Discover what your comments reveal about you?

#1

Post by hathym » Wed, Jun 17, 2026, 4:35 PM UTC

I made a tool that profiles you using nothing but your HN comments. You've been telling Hacker News everything about yourself for years without realizing it. This tool just reads it back to you. You're welcome, and I'm sorry it's going to ruin your evening.

https://hn-panopticon.online/

Re: Discover what your comments reveal about you?

#2

Post by srean » Wed, Jun 17, 2026, 5:20 PM UTC

I sort of agree with its assesment. Recency bias is a bit strong.

It did suddenly worsen though. I was checking if it's assesment was deterministic or not.

Re: Discover what your comments reveal about you?

#3

Post by marssaxman » Wed, Jun 17, 2026, 5:34 PM UTC

That's kinda neat, actually.

The summary appears to have a pronounced recency bias. Is that intentional?

Re: Discover what your comments reveal about you?

#4

Post by krunck » Wed, Jun 17, 2026, 5:42 PM UTC

Imagine what the NSA has on us.

Oops. Just just added to my "Frequent criticism of US military, surveillance, and big tech (many comments)." score.

Re: Discover what your comments reveal about you?

#5

Post by jupr » Wed, Jun 17, 2026, 5:43 PM UTC

Neat tool. I always presumed this existed which is why I really try and speak in generalities and minimize details about myself if I can. What model are you using? How many tokens are we spending running a search?

Re: Discover what your comments reveal about you?

#6

Post by hathym » Wed, Jun 17, 2026, 5:47 PM UTC

marssaxman wrote: post #3

That's kinda neat, actually. The summary appears to have a pronounced recency bias. Is that intentional?

Good catch, not intentional, that's a bug. The sampler picks indices evenly spaced across the account's whole comment history, but it walks newest-to-oldest and bails out as soon as it fills a 90k-char budget. For any reasonably active account, that budget gets used up before the walk reaches old comments, so the model ends up looking almost entirely at recent activity even though the code intends an even sample across time.

Re: Discover what your comments reveal about you?

#7

Post by hathym » Wed, Jun 17, 2026, 5:50 PM UTC

jupr wrote: post #5

Neat tool. I always presumed this existed which is why I really try and speak in generalities and minimize details about myself if I can. What model are you using? How many tokens are we spending running a search?

GPT-5-mini, around ~0,0072$ per call

Re: Discover what your comments reveal about you?

#8

Post by sph » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 6:43 AM UTC

Well, I could use this as a resumé, it’s a pretty generous (yet true) account of my professional skills and knowledge.

I am a bit disappointed it did not catch my ‘subversive’ tendencies, such as defending anarchism, being critical of democracies, being anti AI to the point of extremism, and a few other things that are between me and the three-letter agencies with their more thorough profile.

Re: Discover what your comments reveal about you?

#9

Post by srean » Thu, Jun 18, 2026, 9:42 AM UTC

I think it is confusing me for someone else. It is probably typo-correcting my handle to something else.

Apparently I have lots to say about terraform, kubernetes and docker. I certainly don't :)

I would have to remind myself what terraform does, just in case my past self ever knew.