Tell HN: Flesh out your profiles please
The way to let people know that you're not a dog, is to establish an identity, maybe a short blurb about yourself and a way to contact you out-of-band.
Lots of HN profiles are blank, and the nicknames used are anonymous. Of course, the theory is that since we are all judging your writings by their merits it is just as good to get that information you just wrote from an anonymous source as it would be to get it from a source that has an identity.
To me that would matter, for one when someone is attaching their name - and by extension their reputation - to their words they automatically have something to lose by saying it.
Second, it helps to verify that they are real people with relevant experience, instead of posers.
Anonymity on the net has its uses, for instance for whistleblowers and to ask embarrassing questions.
But for the most part it is used as a shield for cowardly attacks, sockpuppets and to create a persona with a reputation that is larger than the one the person is really entitled to and so on.
Being yourself is more than enough. So, to all those that are for whatever reason anonymous here, step out of the shadows and tie your HN identity in with your real-life persona.
Anonymous cowards belong to that other site :)
60 comments
[ 5.5 ms ] story [ 119 ms ] threadI have no interest in taking it further. This isn't Facebook.
Some (many?) of us have kids or other responsibilities and don't have a nest egg, relatives or soft landings.
Until our peonage is less feudal I think it's going to be this way.
On the other hand, it's a shame that it should come to the point that people are hiding who they are for fear of retribution from their employers.
Yes it is a shame. For me it's a few more years to get some teenagers through HS (it's not like that's without rewards) and then I can get back to wanton risk-taking.
I spent my risk allowance for 10 years: founding a couple of lousy startups (not Silicon Valley, and it was my own damn fault that they were crapiola), and then an employer that suffered death by VC (that one wasn't my fault), so yeah, it's not like corporate is the only way in my case, it's just the recessionary cookie crumble.
Where did you read that ? The word vote isn't even in there, and that was not a suggestion I had in mind.
Whether or not you want your prestige to influence your statement credibility is entirely personal. I'd rather have it not effect it to keep myself honest.
If I did want to dismiss it I'd have said that HN possibly has a better attitude towards this than a random sample used in an experiment, but I figure HN is large enough now that such an effect if established as real will be present here too.
I really like the voting - it's good to know when you have said something stupid. Either everyone else is wrong or you are, and the latter is pretty unlikely :)
There are no words in the English language that should be dismissed with prejudice, but is one of those.
I'm not a 'native' speaker (or writer), the dutch for 'but' is 'maar', and it indicates a modification of the first part of the sentence, a qualifier.
It does not negate the preceding part but it detracts from it, so I mean that to read (and I'll try to avoid the use of 'but')
I take your word for the research, HN will have some of that that, given the general level of discourse here and having read extensively in both articles written by HN'ers and the comments I have yet to see your point proven but it is bound to be true to some extent.
Better like that? ;)
We are now quibbling over magnitudes, which is moot since there is no data either way.
Writing style apparently is not as easy to distinguish as we thought it was:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1199592
and a follow-up:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1203836
So the previously mentioned 'but we'll recognize people by their writing style if we obscure their ids' probably does not hold water.
And keeping (b) in mind, realize that it is often those opinions of an individual that conflict with the masses that contribute largely to the individual's greater-than-average success.
Randomly change the username on new posts from users that have a low average points per post (ppp)to a top 20 user in terms of ppp.
If there is no effect of username on ppp, then the difference between the users true average ppp and the randomly assigned one will be large, if there is an effect it will be approximately zero. We could test this statistically easily enough.
What say you pg?
As you may have noticed, the Facebook privacy stories are rated very highly here.
For those of us in startups, we are either too busy to comment, too afraid to alienate potential customers with our opinions, or currently in stealth mode.
I'd venture to guess that most of the people here are not concerned with winning arguments on the internet by prestige, as you've described as the main reason to lose anonymity.
I think there may be a misunderstanding here. Facebook's problem is not that they make information about their users available, but that they do so after having been specifically directed not to. One can have no problem with the former, while being very much against the latter.
As this article (posted last week on HN)
said:> The battle that is underway is not a battle over the future of privacy and publicity. It’s a battle over choice and informed consent.
Why is why I never say anything even slightly controversial for the record under my True Name. I don't know about you but I rely on getting food and shelter by negotiating with other members of a nosy, judgmental, sometimes irrational species.
http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
Essentially you are saying that you are self-censoring.
