4 ms·

Profiling Hacker News users based on their comments

88 points by simonw 8mo ago

vpribish 8mo ago
HAHAHA - I like me. but claude (sonnet 4.6) seemed like it was cheerleading a bit
johnfn 8mo ago
> This is arguably their defining HN characteristic: they are one of the most vocal, persistent AI optimists on the platform. They claim ~90-95% of their shipped code is AI-generated, report 5-10x productivity gains, and have built a detailed methodology around it — using Playwright for visual verification, static typechecking as a hallucination filter, and e2e test suites as automated validation harnesses Wow, I sound really annoying. Sorry about that everyone!
- hypercube33 8mo ago
  I sound like an annoying old people I guess so I think I'm worse. Either way I forgive you. (GPT called me a wiring closet gremlin)
  - giardini 8mo ago
    "wiring closet gremlin"!? I knew the original!8-)) Hope you aren't him!
bibimsz 8mo ago
hacker news is a goldmine since you can't delete comments nor even delete your account. this site is a privacy nightmare, in a world where everyone is excited to cancel and dox for unpopular opinions (on this site that means anything to the right of bernie sanders).
- BenjiWiebe 8mo ago
  Feel free to not post on here, if you're concerned about privacy.
- b112 8mo ago
  Have you read the FAQ? HN won't hang you out to dry.
  - lysace 8mo ago
    They will offer to rename your account name to something random. They will not delete all your comments. They might agree to delete a very small number of comments. That does not help much in the profile-building/AI perspective. They should be transparent about this upfront, on the signup page, but I suppose that would hurt conversation stats. Cliché but true: On HN we are the product.
    - toomuchtodo 8mo ago
      I ingest, process, and archive the HN firehose. I know others do as well. Regardless of how one feels, once you put something on the Internet, any hope of control of that info is gone forever. Act accordingly. They are kind enough to make changes within some forum integrity tolerances, even though those changes are likely to help very little from an opsec perspective. Edit: my use case is building a graph for archiving every link ever posted on HN (posts and comments), if that’s relevant. The contents of HN comments have little value to me for my workflow, nor do I profile users.
      - lysace 8mo ago
        [flagged]
        toomuchtodo 8mo ago
        That’s a shame, I don’t have any feelings about you and wish you well regardless.
        TimorousBestie 8mo ago
        [flagged]
- SilentM68 8mo ago
  Correct!
- raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
  It could be worse, I have arguments from the 90s when I was on comp.sys.msc.advocacy
- nunez 8mo ago
  I actually appreciate this. I definitely panicked that one time I posted something spicy about a past employer using this handle and couldn't remove it, but forcing that accountability makes me think about what I say and whether it's worth posting it for everyone to see forever.
alexgandy 8mo ago
This just in; posting ridiculous amounts of personal information on the internet can lead to you being profiled correctly. Wild stuff.
- DoctorOetker 8mo ago
  Not entirely correctly though, since there are forms of censorship even on HN, which selectively blinds any method of analysis in a systematically biased way.
- cm2012 8mo ago
  There was an Irish mafia guy who was caught because his anonymous restaurant review profile got linked to him.
  - barrkel 8mo ago
    Christy Kinahan is still at large, in or around Dubai.
- Retr0id 8mo ago
  We all know this, but in the past someone probably wasn't going to go through thousands of your comments unless you've really pissed them off. It's worth realising how much lower the activation energy is these days.
  - alexgandy 8mo ago
    You’re right about the speed; but it doesn’t change the outcome. If you don’t want it to be associated with you, you simply can’t put it out there.
    - rdevilla 8mo ago
      Yes, and then people wonder why you are a gaping hole in the social media surveillance dragnet with your absence. It took 12 years for me to make my first comment on this account.
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
JSR_FDED 8mo ago
Given a profile like this, how good would an LLM be at figuring out whether the profile if from a bot or a real person?
- wolvoleo 8mo ago
  Probably pretty good. Humans are very consistent in ways that LLMs aren't.
janalsncm 8mo ago
Not doubting the method works in general, but Simon Willison is a public-enough figure so the baseline level of info is higher than just HN comments. If you turn off Claude’s web search: > Simon Willison is a British software developer, blogger, and open-source advocate, best known for…
- simonw 8mo ago
  I'm pretty sure Claude hasn't picked up my fondness of kākāpō parrots yet.
  - chewbacha 8mo ago
    Well, now it might.
  - xnx 8mo ago
    "Make an image of a kākāpō parrot riding a bicycle"
    - simonw 8mo ago
      I usually ask for a skateboard, kākāpō have dumpy little legs.
      - ethbr1 8mo ago
