-in only by adding a slug to your bio). It doesn't really do much. Just shows your HN bio rendered as markdown plus meta stuff. I'm thinking of adding an aggregated user listing on the homepage so people can explore profiles. There's a bunch of interesting people on HN but discoverability is a bit longwinded. I'm wondering what other features people want. Otherwise shall likely leave it as-is. I remember hnbadges was a…
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Source: Show HN post ↗ · launch text quoted in part
Launched alongside, November 2022
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