from Hacker News

Show HN: Chat with AI copies of all HN users, like sama, dang, and even yourself

by sync on 4/24/25, 1:43 PM with 8 comments

Hey HN, I'm Chris. I've been working on creating personalized AI chatbots by grounding them in real conversations.

Feeling inspired by antirez's recent post ("Reproducing Hacker News writing style fingerprinting", https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43705632), I wondered: could I use the HN comment data referenced in that post to create virtual versions of... every user on Hacker News?

A ~week later, here we are: https://lexikon.ai/dataset/hn

The database contains every user who has commented at least 200 words, and when you search for a user, we'll process their history in realtime to create a personalized AI chatbot of them on-the-fly (it'll take a few minutes).

There's no login required, and conversations aren't recorded or stored anywhere, nor are they trained on.

It surprised me at how fun it actually is. Give it a shot, would love to know what y'all think--

  • by latexr on 4/24/25, 2:16 PM

    I tried it on dang’s handle, as it was one of the suggestions, and have got to say it didn’t feel anything like Dan. Responses were shallow, short, meaningless, repetitive, and evasive. It didn’t reply to things the real Dan would’ve (and has) answered, even something as simple and public as its own name, and it was pretty easy to get it stuck on a loop. It also got annoyed easily. Rather than a distillation of Dan’t comments, it behaved more like a “rules bot” to spew predetermined text.

    I haven’t tested other users.

    The interface is also frustrating to use on desktop: ↩ does not send a new message—we have instead to click the send button—and every time we do we have to click the message box again. So every message requires:

      1. Take hand out of keyboard to the trackpad.
  2. Move cursor over the text area.
  3. Click.
  4. Move hand back to keyboard.
  5. Type message.
  6. Take hand out of keyboard to the trackpad.
  7. Move cursor to send button.
  8. Click.
    Rinse and repeat.

  • by krapp on 4/24/25, 2:33 PM

    Asked myself my opinion on politics - launched into a polemic rant.

    Asked myself my opinion on AI - pessimistic doomerism.

    Asked myself my opinion on God - agnostic cynicism.

    Asked myself my opinion on myself, lots and lots of snark.

    Lots and lots of shrug emojis.

    Smug, self-important overly verbose troll. 8/10, but it cribs too many comments verbatim.