        {Decades in the future} 'Simon Willison's most enduring contributions to modern computing are the pervasive edge case optimizations present in all modern AIs to draw pictures of animals with inconvenient limb arrangements using a variety of human motive devices.'
- georgemcbay 8mo ago
  [dead]
- sdoering 8mo ago
  I just had Claude Code built the comment-fetching part as a CLI tool. And then use this data on my last 200 comments to profile me. In an empty context. Without web search. Holy moly - it was damn accurate. Those comments spanned the last few year, as I became less and less active in social media/online comments in general. But it picked up on me being a snob about unprocessed food, having hard red lines that I sometimes take a very harsh stand over, as well as so many other things. I know I am quite open in what I write on the net and do not really fear future employers using this to qualify me - because if they do and deny me a job I know I would not have wanted to work there in the first place. And yes, this is a position of old white grumpy male privilege. Still. It was impressive and "quite a bit dystopian". All in all, from posting the URL to Simon's blog post to being profiled took less than 6 minutes.
alexpotato 8mo ago
Story time: My first full time job (early 2000s) was working for a firm that did online cybersecurity related investigations for Fortune 500 companies (generally via a 3rd party law firm they had retained). A big part of this was running investigations into people running "pump and dump" stock schemes on Yahoo message boards. We would generally start by scraping all of the posts for a user who had instigated one of these and then handing off the posts to an analyst. It's amazing: a. how much info people give out even when they think they are being careful b. related to a, how even small tidbits combined over time can build a pretty accurate picture of who someone is. e.g. they post "oh man, the Cubs lost", then a year later "went for a walk on Lakeshore drive", another year later, there was a fire at my local subway stop etc etc and you pretty quickly narrow down the rough neighborhood where they live in Chicago. Combined with tools like Lexis Nexus and you get a list of people that you can narrow down by age, sex, occupation etc and we could narrow it down to <20 people based on other info they had shared. Then you fold in their posting patterns and it's pretty obvious who is at work (posting 9 to 5pm) vs home (posting 7pm to 1am). Again, you keep adding constraints and the intersection of the Venn diagrams gets smaller and smaller. This was all in the early 2000s before we had cellphones that tracked your location and ad infrastructure that followed you around the internet.
- eth0up 8mo ago
  So how do you think this situation will change now that LexisNexis, Oracle, Palantir, Clearview and others are all converging with our four frontier LLM models (plus military contracts) or directly with their own AI? What used to require a little work is now instant. And we're much further into the predictive part than most will admit.
- api 8mo ago
  Think about browser fingerprinting. Every little bit of info is literally one more bit, so by the time you get to 32 bits you’ve narrowed it down to one in four billion. An oversimplification but that’s the idea. Being strongly private online requires spy tradecraft levels of precaution.
  - ethbr1 8mo ago
Forgeties79 8mo ago
> “Two things can be true at the same time” — he holds nuanced positions I feel the need to point out that 99% of the time that phrase is essentially an insult and isn’t indicative of a “nuanced position” lol it generally means “you’re myopic in your views/your argument lacks nuance.” That strikes me as a pretty charitable interpretation by the model there. You seem like a good dude, and I’m not going to pretend I haven’t thrown out the flippant quip here and there in my comments. I just thought that interpretation was pretty funny.
- simonw 8mo ago
  Hah, that's completely fair. When I say "two things can be true at the same time" it's usually in a combative tone when I think someone is making a weak argument.
  - Forgeties79 8mo ago
    I’d be lying if I said I haven’t done literally the exact same thing. Hell I’ve probably done it recently.
sachaa 8mo ago
You can also do this with a simple bookmarklet, no extension needed. Create a new bookmark in your browser, name it something like "Profile HN User", and paste this as the URL: javascript:void(function(){var u;var m=window.location.href.match(/news\.ycombinator\.com\/user\?id=([^&]+)/);if(m){u=m[1]}else{u=prompt(%27Enter HN username:%27)}if(!u)return;var msg=%27Profile this HN user: https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search_by_date?tags=comment,author_%27+u+%27%26hitsPerPage=1000%27;window.open(%27https://claude.ai/new?q=%27+encodeURIComponent(msg),%27_blank%27) https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search_by_date?tags=comment,au...})() If you're on a HN profile page (news.ycombinator.com/user?id=someone) it grabs the username automatically. Otherwise it prompts you to type one. It copies the profiling prompt to your clipboard and opens a new Claude conversation, just Cmd/Ctrl+V and hit Enter.
plun9 8mo ago
