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Profiling Hacker News users based on their comments

simonwillison.net

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Re: Profiling Hacker News users based on their comments

#21

Post by lysace »

b112 wrote: post #16
bibimsz wrote: post #3

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).

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

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.

Re: Profiling Hacker News users based on their comments

#22

Post by SilentM68 »

bibimsz wrote: post #3

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).

Correct!

Re: Profiling Hacker News users based on their comments

#23

Post by Forgeties79 »

> “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.

Re: Profiling Hacker News users based on their comments

#24

Post by rdevilla »

alexgandy wrote: post #17
Retr0id wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Yes, and then people wonder why you are a gaping hole in the social media surveillance dragnet with your absence. It took 12 years for me to make my first comment on this account.

Re: Profiling Hacker News users based on their comments

#26

Post by eth0up »

alexpotato wrote: post #14

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 t…

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.

Re: Profiling Hacker News users based on their comments

#28

Post by llbbdd »

shusaku wrote: post #18
alexgandy wrote: post #4

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

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.

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

Re: Profiling Hacker News users based on their comments

#29

Post by sachaa »

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.

Re: Profiling Hacker News users based on their comments

#30

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

bibimsz wrote: post #3

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).

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