Simon Willison describes a technique for profiling Hacker News users by fetching their last 1,000 comments via the Algolia HN API and feeding them into an LLM with a simple 'profile this user' prompt. He shares the detailed profile generated for himself as an example, which accurately captures his professional identity, working style, technical interests, and personality. He notes the approach is surprisingly effective and somewhat unsettling, even when the data is publicly available, and mentions he uses it primarily to check whether someone he's debating has a history of bad-faith arguing.
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