You can just ask a chatbot about Hacker News or reddit users based on their username.
- aworks 8mo ago
  I asked about my comments and was amused by one part of the answer: 6. Slightly dry, understated style The tone is usually compact, matter-of-fact, and occasionally wry rather than performative. Even their Wuhan taxi-driver remark has that deadpan “I have seen the circus” flavor.
n2d4 8mo ago
This was interesting to do on my own profile. It got a bunch of personality attributes about me right that I haven't directly mentioned on here, which is impressive. I then followed it up with "Given my chat history, how do they compare to me?", and it started making comparisons of myself to myself. Very fun experience.
stego-tech 8mo ago
This is...disquieting. It's one thing to know that it's possible, another thing to know nation states or large megacorps are doing it, but another thing entirely to see such verbose output from free models about, well, me. The first two, I've made peace with (nothing I can do about it anyway). The last one picks quite fiercely at old trauma that really makes me reconsider my socials in general, not just HN. But maybe that's just the anxiety and trauma talking, encouraging me to recede back into the shadows and re-apply the old mask of "acceptableness" I've been trying to toss aside. Maybe the fact a free chatbot can do such a thorough analysis is in fact reason enough to stop worrying about every aspect of my identity and its perception by others, and instead just...be me, and deal with whatever consequences arise from that. I dunno. Just...lot of emotions, here, most of them quite bad.
- simonw 8mo ago
  Right, as is so often the case with AI stuff the thing that's disconcerting is how cheap and low friction and friction adopt available this ability is now. Anyone with access to a decent LLM can now perform a version of this in just a few seconds.
  - lysace 8mo ago
    [flagged]
  - stego-tech 8mo ago
    It's a lot to take in, if I'm being honest. Growing up in the sort of cultures where gossip and tabloids were the norm, this tool is painful to me in a way I'm not sure many folks can understand. It's not even low friction anymore; it's no friction, in the sense that anyone with a chatbot and minimal rails can just ask it to do these sorts of profiles now, on anyone they choose. We desperately need to modernize laws around discrimination in light of the proliferation of these tools. No longer does someone need to thread the needle in interviews around "illegal" questions to find something to (metaphorically) hang an interviewee with, as these tools can pick it apart quite cleanly. People in protected classes are going to get reamed by bad actors leveraging these tools. That said, after rubber ducking with a friend on this, I've come to the conclusion that there's two paths forward from this point: flight (scrubbing socials, hiding online, creating an acceptable persona) or fight (being firmly authentic, owning your weirdness, and accepting you can't control the outcomes of others' actions using these tools). I've spent decades in 'flight', and I'm tired of it. I can't control who uses these tools and to what end, so I may as well just be my damn self anyhow and do regular threat assessments accordingly. The more people who behave authentically, the less power these tools have over us.
SanjayMehta 8mo ago
"Fetched 0 comments." Edit: turns out it's case sensitive. Sounds about right: roughly “anti-imperialist realist” with Indian/Global South anchoring and paleoconservative/libertarian-adjacent distrust of state-corporate surveillance power.
few 8mo ago
See also https://antirez.com/news/150 https://antirez.com/news/150 https://antirez.com/hnstyle?username=pg&threshold=20&action=search https://antirez.com/hnstyle?username=pg&threshold=20&action=... Which lets you find the alts of a handle
- defrost 8mo ago
  suspected alts .. like the pg example I also have similar accounts with similar match levels and I know I've never had a HN alt, nor do I recognise any of my suggested alts as familar accounts I've interacted with.
michaelteter 8mo ago
And note that HN does not allow you to delete your comments after a short time passes. If you contact them and ask for your data to be deleted, they will directly refuse.
- tasuki 8mo ago
  Yes it would break things. Also it's impossible to delete things from the internet, so a bit cute to attempt to do it...
  - michaelteter 8mo ago
    The comment text could be replaced with (deleted), and the poster name could be as well. And while other sites mirroring HN might keep the original, that’s a separate issue.
sgbeal 8mo ago
(...does this thing to check own profile[^1]...) > Old man raising fist at, and yelling at, clouds. Get off his lawn. [^1]: not really - this is speculation (so... kinda the same thing the LLM is doing) but is possibly an accurate representation.
tamimio 8mo ago
