Reproducing Hacker News writing style fingerprinting

antirez 2 hours ago. 3506 views. 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. This is the original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016 I was not aware, back then, of Burrows-Delta method for style detection: it seemed kinda magical that you just needed to normalize a frequency vector of top words to reach such quite remarkable results. I read a few wikipedia pages and took mental note of it. Then, as I was working with Vectors for Redis I remembered about this post, searched the web only to discover that the original page was gone and that the author, in the original post and website, didn’t really explained very well how the data was processed ... Read full article.