I really liked the informative and straight-to-the-point about page - describing how the algorithm works in a way that is easy to understand. All the important details are summarised there. Well done!
Edit:
From the "How to avoid .." page, there is the following sentence:
> Also, most authorship identification algorithms have poor accuracy when working with small amounts of words. This means the optimal strategy would be discarding an account either after every comment or after a small number of comments. Unfortunately, this is against HN rules and may result in a ban.
Can you clarify what this means and why it would result in a ban?
Imagine that for every new comment you want to post you would create a brand new account which you would use precisely once and never again. Then the stylometry would have just a few words and wouldn’t have enough corpus to get a reliable signature. If a lot of people does this it would be hard to figure out which account belongs with which human. ( Of course if you alone do this, your messages will stick out like a sore thumb. See xkcd 1105 )
> why it would result in a ban?
Because this practice is especially discouraged in the guidelines: “please don't create accounts routinely. HN is a community—users should have an identity that others can relate to.”
Your comment quotes an HN guideline, and my point relates to it. Some users may feel the need to create throwaway accounts in order to post comments that in an alternative reality they could post under their primary account and later delete if desired. It may not stop a scrupulous collector of data, but such a scenario may not be the object of their worry.
Drawing this into the logical conclusion, a user may opt to always post under a throwaway account, to avoid any possible tainting associated with a primary account.
> Can you clarify what this means and why it would result in a ban?
I have seen dang respond to users multiple times asking them to stop making new accounts especially but not always if it's to avoid rate limiting. I don't know if there's an official policy but it's definitely something I recall.
Edit: From the "How to avoid .." page, there is the following sentence:
> Also, most authorship identification algorithms have poor accuracy when working with small amounts of words. This means the optimal strategy would be discarding an account either after every comment or after a small number of comments. Unfortunately, this is against HN rules and may result in a ban.
Can you clarify what this means and why it would result in a ban?