> Recurring Hobby Horse >The word "engineer" being diluted by software/bootcamp culture is something they return to obsessively — arguably their strongest ideological position alongside surveillance criticism Busted!! That being said, not surprised because it listed exactly what I want my persona to appear, does that mean I am like that irl? No, I rarely bring the above “engineer” term IRL let alone to be obsessed about it, but in HN it makes sense to bring up, rest are mostly about techie stuff that I usually don’t bring with my friends or family. Also, this can be about anything you produce, like your blog, books, YouTube, or anything, that personality is what attracts (or repels) other people to be around you, it’s human society 101.
Simulacra 8mo ago
I've been doing this for a long time, it's amazing what ChatGPT can suss out with enough data. I like to feed it comments from message boards to try to uncover interesting business opportunities, or threads to follow for my own research.
raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
Just pasting my last 100 comments into ChatGPT using the API and cutting out anything positive it said about me… “Your communication style is direct and often adversarial, using rhetorical questions and sharp analogies to pressure-test assumptions, with little tolerance for what you see as naïve, performative, or abstract reasoning. You prioritize competence, execution, and practical tradeoffs over signaling or theory, and while that makes your analysis grounded and often incisive, it can also make your stance appear combative and less receptive to edge cases or emerging paradigms that don’t yet fit established incentive structures”
zoogeny 8mo ago
It is interesting that Marc Andreesen was having a bit of a X crash out over his belief that introspection is bad [1] I disagree because I tend to seek a middle way. I would agree that too much (excessive) introspection is bad. But I would argue that too little is equally bad. I think obsessively examining ones own comment history would verge on excessive. I'm wondering how much LLM analysis of my public and private life can remain healthy. 1.https://x.com/pmarca/status/2035190797218587116 https://x.com/pmarca/status/2035190797218587116
- inetknght 8mo ago
  > I think obsessively examining ones own comment history would verge on excessive If you write a journal, do you not sometimes review the things you've written? This is no different. If you read the whole journal every day before writing a new entry, then perhaps it is a but excessive. But a review once or twice a year is not a bad thing.
  - zoogeny 8mo ago
    I very much take your point, and literally the paragraph before I said "... I tend to seek a middle way". So if you think reviewing once or twice a year is right for you, then go for it. But to answer your specific question: I do keep journals and I almost never review them. I have a box with 20+ years of handwritten journals in it. Once every couple of years I'll even open the box and flip through a few pages of a few of the books and read a couple of pages. But that is generally all I do and I have no desire to do any more than that. I also have maybe 100 journal entries in Google Docs and to the best of my recollection I have never read a single one of them after they were written. Lately I've been using LLMs as a kind of active journal, where I engage in a dialogue as a means to externalizing my thoughts and refining ideas through critical feedback. I have never gone back and re-read any of those conversations. I'm not making a value claim here, just answering you honestly. It isn't that I think one should or shouldn't review their journals, it is that it doesn't give me pleasure to do so and I find no personal value in it.
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
ich 8mo ago
Nice! Quite accurate as well. Apart from: " The Atari + German book reference indicates: * Interest in legacy computing / systems history " No. I'm just that old. I read the book when the Atari ST was state of the art :-)
Ancapistani 8mo ago
This is impressive, and a bit terrifying. My “profile” is extremely in depth and mostly accurate. I’ve always treated this account as at most pseudo-anonymous, so no harm done - but there is easily enough information there to identify me. In fact, I think I’ll try to do just that tomorrow as a weekend project. I created this account after using my real name here for years, to build at least some kind of separation. At the time, I think I was applying for jobs and had a couple of interviews - positive ones, oddly enough - where my political views were referenced. Given our political climate in the US, I decided it would be best to make at least my current views more difficult to associate with me. For me, this just underscores the fact that while we always knew those data were out there for someone targeting you and determined - this makes it an order of magnitude easier to access. … I just typed out an explanation why I made the above statement, but decided not to post it as it describes a potential criminal act that would likely be very profitable :(.
irthomasthomas 8mo ago
A friend made a cli tool, ideal for agents, which does this and can aggregate intelligence across multiple platforms. https://github.com/bm-github/owasp-social-osint-agent https://github.com/bm-github/owasp-social-osint-agent
jhanschoo 8mo ago
Currently in the process of migrating from Gemini to Claude, this post has been a boon to me in getting Claude to know about myself into its memory.
Bishop197 8mo ago
[dead]

