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.
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.”