Overview
A walkthrough of how to create detailed user profiles by feeding someone's Hacker News comment history to AI models. The technique uses the Algolia Hacker News API to collect up to 1,000 recent comments, then prompts an LLM to analyze patterns and infer personal details from the writing style and content.
The Breakdown
- The Algolia Hacker News API provides easy access to user comments with open CORS headers, allowing you to fetch anyone's recent comment history via a simple JSON endpoint
- Comment aggregation tools can be built quickly using AI assistants - the author created a web interface that fetches comments and provides mobile-friendly copy-to-clipboard functionality
- LLM profiling capabilities are surprisingly comprehensive - feeding 1,000 comments to models like Claude Opus can reveal professional background, technical interests, working style, and even personal habits
- Pattern recognition in writing allows AI to infer details like someone's tech stack preferences, security consciousness, monetization strategies, and even their physical work environment from comment patterns
- Privacy implications emerge from this technique - publicly available comment data can be processed to create detailed psychological and professional profiles without the user's knowledge or consent