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Posted by turtlesoup 6 days ago

Show HN: Are You in the Weights?(www.intheweights.com)
With more traffic moving off-web and into LLMs, I got curious about what traces we leave "in the weights". My design partner and I built a site in the past few weeks that checks recognition across frontier and small models. It queries many of them in parallel, clusters the responses, and tells you how strongly they recognize you. Happy to answer any questions here!
470 points | 247 commentspage 3
tiagobraw 6 days ago|
Interesting. Claude Opus 4.8 and Gemini 3.1 Lite kind of got it right, but when I ask the model directly, they say they don't know. I'm curious how the tool is doing the correlation.
turtlesoup 6 days ago|
Prompt for rollouts posted below (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48592415). I have a bit more information on the clustering part in https://intheweights.com/about but every thing returned by the model is viewable (possibly under the "hallucinations" section)
travel-insider 2 days ago||
By confirming that I'm not in the weights, did I, in fact, add myself to the weights...
onion2k 6 days ago||
I share my name with a famous sports star and that person comes up far more than me, which is understandable. It absolutely nails my username but I've used the same one online for almost 30 years. It'd be weird if I wasn't fairly well understood.

What this tells me is that I've done a decent job of keeping my real life and my internet personas nicely separated.

AgentME 6 days ago||
Of these models, only Kimi had anything on me and it was pretty inaccurate.

When Fable was accessible, I asked it about myself and it had some accurate information about me. It's neat. It feels a tiny bit like I got to sign the Voyager probe. I wonder if Fable was trained on a significantly different selection of data or if it's just better at retaining rare details it saw in its training.

PaulHoule 6 days ago||

  1756, Salzburg, January 27th: Wolfgang Amadeus is born
  1761: at the age of 5, Amadeus begins composing
  1773: he writes his first piano concerto
  1782: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart marries Constance Weber
  1784: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart becomes a Freemason
  1791: Mozart composes The Magic Flute
  On December 5th of that same year, Mozart dies
lordfrito 6 days ago|
1985: Austrian rock singer Falco records Rock Me Amadeus!
PaulHoule 6 days ago||
I was hoping somebody would catch that!

There was a tribute song that came out later that I looked for but had trouble finding. In Falco's timeline you find that he died tragically in 1998.

oliculipolicula 5 days ago||
[dead]
pgt 6 days ago||
Only a fool would enter their name in this.
kylemaxwell 6 days ago||
Right on, nobody will know my name as long as I don't search my name where other people can see it. My name is a secret.
dofm 6 days ago|||
This is just an SEO job/psyop to make "Kyle Maxwell" an even better alias. Hiding in plain sight.
epihelix 6 days ago|||
I trust your real name is not actually Kyle Maxwell :) I do this too, btw - a random name generator is the very best form of internet anonymity.

(If it actually is your real name, then I can only assume you're using an iocaine powder strategy to beat the internet ...)

dgacmu 6 days ago|||
From one person who's completely not-anonymous on HN to another: Why? Do you worry about the association of your IP address with your real name by yet another site other than any place you've made purchases from or signed up for an account from?

(I'm asking seriously, as I can see some risk to having that linkage more public, but given the rate with which services holding PII are compromised and my own personal rate of receiving notices of "oops, we kinda sorta leaked everything about you, here, have more free credit monitoring", I assume almost all of this is available already.)

fullstackchris 6 days ago||
I think its guys just who don't really understand how the internet works. I'm flabbergasted that its 2026 and I still see the "oh no my IP" trope.

If you're worried about it use a VPN.

Your ISP anyway knows your IP or at the very least your current one if its dynamic.

djmips 6 days ago||
People who blur their car license plates - when you can go to their social media profile and usually geolocate them down to a street address.
coldpie 6 days ago|||
Unless you think Osama Bin Laden[1] is bored and browsing HN, I'm desperately curious to know what you think the risk here could possibly be.

[1] (Yes, I know, it's a joke.)

Jtarii 6 days ago||
Absolutely, a good hacker could likely get into your bank with your name alone.
ahartmetz 6 days ago||
Life must be rough for John Smiths.
flufluflufluffy 6 days ago||
BUTTWIPE MCFART FICTIONAL INTERNET PERSONA

LLAMA 3.2 1B SAYS

MCFART IS A POPULAR INTERNET PERSONALITY KNOWN FOR HIS HUMOROUS CONTENT.

wow how does it konw

compass_copium 6 days ago||
I tried both of my long-lived social media (Xanga, LJ, MySpace era) handles from my teen and early twenties years (I mostly use disposable handles now). I've deleted a decent chunk of those postings, but they were both recognized (top 25% on both), although for the wrong reasons (never a Minecraft Twitchstreamer, but I did have a Minecraft account with the handle name).

Really odd feeling to think that my writings from that period are helping these things. Not necessarily happy about it--I took that stuff down because it was so deeply personal, and a record of my life that didn't need to be public. Odd to think my teenage angst is, in some small way, writing the AI-generated e-mails I get now.

notatoad 6 days ago||
apparently i'm also a minecraft youtuber. i have never played minecraft or posted a youtube video.

i think somewhere along the lines the models might have just gotten "online handle" and "minecraft content creator" conflated.

compass_copium 6 days ago||
My wife tried it with her longest-running handle and it got social media right, but said she was on TikTok and Instagram (both wrong, just old Twitter). It's an interesting mix of truth and hallucination.
aposm 6 days ago||
I only got hallucinations of random combinations of my (fairly unique) last name & first names that do not exist, combined with very accomplished and completely fictional biographies. I guess I'm not notable enough which is somewhat comforting.
zellyn 6 days ago|
Heh. That's what I get for having a weird name and having been on the internet since like 1993… https://www.intheweights.com/p/zellyn
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