88 points by simonw 8mo ago

HAHAHA - I like me. but claude (sonnet 4.6) seemed like it was cheerleading a bit

> This is arguably their defining HN characteristic: they are one of the most vocal, persistent AI optimists on the platform. They claim ~90-95% of their shipped code is AI-generated, report 5-10x productivity gains, and have built a detailed methodology around it — using Playwright for visual verification, static typechecking as a hallucination filter, and e2e test suites as automated validation harnesses Wow, I sound really annoying. Sorry about that everyone!

hypercube33 8mo ago
I sound like an annoying old people I guess so I think I'm worse. Either way I forgive you. (GPT called me a wiring closet gremlin)
- giardini 8mo ago
  "wiring closet gremlin"!? I knew the original!8-)) Hope you aren't him!

bibimsz 8mo ago

hacker news is a goldmine since you can't delete comments nor even delete your account. this site is a privacy nightmare, in a world where everyone is excited to cancel and dox for unpopular opinions (on this site that means anything to the right of bernie sanders).

BenjiWiebe 8mo ago
Feel free to not post on here, if you're concerned about privacy.
b112 8mo ago
Have you read the FAQ? HN won't hang you out to dry.
- lysace 8mo ago
  They will offer to rename your account name to something random. They will not delete all your comments. They might agree to delete a very small number of comments. That does not help much in the profile-building/AI perspective. They should be transparent about this upfront, on the signup page, but I suppose that would hurt conversation stats. Cliché but true: On HN we are the product.
  - toomuchtodo 8mo ago
    I ingest, process, and archive the HN firehose. I know others do as well. Regardless of how one feels, once you put something on the Internet, any hope of control of that info is gone forever. Act accordingly. They are kind enough to make changes within some forum integrity tolerances, even though those changes are likely to help very little from an opsec perspective. Edit: my use case is building a graph for archiving every link ever posted on HN (posts and comments), if that’s relevant. The contents of HN comments have little value to me for my workflow, nor do I profile users.
    - lysace 8mo ago
      [flagged]
      - toomuchtodo 8mo ago
        That’s a shame, I don’t have any feelings about you and wish you well regardless.
        TimorousBestie 8mo ago
        [flagged]
SilentM68 8mo ago
Correct!
raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
It could be worse, I have arguments from the 90s when I was on comp.sys.msc.advocacy
nunez 8mo ago
I actually appreciate this. I definitely panicked that one time I posted something spicy about a past employer using this handle and couldn't remove it, but forcing that accountability makes me think about what I say and whether it's worth posting it for everyone to see forever.

alexgandy 8mo ago

This just in; posting ridiculous amounts of personal information on the internet can lead to you being profiled correctly. Wild stuff.

DoctorOetker 8mo ago
Not entirely correctly though, since there are forms of censorship even on HN, which selectively blinds any method of analysis in a systematically biased way.
cm2012 8mo ago
There was an Irish mafia guy who was caught because his anonymous restaurant review profile got linked to him.
- barrkel 8mo ago
  Christy Kinahan is still at large, in or around Dubai.
Retr0id 8mo ago
We all know this, but in the past someone probably wasn't going to go through thousands of your comments unless you've really pissed them off. It's worth realising how much lower the activation energy is these days.
- alexgandy 8mo ago
  You’re right about the speed; but it doesn’t change the outcome. If you don’t want it to be associated with you, you simply can’t put it out there.
  - rdevilla 8mo ago
    Yes, and then people wonder why you are a gaping hole in the social media surveillance dragnet with your absence. It took 12 years for me to make my first comment on this account.

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

JSR_FDED 8mo ago

Given a profile like this, how good would an LLM be at figuring out whether the profile if from a bot or a real person?

wolvoleo 8mo ago
Probably pretty good. Humans are very consistent in ways that LLMs aren't.

