| HN Mirror

I just created a ~/social directory, launched Claude Code in it and told Claude I'd like to start tracking and studying my own social media presence. Before long there were scripts to dump all of my public posts into a SQLite database. I pulled HN, reddit, lobsters, stackoverflow and its sister sites, even mailing lists. Given a corpus inside a database, any sort of analysis can be done.

I started with linguistic analysis to reduce commit message rewriting. That one also used years worth of commit messages as input.

I immediately started doing more though. Sentiment analysis, interlocutors, negativity, positivity, recurring arguments, best and worst threads by voting patterns.

Discovered a lot of fun stuff. For example, it was hilarious and a little terrifying to realize I was randomly interacting with some industry heavy hitters without even realizing who they were. Claude on the other hand seems to know quite a bit about many people on HN.

Mapped out all of my free and open source software contributions. Counted my successes and failures, did post-mortems, saw what I did right and where I could improve. Got some very useful results out of that. For example, I will never attempt to contribute to GNU ever again.

Ask it to steelman every single argument I get into and every single worldview I have. Turned up some excellent literature too. This is great for sharpening my mind, and sometimes Claude even changes my mind.

The database also acts as a preservation archive in case any of these sites get wiped out.

It's also the best search engine I've ever used. Saying something like "I remember posting something along the X and Y lines" is enough to find pretty much anything.

Gets downright nostalgic at times. Claude found my GitHub projects dating to my teenage years.

> I assume you don't feed the whole corpus in every prompt

Claude has the local comment database and runs SQL against it to pull whatever it wants.