Discover what your comments reveal about you?

Posted by hathym 3 hours ago

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/

Comments

Comment by marssaxman 2 hours ago

That's kinda neat, actually.

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

Comment by hathym 2 hours ago

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.

Comment by jupr 2 hours ago

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?

Comment by hathym 2 hours ago

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

Comment by srean 2 hours ago

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.

Comment by krunck 2 hours ago

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.