Profiling Hacker News users based on their comments

On March 22nd, a project surfaced on Hacker News that the community there was constitutionally incapable of scrolling past: a tool that ingests a user's public comment history and constructs a psychological and professional profile from the accumulated residue. The mechanics are almost rude in their simplicity. Every comment posted to Hacker News is public, timestamped, and retrievable through the official API — years of technical arguments, career frustrations, midnight opinions on programming languages, and the occasional moment of genuine warmth, all sitting in a database waiting to be fed to a large language model that will then tell you, with quiet confidence, what kind of person you probably are. The project appears to be a vibe coding exercise as much as anything — the kind of thing you build in a weekend because the API is open and the idea is too funny not to pursue. What makes it land is not the technical sophistication, which is modest, but the conceptual honesty. Hacker News users have spent years constructing detailed public records of their inner lives while believing they were merely discussing software.

If confirmed as a functioning, publicly accessible tool, the implications are uncomfortable in several directions at once. For individual users, it is a practical demonstration that pseudonymity and long comment histories do not coexist peacefully — your username may be opaque, but a decade of opinions is not. For employers and recruiters, it opens an obvious if ethically murky shortcut: candidate due diligence conducted not through LinkedIn but through the unguarded record of someone's 2 a.m. forum posts. More broadly, it illustrates what happens when LLMs meet open social APIs — which is that every platform that ever believed public data was somehow diffuse enough to be private is about to find out it was wrong. The second-order effect is a slow cultural reckoning inside communities that built their identity around technical sophistication: the people most likely to have generated rich, profilable comment histories are the people most likely to understand, with some discomfort, exactly how this works.

Watch for whether the original project gains a maintainer or forks that expand it to other platforms — Reddit, Lobsters, Stack Overflow — which would signal this moving from a clever weekend experiment into something with genuine reach. Also worth tracking: whether Hacker News or Y Combinator responds with any API access changes.

NewsHive monitors these sources continuously. All signal titles above link to the original reporting.

Intelligence by NewsHive. Need help navigating what this means for your business? Contact GeekyBee →