Profiling Hacker News users based on their comments
Highlights
- ▸Feed an LLM 1,000 of someone's public comments and ask for a profile — the output is uncannily accurate, and it's an API-call level of effort
- ▸Privacy-through-obscurity is dead for public-comment graphs — HN, Reddit, Twitter, GitHub issues are all now cheaply profileable at scale
- ▸Algolia's HN API + CORS-open headers + a prompt is the whole pipeline — no scraping, no auth, runs from any web page
Original excerpt
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Here’s a mildly dystopian prompt I’ve been experimenting with recently: “Profile this user”, accompanied by a copy of their last 1,000 comments on Hacker News.
Obtaining those comments is easy. The Algolia Hacker News API supports listing comments sorted by date that have a specific tag, and the author of a comment is tagged there as author_username. Here’s a JSON feed of my (simonw) most recent comments, for example:
https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search_by_date?tags=comment,author_simonw&hitsPerPage=1000
The Algolia API is served with open CORS headers, which means…
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