Policy & Ethicsllmhacker newsalgolia apiprivacy
Hacker News Comments Enable Deep User Profiling
6.1
On March 21, 2026, developer Simon Willison demonstrates that the Algolia Hacker News API (with open CORS) can supply a user's recent comments, which he feeds into Claude Opus 4.6 to generate detailed personal and professional profiles. The experiment shows LLMs can infer identifying traits and behaviours from public comments, raising privacy and prompt-injection security concerns for developers and platform operators.
Key Points
- 1Demonstrates extracting a user's last 1,000 Hacker News comments via Algolia API with open CORS.
- 2Reveals LLMs (Claude Opus 4.6) can infer rich personal and professional profiles from public comments.
- 3Warns practitioners to audit exposed public data and mitigate prompt-injection and privacy risks in tooling.
Scoring Rationale
Clear demonstration of easy LLM profiling using public APIs as driver; limited generalizability and single-author anecdotal evidence.
Sources
Public references used for this report.
Practice with real Logistics & Shipping data
90 SQL & Python problems · 15 industry datasets
Used by DS/ML engineers at top companies
High-Value Overnight OrdersEasyDelivered International ShipmentsMediumOn-Time Delivery Rate by CarrierHard
250 free problems · No credit card
See all Logistics & Shipping problems
