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Comment by chipgap98 | Hacker News Reader

Agreed, but I think there are a lot of somewhat well known figures in tech who haves accounts on here and they are trying to be anonymous, but also newer HN members may not know who they are. I don't feel like we need this mapping but I could see how some might find it useful.

We DEFINITELY don't need people's account to be de-anonymized who are trying to remain anonymous

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It's probably inevitable that someone will publish a collection of predicted sockpuppet/alias accounts. It wouldn't surprise me if the HN mods had their own private collection; I think it'd be a fun project to show estimated alternate usernames next to a comments' username along with a confidence score. Naive bayes on comment text would probably do alright but there are plenty of other signals. A public list being published might suck if any of them are linked to a real identity and the real identity didn't really want them linked, but at least it's safe from novel associations, like maybe chipgap98 is _why but is also Bob from the Mozilla office down the street (in addition to Jonathan)...

> Agreed, but I think there are a lot of somewhat well known figures in tech who haves accounts on here and they are trying to be anonymous, but also newer HN members may not know who they are.

I think that I don't understand this post. This sentence seems to start by saying that we should respect people's desire to be anonymous, but to conclude by saying that it's a problem when … we don't know who they are?

A lot of famous people openly post about who they are but they have non-obvious nicks, so it is hard to remember.

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