janalsncm 8mo ago

Not doubting the method works in general, but Simon Willison is a public-enough figure so the baseline level of info is higher than just HN comments. If you turn off Claude’s web search: > Simon Willison is a British software developer, blogger, and open-source advocate, best known for…

simonw 8mo ago
I'm pretty sure Claude hasn't picked up my fondness of kākāpō parrots yet.
- chewbacha 8mo ago
  Well, now it might.
- xnx 8mo ago
  "Make an image of a kākāpō parrot riding a bicycle"
  - simonw 8mo ago
    I usually ask for a skateboard, kākāpō have dumpy little legs.
    - ethbr1 8mo ago
      {Decades in the future} 'Simon Willison's most enduring contributions to modern computing are the pervasive edge case optimizations present in all modern AIs to draw pictures of animals with inconvenient limb arrangements using a variety of human motive devices.'
georgemcbay 8mo ago
[dead]
sdoering 8mo ago
I just had Claude Code built the comment-fetching part as a CLI tool. And then use this data on my last 200 comments to profile me. In an empty context. Without web search. Holy moly - it was damn accurate. Those comments spanned the last few year, as I became less and less active in social media/online comments in general. But it picked up on me being a snob about unprocessed food, having hard red lines that I sometimes take a very harsh stand over, as well as so many other things. I know I am quite open in what I write on the net and do not really fear future employers using this to qualify me - because if they do and deny me a job I know I would not have wanted to work there in the first place. And yes, this is a position of old white grumpy male privilege. Still. It was impressive and "quite a bit dystopian". All in all, from posting the URL to Simon's blog post to being profiled took less than 6 minutes.

alexpotato 8mo ago

Story time: My first full time job (early 2000s) was working for a firm that did online cybersecurity related investigations for Fortune 500 companies (generally via a 3rd party law firm they had retained). A big part of this was running investigations into people running "pump and dump" stock schemes on Yahoo message boards. We would generally start by scraping all of the posts for a user who had instigated one of these and then handing off the posts to an analyst. It's amazing: a. how much info people give out even when they think they are being careful b. related to a, how even small tidbits combined over time can build a pretty accurate picture of who someone is. e.g. they post "oh man, the Cubs lost", then a year later "went for a walk on Lakeshore drive", another year later, there was a fire at my local subway stop etc etc and you pretty quickly narrow down the rough neighborhood where they live in Chicago. Combined with tools like Lexis Nexus and you get a list of people that you can narrow down by age, sex, occupation etc and we could narrow it down to <20 people based on other info they had shared. Then you fold in their posting patterns and it's pretty obvious who is at work (posting 9 to 5pm) vs home (posting 7pm to 1am). Again, you keep adding constraints and the intersection of the Venn diagrams gets smaller and smaller. This was all in the early 2000s before we had cellphones that tracked your location and ad infrastructure that followed you around the internet.

eth0up 8mo ago
So how do you think this situation will change now that LexisNexis, Oracle, Palantir, Clearview and others are all converging with our four frontier LLM models (plus military contracts) or directly with their own AI? What used to require a little work is now instant. And we're much further into the predictive part than most will admit.
api 8mo ago
Think about browser fingerprinting. Every little bit of info is literally one more bit, so by the time you get to 32 bits you’ve narrowed it down to one in four billion. An oversimplification but that’s the idea. Being strongly private online requires spy tradecraft levels of precaution.
- ethbr1 8mo ago

Forgeties79 8mo ago

> “Two things can be true at the same time” — he holds nuanced positions I feel the need to point out that 99% of the time that phrase is essentially an insult and isn’t indicative of a “nuanced position” lol it generally means “you’re myopic in your views/your argument lacks nuance.” That strikes me as a pretty charitable interpretation by the model there. You seem like a good dude, and I’m not going to pretend I haven’t thrown out the flippant quip here and there in my comments. I just thought that interpretation was pretty funny.

simonw 8mo ago
Hah, that's completely fair. When I say "two things can be true at the same time" it's usually in a combative tone when I think someone is making a weak argument.
- Forgeties79 8mo ago
  I’d be lying if I said I haven’t done literally the exact same thing. Hell I’ve probably done it recently.

sachaa 8mo ago

You can also do this with a simple bookmarklet, no extension needed. Create a new bookmark in your browser, name it something like "Profile HN User", and paste this as the URL: javascript:void(function(){var u;var m=window.location.href.match(/news\.ycombinator\.com\/user\?id=([^&]+)/);if(m){u=m[1]}else{u=prompt(%27Enter HN username:%27)}if(!u)return;var msg=%27Profile this HN user: https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search_by_date?tags=comment,author_%27+u+%27%26hitsPerPage=1000%27;window.open(%27https://claude.ai/new?q=%27+encodeURIComponent(msg),%27_blank%27) https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search_by_date?tags=comment,au...})() If you're on a HN profile page (news.ycombinator.com/user?id=someone) it grabs the username automatically. Otherwise it prompts you to type one. It copies the profiling prompt to your clipboard and opens a new Claude conversation, just Cmd/Ctrl+V and hit Enter.