And that's without even getting into political views like IP law, or whatever the hell future landlords or neighbors might object to....
woof!
> So, to all those that are for whatever reason anonymous here, step out of the shadows and tie your HN identity in with your real-life persona.
No thanks, I'm happy being another dog on the internet.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1364225
That got me in to a lot of trouble in my school days by the way, especially with religious teachers ;)
So is my life.
It depends if you want to let other accomplishments add weight to your argument, or let your argument stand on it's own. I prefer the latter.
Has HN been acquired by the government for an undisclosed sum lately?
I filled my profile out a little more, but I'm honestly pretty boring to everyone I know with the exception of my dog!
So you really don't need to expose your full fledged identity but if you have a blog and like a bit of extra relevant traffic put it up on your profile page and it might get more visits.
One thing I would like to see more of is people responding when they downvote something because I always like to see the other side of the argument (other than those comments that have no merit whatsoever and should probably be flagged rather than, or perhaps in addition to, being downvoted.
Other than that my profile is blank because I don't really have anything to put there.
I have trust issues with random people on the internet.
That said, I would like it if people added things like a way to contact them. There have been times when I would like to contact people and there isn't really a good way to do it. I've been contacted from having my email address in my profile and made some good contacts through it as well.
I've been spouting my beliefs on the interwebs long enough that am unelectable to any political office.
Personally I don't know who you are and I really don't care. I care if what you write is insightful and helpful to me (and hopefully I do the same for some other people).
I'm sure I've been attacked a few times by people that might be run out of town under the no cowards policy, but I'd rather deal with ankle biters than have this place turn into a cult of personality for a handful of celebrity posters.
Btw if anyone downvotes this without a bio I'm calling you out. That's ironic humor if you're wondering. Am I qualified? Yes, I'm a startup founder with a degree in literature.
The only real 'celebrity posters' I can think of are PG, patio11, cperciva, tptacek and jgrahamc and their reputations are well established and deserved in the fields they write most about, for the most part their votes seem to reflect the quality of what they write on a case-by-case basis.
For example, it's rare to see PG downvoted because most of the time what he writes makes very good sense (and I've been on the receiving end of a couple of 'you disagreed with PG downvotes' but it does happen, and that, as far as I'm concerned proves that the problem if it exists is not that large.
So inspite of the research referenced above and personal experience, even if it does happen we don't have a cult of celebrity worship here as far as I can see, but at the same time we're talking about a bunch of counters in a disk file somewhere, so assuming that we do it still isn't a problem. Maybe ask the posters I mentioned above if they feel 'worshipped' in any way?
> Btw if anyone downvotes this without a bio I'm calling you out.
Hehe, that was funny :)
And I'm just a startup founder with a typing diploma and a driving license.
But usually in those cases people qualify what they're saying with, 'I worked on x and we did y'. I think you have to qualify what you're saying in that way. It's presumptuous to assume people know who you are. My background is marketing and PR (as an entrepreneur) so I usually qualify PR-related advice with a note of my experience. If people don't I usually assume they're regurgitating what someone else told them.
Anyway it's moot for me because I never check people's bios.
I don't know who any of those people are other than pg. I'm ok with that because again I'm really only interested in what they have to say. If Mr Z is on his 11th startup and is worth 23 gazillion dollars I would expect that will come through in his perspective on the industry. I hope it would at least.
Don't worry, if I could do it over again I would skip college. I wish I would have raised 1/5 of the money I had to for college and started a business. I would have learned more, faster and would probably be retired already.
I've seen more than a few, but truth be told they were usually identified as such.
> Don't worry, if I could do it over again I would skip college. I wish I would have raised 1/5 of the money I had to for college and started a business. I would have learned more, faster and would probably be retired already.
I still have contact with a few of the people from 'the old days', and I wouldn't trade with them for any amount of money, but every now and then I wished I'd gotten the benefits of at least high school calculus.
I tend to spend too much time approaching mathematical problems in a way that I can fudge my basic knowledge, in stead of for instance a direct approach using an analytical method I might code up a brute force search or a hill climbing algorithm (and pray I'm not stuck on a local maximum :) ).
The network would have come in handy as well in the beginning, but I've long ago made up for lack of that.
How the method works is an irrelevant implementation detail (as long as its not an anonymous PO box, that is..). Really, an anonymous gmail thats checked once every few weeks would be fine most of the time.
Of course, I can just as easily understand why someone wouldn't want to be contacted. So, shrug.