Nice! Quite accurate as well. Apart from:
" The Atari + German book reference indicates:
* Interest in legacy computing / systems history "
No. I'm just that old. I read the book when the Atari ST was state of the art :-)
Profiling Hacker News users based on their comments
71–80 of 96 posts
Re: Profiling Hacker News users based on their comments
#72This is impressive, and a bit terrifying. My “profile” is extremely in depth and mostly accurate. I’ve always treated this account as at most pseudo-anonymous, so no harm done - but there is easily enough information there to identify me. In fact, I think I’ll try to do just that tomorrow as a weekend project.
I created this account after using my real name here for years, to build at least some kind of separation. At the time, I think I was applying for jobs and had a couple of interviews - positive ones, oddly enough - where my political views were referenced. Given our political climate in the US, I decided it would be best to make at least my current views more difficult to associate with me.
For me, this just underscores the fact that while we always knew those data were out there for someone targeting you and determined - this makes it an order of magnitude easier to access.
… I just typed out an explanation why I made the above statement, but decided not to post it as it describes a potential criminal act that would likely be very profitable :(.
Re: Profiling Hacker News users based on their comments
#73Story 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…
I thought I had deja vu when reading your comment so I searched and found that you wrote something very similar 6 years ago, then 4 months ago and then 3 comments within the last month. Out of curiosity and without meaning it to sound like an accusation, did you write such similar posts by hand or do you use some form of automation for commenting?
It’s funny because someone asked me about this on Twitter too. Specifically, how was I able to reply to tweets of other people with a relevant Twitter thread I had already written.
It’s all manual and I guess just how my brain works. My wife actually calls it “the database” because I can quickly access stories and I apparently tell them in a very similar way.
I’m just as impressed that you noticed and had the Déjà vu.
Re: Profiling Hacker News users based on their comments
#74A friend made a cli tool, ideal for agents, which does this and can aggregate intelligence across multiple platforms.
Re: Profiling Hacker News users based on their comments
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
I thought I had deja vu when reading your comment so I searched and found that you wrote something very similar 6 years ago, then 4 months ago and then 3 comments within the last month. Out of curiosity and without meaning it to sound like an accusation, did you write such similar posts by hand or do you use some form of automation for commenting?
It’s funny because someone asked me about this on Twitter too. Specifically, how was I able to reply to tweets of other people with a relevant Twitter thread I had already written. It’s all manual and I guess just how my brain works. My wife actually calls it “the database” because I can quickly access stories and I apparently tell them in a very similar way. I’m just as impressed that you noticed and had the Déjà vu…
if it's a good story, it is worth retelling. my personal approach is to try to link to the old post or at least mention that i told this before. i don't know if that is better or not though. but certainly if the story fits, then it should be posted, and here it fits.
Re: Profiling Hacker News users based on their comments
#76Currently in the process of migrating from Gemini to Claude, this post has been a boon to me in getting Claude to know about myself into its memory.
Re: Profiling Hacker News users based on their comments
#77And note that HN does not allow you to delete your comments after a short time passes. If you contact them and ask for your data to be deleted, they will directly refuse.
Yes it would break things. Also it's impossible to delete things from the internet, so a bit cute to attempt to do it...
Re: Profiling Hacker News users based on their comments
#78This 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 mayb…
Right, as is so often the case with AI stuff the thing that's disconcerting is how cheap and low friction and friction adopt available this ability is now. Anyone with access to a decent LLM can now perform a version of this in just a few seconds.
We've come a long way in some aspects, while staying pretty much in place in others.
I taught infosec 101 course at a university ~20 years ago. (Twice.) On the topic of privacy I used an example of harvesting data on peoples' habits, movements and behaviours and then said that as a society we use two different terms for the same thing. "When an individual does this, it's called stalking. When a company does this, it's called data mining."
The economics department students, many of who already knew they would want to work in marketing, were quite offended.
Re: Profiling Hacker News users based on their comments
#79Story 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…
People search engines do a lot of the heavy lifting and can give you that data on a platter for a few dollars. I pay for a service that employs people to periodically do data removal requests with them. It's not great that _they_ have a bunch of data about me, but I'd rather it be in one place that tries to safeguard it than in a bunch of places all over the Internet. (There are A LOT of people search engines.) As fo…
> I pay for a service that employs people to periodically do data removal requests with them.
Curious about any recommendations from you or others.
> Most people don't think about cybersecurity outside of "oh, I need to change my password now."
Cyber anonymity is a concept that most people don't think about at all, especially post-Facebook normalization of real names ~10s.
In many ways, it feels like Eternal September talking to younger people who never used a pseudonym online.
Re: Profiling Hacker News users based on their comments
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
I thought I had deja vu when reading your comment so I searched and found that you wrote something very similar 6 years ago, then 4 months ago and then 3 comments within the last month. Out of curiosity and without meaning it to sound like an accusation, did you write such similar posts by hand or do you use some form of automation for commenting?
It’s funny because someone asked me about this on Twitter too. Specifically, how was I able to reply to tweets of other people with a relevant Twitter thread I had already written. It’s all manual and I guess just how my brain works. My wife actually calls it “the database” because I can quickly access stories and I apparently tell them in a very similar way. I’m just as impressed that you noticed and had the Déjà vu…
Out of curiosity, did you come from a family where older generations were storytellers? E.g. parents, extended, or grandparents?
In the sense that there were stories you heard retold (sometimes by the same person) over the years, mutating a bit in each retelling?
I think some brains get wired so that oral (or at least reproductive in some medium) story transmission is effortless, but affinity does seem to differ person-by-person.