HN Explorer

Almost all HN accounts with plain first name (peter,john etc) are Fake ?

1 points by throwAway_29 ↗ HN
Just check out any id of the form: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=james

For all common names like : bob,james,john,mary,thames,peter and many more, I could see that they had no submissions, 1 karma, and created 1250+ days ago. Anyone else noticed this? Wonder why.

3 comments

[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 18.4 ms ] thread
donohoe
Maybe some people registered to hold the username and then neglected it?
pg
james looks like a legit account. It has a real email address.

Accounts aren't only created to post; they're also created to apply to YC.

throwAway_29
Was wondering how I missed seeing an address on that profile.. then I saw who wrote the comment :-) Thanks for the clarification, Pg! Just couldn't help wondering about it- seemed weird to notice that many first-names account not posting/commenting, but just existing.