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.

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.

> 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!

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…

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,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.

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 :(.

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

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.

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”

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

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 :-)

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.

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.

> “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.

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

See also

https://antirez.com/news/150

https://antirez.com/hnstyle?username=pg&threshold=20&action=...

Which lets you find the alts of a handle

undefined

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?

(...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.

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.

> 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.

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

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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).

"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.

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