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.
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.
Edit: However, the real blame must go to YC who refuses to state any of these things on the extremely minimalistic signup page.
How else would you politely respond to someone who comments only “I know. I despise you”?
Surveillance was always possible but it was expensive because a person or two had to literally watch a suspect. So it was rare in practice and suspects had to be chosen carefully.
Mass surveillance is not new in the sense that surveillance was always possible. What is new is the scope of power it gives to those who can use it.
> Simon Willison is a British software developer, blogger, and open-source advocate, best known for…
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 these and then handing off the posts to an analyst.
It's amazing:
a. how much info people give out even when they think they are being careful
b. related to a, how even small tidbits combined over time can build a pretty accurate picture of who someone is.
e.g. they post "oh man, the Cubs lost", then a year later "went for a walk on Lakeshore drive", another year later, there was a fire at my local subway stop etc etc and you pretty quickly narrow down the rough neighborhood where they live in Chicago.
Combined with tools like Lexis Nexus and you get a list of people that you can narrow down by age, sex, occupation etc and we could narrow it down to <20 people based on other info they had shared.
Then you fold in their posting patterns and it's pretty obvious who is at work (posting 9 to 5pm) vs home (posting 7pm to 1am).
Again, you keep adding constraints and the intersection of the Venn diagrams gets smaller and smaller.
This was all in the early 2000s before we had cellphones that tracked your location and ad infrastructure that followed you around the internet.
What used to require a little work is now instant. And we're much further into the predictive part than most will admit.
Being strongly private online requires spy tradecraft levels of precaution.
As for using clues to discover people's whereabouts and such: lots of police/detective shows have turned "finding where people are through Instagram photos" into a meme. Most people don't think about cybersecurity outside of "oh, I need to change my password now."
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?
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 haven’t thrown out the flippant quip here and there in my comments. I just thought that interpretation was pretty funny.
Create a new bookmark in your browser, name it something like "Profile HN User", and paste this as the URL:
javascript:void(function(){var u;var m=window.location.href.match(/news\.ycombinator\.com\/user\?id=([^&]+)/);if(m){u=m[1]}else{u=prompt(%27Enter HN username:%27)}if(!u)return;var msg=%27Profile this HN user: https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search_by_date?tags=comment,au...})()
If you're on a HN profile page (news.ycombinator.com/user?id=someone) it grabs the username automatically. Otherwise it prompts you to type one. It copies the profiling prompt to your clipboard and opens a new Claude conversation, just Cmd/Ctrl+V and hit Enter.
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.
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.
Anyone with access to a decent LLM can now perform a version of this in just a few seconds.
We desperately need to modernize laws around discrimination in light of the proliferation of these tools. No longer does someone need to thread the needle in interviews around "illegal" questions to find something to (metaphorically) hang an interviewee with, as these tools can pick it apart quite cleanly. People in protected classes are going to get reamed by bad actors leveraging these tools.
That said, after rubber ducking with a friend on this, I've come to the conclusion that there's two paths forward from this point: flight (scrubbing socials, hiding online, creating an acceptable persona) or fight (being firmly authentic, owning your weirdness, and accepting you can't control the outcomes of others' actions using these tools). I've spent decades in 'flight', and I'm tired of it. I can't control who uses these tools and to what end, so I may as well just be my damn self anyhow and do regular threat assessments accordingly. The more people who behave authentically, the less power these tools have over us.
But, the problem is real if it's a nation states or megacorps are doing it. They'll use such tech in an unjustified way, make a misjudgement, and then ask you to explain yourself out of the situation. Yeah, they're definitely going that, because they don't give a damn about it.
Edit: turns out it's case sensitive.
Sounds about right:
roughly “anti-imperialist realist” with Indian/Global South anchoring and paleoconservative/libertarian-adjacent distrust of state-corporate surveillance power.
https://antirez.com/hnstyle?username=pg&threshold=20&action=...
Which lets you find the alts of a handle
If you contact them and ask for your data to be deleted, they will directly refuse.
> Old man raising fist at, and yelling at, clouds. Get off his lawn.
[^1]: not really - this is speculation (so... kinda the same thing the LLM is doing) but is possibly an accurate representation.
>The word "engineer" being diluted by software/bootcamp culture is something they return to obsessively — arguably their strongest ideological position alongside surveillance criticism
Busted!!
That being said, not surprised because it listed exactly what I want my persona to appear, does that mean I am like that irl? No, I rarely bring the above “engineer” term IRL let alone to be obsessed about it, but in HN it makes sense to bring up, rest are mostly about techie stuff that I usually don’t bring with my friends or family. Also, this can be about anything you produce, like your blog, books, YouTube, or anything, that personality is what attracts (or repels) other people to be around you, it’s human society 101.
I disagree because I tend to seek a middle way. I would agree that too much (excessive) introspection is bad. But I would argue that too little is equally bad.
I think obsessively examining ones own comment history would verge on excessive. I'm wondering how much LLM analysis of my public and private life can remain healthy.
johnfn•1h ago
Wow, I sound really annoying. Sorry about that everyone!
hypercube33•1h ago