People drop $60 on video games, $50 on going to a movie, $100 on lottery tickets, $500 on cigarettes, and $2000 on first-class flights every day, and most of these are no big deal, just a person spending their money on entertainment in their own life.
If they want to spend $60 out of mild curiosity on a genetic test, I don't understand why it merits some kind of particular scorn.
As for the genetic tests, most of them update with new results after the first $60.
Except if your entire family spends their money on DNA tests, then publishes the results on Facebook then your DNA is out in the open.
You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
Personally, I do not read usernames and have never had the experience on H.N. of recognizing a username as I have on some other fora that have signatures, avatars, profile pages, and other such facilities to create an identity.
The culture of H.N. also favors giving technical, impersonal comments, which consequently leave out even more of a personal identity.
I have really never felt on H.N. that I was responded to in a way that connected me to anything I said prior; no one brought such a thing up.
Users who undermine that system, in the way that I described above, are in a sense freeloading off the community established by others.
I'm asking whether people actually pay attention to usernames to any significant degree and recognize them.
The reason I wondered was because I never had anyone reference anything I said prior to me, whereas I've had this happen on 4chan to me, a forum sans usernames because someone recognized my writing style or opinions.