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Profiling Hacker News users based on their comments

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Chimera Difficulty Score
a synthesis of Flesch-Kincaid, Coleman-Liau, SMOG, and Dale-Chall readability metrics
Profiling Hacker News users based on their comments 21st March 2026 Here’s a mildly dystopian prompt I’ve been experimenting with recently: “Profile this user”, accompanied by a copy of their last 1,000 comments on Hacker News. Obtaining those comments is easy. The Algolia Hacker News API supports listing comments sorted by date that have a specific tag, and the author of a comment is tagged there...
The article showcases the capabilities of a tool that can analyze a user's comments from Hacker News using a large language model (LLM) to profile them. This raises concerns about privacy and the potential for misuse of such technology. The use of the tool on Willison's own comments exemplifies this, as it reveals personal information about him, including his professional background, opinions, and interests. While the tool appears to be primarily used for self-analysis or understanding debate pa...