Profiling Hacker News users based on their comments

https://simonwillison.net/2026/Mar/21/profiling-hacker-news-users/

by simonw • 4 months ago

88 82 4 months ago

johnfn• 4 months 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• 4 months 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• 4 months ago

"wiring closet gremlin"!?

I knew the original!8-)) Hope you aren't him!

bibimsz• 4 months 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• 4 months ago

Feel free to not post on here, if you're concerned about privacy.

b112• 4 months ago

Have you read the FAQ? HN won't hang you out to dry.

lysace• 4 months 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.

SilentM682• 4 months ago

Correct!

raw_anon_11112• 4 months ago

It could be worse, I have arguments from the 90s when I was on comp.sys.msc.advocacy

nunez3• 4 months 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.

alexgandy2• 4 months ago

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

DoctorOetker• 4 months 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• 4 months ago

There was an Irish mafia guy who was caught because his anonymous restaurant review profile got linked to him.

barrkel• 4 months ago

Christy Kinahan is still at large, in or around Dubai.

Retr0id• 4 months 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.

alexgandy2• 4 months 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.

SilentM682• 4 months ago

Yeah, it takes just one carefully worded comment to turn the majority of readers in this forum against you, particularly if the comment does not align with the majority's point of view. Definitely a place with a low melting point where my HN Karma, consistently takes a beating :)

shusaku• 4 months ago

The real game starts when you use a tool like this to introduce a counter narrative. Now excuse while I’m off to play in my next professional basketball game.

llbbdd• 4 months ago

I'll see you on the court, Victor Wembanyama.

stefan_• 4 months ago

Yeah, but now with AI. Because the shtick of this blog is "everything is ~~computer~~ AI".

JSR_FDED• 4 months 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• 4 months ago

Probably pretty good. Humans are very consistent in ways that LLMs aren't.

janalsncm2• 4 months 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…

simonw4• 4 months ago

I'm pretty sure Claude hasn't picked up my fondness of kākāpō parrots yet.

chewbacha• 4 months ago

Well, now it might.

xnx• 4 months ago

"Make an image of a kākāpō parrot riding a bicycle"

sdoering• 4 months 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.

alexpotato5• 4 months 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• 4 months 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• 4 months 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.

ethbr16• 4 months ago

Or just making certain topics verboten. Different pieces of information can be order of magnitude more or less useful.

nunez3• 4 months ago

People search engines do a lot of the heavy lifting and can give you that data on a platter for a few dollars. I pay for a service that employs people to periodically do data removal requests with them. It's not great that _they_ have a bunch of data about me, but I'd rather it be in one place that tries to safeguard it than in a bunch of places all over the Internet. (There are A LOT of people search engines.)

As for using clues to discover people's whereabouts and such: lots of police/detective shows have turned "finding where people are through Instagram photos" into a meme. Most people don't think about cybersecurity outside of "oh, I need to change my password now."

ethbr16• 4 months ago

I pay for a service that employs people to periodically do data removal requests with them.

Curious about any recommendations from you or others.

Most people don't think about cybersecurity outside of "oh, I need to change my password now."

Cyber anonymity is a concept that most people don't think about at all, especially post-Facebook normalization of real names ~10s.

In many ways, it feels like Eternal September talking to younger people who never used a pseudonym online.

martin-t2• 4 months ago

I thought I had deja vu when reading your comment so I searched and found that you wrote something very similar 6 years ago, then 4 months ago and then 3 comments within the last month.

Out of curiosity and without meaning it to sound like an accusation, did you write such similar posts by hand or do you use some form of automation for commenting?

alexpotato5• 4 months ago

It’s funny because someone asked me about this on Twitter too. Specifically, how was I able to reply to tweets of other people with a relevant Twitter thread I had already written.

It’s all manual and I guess just how my brain works. My wife actually calls it “the database” because I can quickly access stories and I apparently tell them in a very similar way.

I’m just as impressed that you noticed and had the Déjà vu.

tedmiston• 4 months ago

b. related to a, how even small tidbits combined over time can build a pretty accurate picture of who someone is.

that's basically why clickstream analytics is so powerful

Forgeties792• 4 months 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.

simonw4• 4 months 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.

Forgeties792• 4 months 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• 4 months 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,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• 4 months ago

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

aworks• 4 months 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• 4 months 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-tech2• 4 months 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.

simonw4• 4 months 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.

stego-tech2• 4 months 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.

bostik• 4 months ago

We've come a long way in some aspects, while staying pretty much in place in others.

I taught infosec 101 course at a university ~20 years ago. (Twice.) On the topic of privacy I used an example of harvesting data on peoples' habits, movements and behaviours and then said that as a society we use two different terms for the same thing. "When an individual does this, it's called stalking. When a company does this, it's called data mining."

The economics department students, many of who already knew they would want to work in marketing, were quite offended.

nirui• 4 months ago

From another perspective, it's like hearing others judging you behind your back. First few times it's awkward and maybe even annoying, but given enough time you stops to give a damn about it.

But, the problem is real if it's a nation states or megacorps are doing it. They'll use such tech in an unjustified way, make a misjudgement, and then ask you to explain yourself out of the situation. Yeah, they're definitely going that, because they don't give a damn about it.

ethbr16• 4 months ago

I have a sneaking suspicion this is going to be 21st century communism's (read China's) fatal flaw: the corrosive effect of panopticon monitoring on population productivity.

Because eventually apparatchiks with the data at their fingertips are going to use it to rule out the next Einsteins from participating in {insert major Chinese project}, and you've effectively self-selected at scale for people whose shared characteristic is "not being different."

We'll see if the US and Europe course correct on individual freedom enough to reap the benefits of that though.

ludicrousdispla• 4 months ago

as an exercise, you could simply repost the last 1000 of simonw's comments as your own

vpribish• 4 months ago

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

SanjayMehta• 4 months 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• 4 months ago

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

defrost• 4 months 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.

michaelteter2• 4 months 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• 4 months 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...

michaelteter2• 4 months 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• 4 months 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• 4 months 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• 4 months 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_11112• 4 months 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”

zoogeny2• 4 months 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

inetknght• 4 months 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.

zoogeny2• 4 months 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.

ich• 4 months 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• 4 months 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• 4 months 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

jhanschoo• 4 months 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.

Profiling Hacker News users based on their comments

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