zlacker

The organization’s stated mission, inherent not just to it but to all places of its sort, is <X>, even though, unfortunately, we often end up chasing <Y> instead.

It’s a difficult balance: <Y> is in fact necessary to continually achieve <X> but there are times where decisions focus exclusively, or at least too much, on <Y>. But we live in the real world, and sometimes that’s necessary. (<Y> is not money though it has an impact on our financials) And also sometime people with a broader view see further than I do and those choices that seem wrong come around a few years later and it turns out <X> is actually better off for it. It keeps me humble, skeptical of my own certainty even when it seems faultless.

But I’m also at a point now where people who pop up and start shouting <r>! or <f>! or something completely random like “Well how about <~€€€~>?” I can easily deal with: I go back, do a bit of the work I do, show it to the right people, and those shouts -disappear. Sometimes one gets through and it’s annoying, but whatever, nothing is perfects.

Of course the above vastly oversimplifies things. There are many, many more variables to juggle along the way. But I hope it gives a reasonable sense of things.

And I’m sure the “<X>” style notation of things in my explanation makes it harder understand what I mean, but I value my privacy, hence the abstractions of the factors involved.

>>ineeda+(OP)
> but I value my privacy

I guess the way you abstracted will probably reduce your privacy (a tiny bit). At least I have not seen anybody write "<X>" instead of just X in this usecase.

So either this is very specific to you, or is very common in your circles so you do it too. Both of which reduce the number of potential candidate if somebody tries to doxx you.

Additional you (or your editor) uses “” over " which also reduces the number of candidates.

(Not trying to attack you here, just thought it was notable)

>>fho+T5
<*> was my own ad hoc convention in the moment. My “.” style is the default for the mobile phone I’m on, which is the US, and I don’t mind sharing that since I’ve mentioned it in plenty of prior posts. But I do honesty appreciate the analysis, those aren’t things I’d specifically considered when posting now or in the past, and it’s always useful to know what subtle signals can be picked up in that sort of detail. Heck someone observant could probably infer broad geo region (time zone) just from the fact that I am making these comments at this time.

>>ineeda+m8
Writing style is also a lot more individual than people recognize.

Iirc word histograms almost uniquely identify authors. Of course this is on larger amounts of text, but I guess you could identify users over seperate platforms this way.

E.g. Intend to use ellipsis (...) to separate thoughts in online conversation a lot. But I try to not do that in reddit, where I try to stay somewhat anonymous.

Still, I assume that it would be possible to correlate my reddit and HN account just by comparing the word histograms (ie which words I use and how often).

>>ineeda+m8
Then you'll probably appreciate the following info. You have commented excessively on HN over the years. If you have done any publicly accessible writing with your real name attached, then it is quite easy to find out who you are by correlating writing styles. (If you don't have done so publicly then at least your employer will be able to do that using all internal writing on one hand and all your HN contributions on the other.)

Sounds far fetched, but it's really not that hard. Quite recently somebody hacked this for correlating HN accounts with each other and found alt accounts of people with high accuracy. Which people confirmed. And that wasn't even a serious attempt, just a little hack on a sunday night.

In a sense, it's all too late now since all your writing is already out there. But could be good to know for the future.

>>correl+gm
It's unclear to me what you're meant to do about this besides never post anything, which is depressing. Hence I don't even try.

>>sveron+xr
I guess you can try to develop two very distinct writing styles.

Or, as I do, consider everything posted to HN to be linked to me. My handle is actually an abbreviation of my full name. I consider HN to be "professional" correspondence.

>>correl+gm
All true, but that’s a level personal detail I’m prepared to live with having it out in the world. There’s a limit to how much mental energy I’m prepared to put into worrying about doxing, and it doesn’t go this far. But it is a remarkable aspect of just how much we can be fingerprinted by so many different things we do in life.

>>fho+bt
You can have LLMs rewrite your texts.

>>balder+1Q
And we are back to the depressing part where you can't even bother.

>>fho+Ek
Yes, some of my academic work in comp-ling (massively outdated by today’s advances) explored things like the perplexity scores of different Shakespeare plays to explore the controversial claim that some the work attributed to him was actually done by Marlowe.

(As a complete aside, that program of study also included Forensic Linguistics which truly fascinating. And of course the work of Claude Shannon and information theory, though not in any great depth)

>>sveron+xr
One option is to change HN accounts often. Every few posts you need to make a new one. Successfully correlating writing styles needs some data and if there are only a few sentences to go off then that's not enough.

I know that the site guidelines discourage that, but what can you do.