Public Hacker News Comments Can Be Fed Into AI to Build Shockingly Accurate Personal Profiles

A simple technique using public Hacker News comments and an LLM can generate shockingly accurate personal profiles, revealing users' careers, habits, and personality traits, sparking serious privacy concerns despite the data being freely available online.

• A simple technique using the Algolia Hacker News API allows anyone to pull a user's last 1,000 comments and feed them into an LLM, which then generates a surprisingly detailed and accurate personal profile.
• The method proves startlingly effective, successfully identifying professional identity, working habits, technical interests, personality traits, and even personal hobbies from public comment history alone, raising notable privacy concerns despite the data being publicly available.
• Simon Willison uses this tool primarily to detect bad-faith actors in online debates, but acknowledges the ease of deriving deep personal profiles from freely shared public data feels invasive and 'mildly dystopian.'