plun9 8mo ago

You can just ask a chatbot about Hacker News or reddit users based on their username.

aworks 8mo ago
I asked about my comments and was amused by one part of the answer: 6. Slightly dry, understated style The tone is usually compact, matter-of-fact, and occasionally wry rather than performative. Even their Wuhan taxi-driver remark has that deadpan “I have seen the circus” flavor.

n2d4 8mo ago

This was interesting to do on my own profile. It got a bunch of personality attributes about me right that I haven't directly mentioned on here, which is impressive. I then followed it up with "Given my chat history, how do they compare to me?", and it started making comparisons of myself to myself. Very fun experience.

stego-tech 8mo ago

This is...disquieting. It's one thing to know that it's possible, another thing to know nation states or large megacorps are doing it, but another thing entirely to see such verbose output from free models about, well, me. The first two, I've made peace with (nothing I can do about it anyway). The last one picks quite fiercely at old trauma that really makes me reconsider my socials in general, not just HN. But maybe that's just the anxiety and trauma talking, encouraging me to recede back into the shadows and re-apply the old mask of "acceptableness" I've been trying to toss aside. Maybe the fact a free chatbot can do such a thorough analysis is in fact reason enough to stop worrying about every aspect of my identity and its perception by others, and instead just...be me, and deal with whatever consequences arise from that. I dunno. Just...lot of emotions, here, most of them quite bad.

simonw 8mo ago
Right, as is so often the case with AI stuff the thing that's disconcerting is how cheap and low friction and friction adopt available this ability is now. Anyone with access to a decent LLM can now perform a version of this in just a few seconds.
- lysace 8mo ago
  [flagged]
- stego-tech 8mo ago
  It's a lot to take in, if I'm being honest. Growing up in the sort of cultures where gossip and tabloids were the norm, this tool is painful to me in a way I'm not sure many folks can understand. It's not even low friction anymore; it's no friction, in the sense that anyone with a chatbot and minimal rails can just ask it to do these sorts of profiles now, on anyone they choose. We desperately need to modernize laws around discrimination in light of the proliferation of these tools. No longer does someone need to thread the needle in interviews around "illegal" questions to find something to (metaphorically) hang an interviewee with, as these tools can pick it apart quite cleanly. People in protected classes are going to get reamed by bad actors leveraging these tools. That said, after rubber ducking with a friend on this, I've come to the conclusion that there's two paths forward from this point: flight (scrubbing socials, hiding online, creating an acceptable persona) or fight (being firmly authentic, owning your weirdness, and accepting you can't control the outcomes of others' actions using these tools). I've spent decades in 'flight', and I'm tired of it. I can't control who uses these tools and to what end, so I may as well just be my damn self anyhow and do regular threat assessments accordingly. The more people who behave authentically, the less power these tools have over us.

SanjayMehta 8mo ago

"Fetched 0 comments." Edit: turns out it's case sensitive. Sounds about right: roughly “anti-imperialist realist” with Indian/Global South anchoring and paleoconservative/libertarian-adjacent distrust of state-corporate surveillance power.

few 8mo ago

See also https://antirez.com/news/150 https://antirez.com/news/150 https://antirez.com/hnstyle?username=pg&threshold=20&action=search https://antirez.com/hnstyle?username=pg&threshold=20&action=... Which lets you find the alts of a handle

defrost 8mo ago
suspected alts .. like the pg example I also have similar accounts with similar match levels and I know I've never had a HN alt, nor do I recognise any of my suggested alts as familar accounts I've interacted with.

michaelteter 8mo ago

And note that HN does not allow you to delete your comments after a short time passes. If you contact them and ask for your data to be deleted, they will directly refuse.

tasuki 8mo ago
Yes it would break things. Also it's impossible to delete things from the internet, so a bit cute to attempt to do it...
- michaelteter 8mo ago
  The comment text could be replaced with (deleted), and the poster name could be as well. And while other sites mirroring HN might keep the original, that’s a separate issue.

sgbeal 8mo ago

(...does this thing to check own profile[^1]...) > Old man raising fist at, and yelling at, clouds. Get off his lawn. [^1]: not really - this is speculation (so... kinda the same thing the LLM is doing) but is possibly an accurate representation.

tamimio 8mo ago

> Recurring Hobby Horse >The word "engineer" being diluted by software/bootcamp culture is something they return to obsessively — arguably their strongest ideological position alongside surveillance criticism Busted!! That being said, not surprised because it listed exactly what I want my persona to appear, does that mean I am like that irl? No, I rarely bring the above “engineer” term IRL let alone to be obsessed about it, but in HN it makes sense to bring up, rest are mostly about techie stuff that I usually don’t bring with my friends or family. Also, this can be about anything you produce, like your blog, books, YouTube, or anything, that personality is what attracts (or repels) other people to be around you, it’s human society 101.

