Profiling Hacker News users based on their comments
BlogSimon WillisonMar 21, 2026
AI Summary
A mildly dystopian prompt: feed an LLM someone's last 1,000 HN comments and ask 'profile this user.' Simon builds a tool around the Algolia HN API — the results are unsettlingly sharp, and raise real questions about public-data privacy.
From the original
Sponsored by: Honeycomb — AI agents behave unpredictably. Get the context you need to debug what actually happened. Read the blog 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…
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