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Comment by pbhjpbhj | Hacker News Reader

As an aside: didn't Lamo report Bradley Manning, it's surely rewriting history to report otherwise?

I didn't recognise the name at first because of this change.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16601642 and marked it off-topic.

"Chelsea Manning" is the preferred name that refers to the person Lamo reported. "Bradley Manning" is a former, non-preferred name. Nothing about history changes if a different name is used; the same person is referred to either way.

That you didn't recognize the person based on the preferred name only indicates that you've paid less attention to the news than you thought you had.

I'm rather surprised someone on hacker news could not have heard about Chelsea Manning in the past few years. (Or even just on the internet, really.)

If you have any interest in artificial intelligence and automation or their effects on society at large, I strongly recommend her Op-Ed in the Times last September [0].

Like her or not, she's a big figure in cybersecurity, freedom of information, and international politics. I thoroughly enjoy and benefit from what she has to say.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/13/opinion/chelsea-manning-b...

I have a very bad memory, perhaps the initial name association acts as a stronger pointer than subsequent modified pointers for me.

When writing about past well-known events, it is probably best to give both the names people went by at the time and their current names. You need the past names because those will be the names on documents from the time of the event.

Using a person's name from before they come out as transgender is called deadnaming and is a tactic favored among abusive people.

The polite thing to do, regardless of personal politics, is to simply reassociate the person with the name Chelsea Manning and move on with your life.

Chelsea is Bradley, she's trans.

A name is a label (think C pointer) to a specific person. So yes, Lamo did report the person now known as Chelsea Manning. It was the person that was reported, not a name. Names in themselves are almost entirely inconsequential.

That's a really interesting way to frame it. Glad you posted that comment.

So, do you remember when the President of USA had that Apprentice show on TV?

To me that's wrong, the President didn't, but Donald Trump did.

There's no reason to hide that Trump hasn't always been president, and it's informative to know that he wasn't president at the time he was a TV character in a "game" (?) show.

If the name is inconsequential why does anyone care if you refer to the correct historical fact that "Bradley Manning (now called Chelsea) was reported ...".

They matter, just in different ways to different people. What's that quote - naming things and off-by-one errors??

All of your comments in this thread are a great example of why people make fun of HN commenters.

President is a job title, not a name.

You're right, I struggled for a good analogy.

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