February 4, 2026
From Show HN to Oh No, HN
Show HN: EpsteIn – Search the Epstein files for your LinkedIn connections
Missing link, privacy panic, and 'name twin' drama
TLDR: A hacker demo promises to scan your LinkedIn contacts against public Epstein court files, but the thread spiraled over a missing link, data-privacy fears, and noisy name matches. Commenters split between transparency and recklessness, with warnings that common names could smear the wrong people.
Someone on Hacker News dropped a DIY script that checks your LinkedIn contacts against publicly released Epstein court documents—and the comment section promptly exploded. The vibe? Intrigued, alarmed, and a little chaotic. First replies called out a vanishing launch: “link not found,” “Is your repo private?” Cue eye-rolls: a Show HN without a show. Meanwhile, one user explained it simply: the tool hits a public search API to look for exact name matches, then spits out an HTML report.
That’s where the privacy panic and false-positive fear kicked in. “Nice try, Cambridge Analytica,” snarked one commenter, accusing the project of fishing for people’s contact lists. Others warned that names aren’t unique, meaning your “John Smith” could be another “John Smith”—and reputations could get dragged unfairly. A more sober take noted Epstein’s web touched “many power layers,” but the crowd mostly debated whether this is transparency or trouble. Is it a useful way to mine public records, or a reckless way to spook your network? The memes wrote themselves: people joked about combing their rolodex for scandal while trying not to upload their entire LinkedIn life. Verdict: the code is less the story than the ethical crossfire—and the missing link
Key Points
- •EpsteIn is a Python script that searches publicly released Epstein court documents for mentions of LinkedIn connections.
- •The tool requires a LinkedIn data export containing Connections.csv and uses exact phrase matching on full names.
- •Setup involves Python 3.6+, the requests library, creating a virtual environment, and installing dependencies.
- •Usage includes running EpsteIn.py with a required --contacts flag and an optional --output flag for the HTML report.
- •The generated HTML report provides summaries, contact cards with excerpts, and links to source PDFs on justice.gov; common names may yield false positives.