Ask HN: How do you guys pick your usernames?

parts of my first and lastname

In 2007, I wanted to start a blog to release some of the software and videogame side projects I had begun developing in college (at the time, a Kernel Panic Screen Saver for the Mac and Cursorcerer, a Mac system tool for hiding the cursor with a hotkey) . A friend of mine sent me a piece of php code he'd written that would spit out a huge list of 2-word pairs chosen at random from an English dictionary.

I scanned through this huge vertical list of word outputs, and the pair "doom laser" instantly stuck out to me. That sounds cool! A few hours later, http://doomlaser.com was born, and I snagged https://twitter.com/doomlaser as well. I'm still updating Cursorcerer. It continues to run in macOS Ventura, and it has been downloaded on the order of a hundred thousand times. People are still downloading it from the same blog entry I wrote for it in 2007 :)

The friend who wrote the word pairing program is one of the co-founders of Rogue Amoeba, though I've never asked if it was the source of the name of their company.

Mine's based on the Operation: Mindcrime[1] album by Queensrÿche[2]. I've been a huge fan of theirs, and a huge fan of that album specifically, since about 1992 or so, and started using "mindcrime" as an online handle decades ago.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation:_Mindcrime

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queensr%C3%BFche

last name + initials here

My dad chose it for my first windows account when I was about 7yo.

It stuck with me ever since, because it's actually pretty unique on the internet !

I never found someone using the same username.

I wish to be the Don of aliens, my username reflects that ;)

I played a Traveller RPG in 1985 as Orion Blastar and the name stuck. He was a Merchant turned Space Pirate.

I develop compilers.

import string import random

if __name__ == "__main__": s1 = string.ascii_lowercase s2 = string.ascii_uppercase

    s = []
    s.extend(list(s1))
    s.extend(list(s2))

    print("login: ", end="")
    print("".join(random.sample(s, 12)))

It was up to my parents. ;)

It is my really old CB (citizens band radio) handle.

artificial intelligence for intelligence amplification

An OP on a 90's IRC channel I hung out in used to find it hilarious to forcibly change my username from banana to plantain with /sanick and I got bored of changing it back.

banana was originally picked because it was an adjacent object at the time.

Randomly generated for every website (except this one paradoxically even though it looks random), avoiding characters that lead to confusion (i vs l, O vs 0, etc - some websites designed by morons require you to type the credentials).

To be honest... no idea. :D I think it was inspired some time around the release of the movie "Hackers" in the 90-s. I was writing a short script for something, when the arrangement of letters and numbers made sense together, and still fresh after watching the movie, I came up with it. Been more then 20 years now. Kind of always sticked with it.

quick throwaway account. first one was taken.

Completely random, my full name or vaguely related to my name, depending on the forum.

My family name starts with Đ, which is transcribed to latin DJ, and other part is my nickname.

I think I think.

I pick different username / handle for every website because I don't want someone to be able to follow everything I do with a simple search.

I just pick them as it strikes me fancy, based of something cool I saw that week. This one is a onomatopoeia for a sound of bubbles. No idea why.

My hacker news one is the password that one of our maths teachers used at school for the computers.

I used MrBananas as a test account name (probably inspired by the banana man cartoons) - which is why it’s my Twitter handle… didn’t think Twitter would last when it launched so made a throwaway test account.

Depends on the context. My "real-life" profile is just my firstname + lastname, like many others. This particular username came into life because it was auto-generated when signing up to reddit, where I wanted to post a 3D simulation/physics render I did, so that's what stuck. Then I started using the same user across platforms and brought the username with me.

Character in several Neal Stephenson books. Was reading one when I made the account.

Way back before the World Wide Web the dialup world had Bulletin Boards. Everybody wanted you to create an account "handle". I tried to use first initial and family name, but found that my name was common and I had to think of different "handles" for different sites which became a memory problem. So I decided to come up with a unique handle that wouldn't be used by anyone else. I put three Z characters between my initial and family name. I still use that today as my account name here shows.

My name plus the last few letters of the modern english alphabet in lowercase