March 21, 2026
The comments remember everything
Profiling Hacker News users based on their comments
“HN can’t delete your receipts” — users freak out over AI psychoanalyzing their comments
TLDR: A developer showed how an AI can read your last 1,000 Hacker News comments and spit out an eerily accurate life profile, sparking panic over a site where nothing can be deleted. Some users shrug and say “you overshare, you get profiled,” while others see a permanent, dox-ready time bomb.
Hacker News, the geeky message board famous for long rants and un-editable comments, is having a full-on identity crisis after developer Simon Willison showed how easy it is to feed your last 1,000 posts into an AI and get a disturbingly accurate personality profile back. His own profile reads like a creepily observant biography: where he works, what he believes, even how much he pays for an AI subscription.
The crowd instantly split into camps. One side is basically saying, well, duh. As one commenter mocked, if you “post ridiculous amounts of personal information on the internet,” of course a robot can figure you out. Others are way more alarmed, calling Hacker News “a privacy nightmare” because you can’t delete old comments or even your account, a terrifying thought in an era of mob pile-ons and online “canceling.”
Then there’s the meta-drama: some users point out that profiling Simon is easy because he’s already a well-known public figure, so don’t assume the machines are magical mind-readers. Another person ups the paranoia by asking the most sci‑fi question of all: could an AI use this data to tell apart a real human from a bot in the first place? In classic internet fashion, the story of AI profiling users has turned into users profiling themselves, each other, and the platforms they can never really escape from.
Key Points
- •Simon Willison demonstrates how to profile Hacker News users by feeding their last 1,000 comments into a large language model with the prompt “Profile this user.”
- •He retrieves user comments via the Algolia Hacker News API, which can filter comments by author and is accessible from any web page due to open CORS headers.
- •Willison used ChatGPT to build, and Claude to refine, a tool that fetches any user’s comments and provides a mobile-friendly copy-to-clipboard interface.
- •He primarily uses Claude Opus 4.6 to generate detailed user profiles from these comment histories, finding the results highly effective and revealing.
- •To illustrate the power of this approach, he includes a model-generated profile of himself, covering his professional identity, AI coding philosophy, work habits, technical interests, and security concerns.