Simulacra 8mo ago

I've been doing this for a long time, it's amazing what ChatGPT can suss out with enough data. I like to feed it comments from message boards to try to uncover interesting business opportunities, or threads to follow for my own research.

raw_anon_1111 8mo ago

Just pasting my last 100 comments into ChatGPT using the API and cutting out anything positive it said about me… “Your communication style is direct and often adversarial, using rhetorical questions and sharp analogies to pressure-test assumptions, with little tolerance for what you see as naïve, performative, or abstract reasoning. You prioritize competence, execution, and practical tradeoffs over signaling or theory, and while that makes your analysis grounded and often incisive, it can also make your stance appear combative and less receptive to edge cases or emerging paradigms that don’t yet fit established incentive structures”

zoogeny 8mo ago

It is interesting that Marc Andreesen was having a bit of a X crash out over his belief that introspection is bad [1] I disagree because I tend to seek a middle way. I would agree that too much (excessive) introspection is bad. But I would argue that too little is equally bad. I think obsessively examining ones own comment history would verge on excessive. I'm wondering how much LLM analysis of my public and private life can remain healthy. 1.https://x.com/pmarca/status/2035190797218587116 https://x.com/pmarca/status/2035190797218587116

inetknght 8mo ago
> I think obsessively examining ones own comment history would verge on excessive If you write a journal, do you not sometimes review the things you've written? This is no different. If you read the whole journal every day before writing a new entry, then perhaps it is a but excessive. But a review once or twice a year is not a bad thing.
- zoogeny 8mo ago
  I very much take your point, and literally the paragraph before I said "... I tend to seek a middle way". So if you think reviewing once or twice a year is right for you, then go for it. But to answer your specific question: I do keep journals and I almost never review them. I have a box with 20+ years of handwritten journals in it. Once every couple of years I'll even open the box and flip through a few pages of a few of the books and read a couple of pages. But that is generally all I do and I have no desire to do any more than that. I also have maybe 100 journal entries in Google Docs and to the best of my recollection I have never read a single one of them after they were written. Lately I've been using LLMs as a kind of active journal, where I engage in a dialogue as a means to externalizing my thoughts and refining ideas through critical feedback. I have never gone back and re-read any of those conversations. I'm not making a value claim here, just answering you honestly. It isn't that I think one should or shouldn't review their journals, it is that it doesn't give me pleasure to do so and I find no personal value in it.

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

ich 8mo ago

Nice! Quite accurate as well. Apart from: " The Atari + German book reference indicates: * Interest in legacy computing / systems history " No. I'm just that old. I read the book when the Atari ST was state of the art :-)

Ancapistani 8mo ago

This is impressive, and a bit terrifying. My “profile” is extremely in depth and mostly accurate. I’ve always treated this account as at most pseudo-anonymous, so no harm done - but there is easily enough information there to identify me. In fact, I think I’ll try to do just that tomorrow as a weekend project. I created this account after using my real name here for years, to build at least some kind of separation. At the time, I think I was applying for jobs and had a couple of interviews - positive ones, oddly enough - where my political views were referenced. Given our political climate in the US, I decided it would be best to make at least my current views more difficult to associate with me. For me, this just underscores the fact that while we always knew those data were out there for someone targeting you and determined - this makes it an order of magnitude easier to access. … I just typed out an explanation why I made the above statement, but decided not to post it as it describes a potential criminal act that would likely be very profitable :(.

irthomasthomas 8mo ago

A friend made a cli tool, ideal for agents, which does this and can aggregate intelligence across multiple platforms. https://github.com/bm-github/owasp-social-osint-agent https://github.com/bm-github/owasp-social-osint-agent

jhanschoo 8mo ago

Currently in the process of migrating from Gemini to Claude, this post has been a boon to me in getting Claude to know about myself into its memory.

Bishop197 8mo ago

[dead]