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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

#31

Post by SilentM68 »

Retr0id wrote: post #10
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.

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.

Yeah, it takes just one carefully worded comment to turn the majority of readers in this forum against you, particularly if the comment does not align with the majority's point of view. Definitely a place with a low melting point where my HN Karma, consistently takes a beating :)

Re: Profiling Hacker News users based on their comments

#32

Post by simonw »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #23

> “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 ha…

Hah, that's completely fair. When I say "two things can be true at the same time" it's usually in a combative tone when I think someone is making a weak argument.

Re: Profiling Hacker News users based on their comments

#34

Post by xnx »

simonw wrote: post #15
janalsncm wrote: post #13

Not doubting the method works in general, but Simon Willison is a public-enough figure so the baseline level of info is higher than just HN comments. If you turn off Claude’s web search: > Simon Willison is a British software developer, blogger, and open-source advocate, best known for…

I'm pretty sure Claude hasn't picked up my fondness of kākāpō parrots yet.

"Make an image of a kākāpō parrot riding a bicycle"

Re: Profiling Hacker News users based on their comments

#35

Post by simonw »

xnx wrote: post #34
simonw wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure Claude hasn't picked up my fondness of kākāpō parrots yet.

"Make an image of a kākāpō parrot riding a bicycle"

I usually ask for a skateboard, kākāpō have dumpy little legs.

Re: Profiling Hacker News users based on their comments

#36

Post by n2d4 »

This was interesting to do on my own profile. It got a bunch of personality attributes about me right that I haven't directly mentioned on here, which is impressive.

I then followed it up with "Given my chat history, how do they compare to me?", and it started making comparisons of myself to myself. Very fun experience.

Re: Profiling Hacker News users based on their comments

#37

Post by api »

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…

Think about browser fingerprinting. Every little bit of info is literally one more bit, so by the time you get to 32 bits you’ve narrowed it down to one in four billion. An oversimplification but that’s the idea.

Being strongly private online requires spy tradecraft levels of precaution.

Re: Profiling Hacker News users based on their comments

#38

Post by toomuchtodo »

lysace wrote: post #21
b112 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I ingest, process, and archive the HN firehose. I know others do as well. Regardless of how one feels, once you put something on the Internet, any hope of control of that info is gone forever. Act accordingly. They are kind enough to make changes within some forum integrity tolerances, even though those changes are likely to help very little from an opsec perspective.

Edit: my use case is building a graph for archiving every link ever posted on HN (posts and comments), if that’s relevant. The contents of HN comments have little value to me for my workflow, nor do I profile users.

Re: Profiling Hacker News users based on their comments

#39

Post by lysace »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #38
lysace wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I ingest, process, and archive the HN firehose. I know others do as well. Regardless of how one feels, once you put something on the Internet, any hope of control of that info is gone forever. Act accordingly. They are kind enough to make changes within some forum integrity tolerances, even though those changes are likely to help very little from an opsec perspective. Edit: my use case is building a graph for archivi…

[flagged]

Re: Profiling Hacker News users based on their comments

#40

Post by stego-tech »

This is...disquieting. It's one thing to know that it's possible, another thing to know nation states or large megacorps are doing it, but another thing entirely to see such verbose output from free models about, well, me.

The first two, I've made peace with (nothing I can do about it anyway). The last one picks quite fiercely at old trauma that really makes me reconsider my socials in general, not just HN.

But maybe that's just the anxiety and trauma talking, encouraging me to recede back into the shadows and re-apply the old mask of "acceptableness" I've been trying to toss aside. Maybe the fact a free chatbot can do such a thorough analysis is in fact reason enough to stop worrying about every aspect of my identity and its perception by others, and instead just...be me, and deal with whatever consequences arise from that.

I dunno. Just...lot of emotions, here, most of them quite bad.

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