I did it because emailing a few times didn't work, I wanted to do something nice in return (preemptively, I guess), and I think doing stuff like this is fun.
Stop signing your posts, you're only proving his point.
We can move on to doing this kind of analysis with your site if you'd like to persist in pretending you're not one of 1,000 other people on the internet with the same personality blog about how OH SO RANDOM and INTERESTING you are.
It's a habit from writing email all day, not some sinister plot to get people to see my name a lot. I removed the ultra-offensive signature from my post.
I'm not inclined to get into an argument about how original or interesting I am... my ego is big, but not big enough for that. I'm content to gauge those things by the responses of my readers.
I consider it a personality flaw that I'm compelled to respond to (what I consider to be) unconstructive criticism like this. I'm done responding publicly, but will continue by email if you like.
On the other hand, two or three of my 100 yearly posts submitted to HN, about the same to Reddit.
Patrick managed to make and give away A/Bingo to the community while working on BCC.
What's the other PHP project?
I don't care about anything else you've mentioned.
Nobody cares what you read or what you have to say. The books are a tilt too. The only people who care about your blog of personality thing you have going is because they aspire to make money off of their 'personality' and otherwise not being productive.
Typical anti-work/productivity culture really. This kind of nonsense is the mainstream, not your OH SO RANDOM 'antics'.
My email address has my name on it, but I still close it with -matt. I was going to post a comment to our work order system, which stamps my name on it, but I'm still inclined to close it with -matt. Same with Basecamp. Why? It feels more personal.
Does this really grind people's gears that hard? If so, where's it appropriate? Inappropriate? I respect the opinion of the HN community, so looking for honest feedback.
I don't mind it at all in basecamp which lacks structure or email where it's traditional and signing off is a way to make it friendly. That said, I don't use automatic signatures, I write a personal benediction/have-a-good-day type thing for each email.
If it's not worth signing personally, it's not worth writing the email.
The short rule is, if it's occurred to you that it might be douchey, you're probably safe because you actually care.
Think of it as a Dunning-Kruger for douchebags.
A...Douching-Kruger if you will.