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Comment by treyfitty | Hacker News Reader

Legitimate question: what benefits are there to be anonymous to the general public? Wouldn’t most people be happy to take credit for their code?

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Daniel Stenberg, developer of very popular opensource library/utility curl, once received a threatening email:

https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2021/02/19/i-will-slaughter-you/

SQLite developers were receiving phone calls in the middle of the night, so decided to change temporary files prefix:

https://github.com/mackyle/sqlite/blob/3cf493d/src/os.h#L52-...

In both cases, their libraries were used in some other software, which upset users.

People are nuts. I ran a small, simple MUD (a text-based MORPG). Nothing fancy, nothing overly popular, a nice little niche group of people. Seemingly. I ran it anonymously, but there will always be somebody you know who slips something about you that will break that anonymity. The day that happened to me, a couple of disgruntled players found my Facebook account and sent messages to me and my immediate family threatening to kill us in various colorful ways.

My information is pretty locked down, but my family was less so. They started to get threatening phone calls. Very unpleasant stuff.

Anyway, that's when I learned that credit isn't worth the hassle of harassment.

A friend of mine programs free / open source software and one of his libraries was used in a crypto scam project.

Suddenly he got accusations and threats from a person from a completely different country, because that person thought he was the brain behind the crypto scam where they lost some money. He had to take it to the police to get that person stop threatening and harass him.

If you're a retired gentleman mostly coding for your own and your friend's use, and you've seen the trashfire that social media and the modern internet has become compared to the time before The Eternal September - back when you originally started using the internet... It's very very easy to see why you might desire anonymity before widely releasing simple utility tools.

to: developer@gmail.example.org

from: billy-joe@3rd-grade.nowheresville-elementary-schoole.edu.us

subject: FinderFix

I demand you integrate FinderFix with TikTok and Discord IMMEDIATELY - or I'll come over there and rape your family and pets!!!llII!!1!!

Lots of people are horrible and when you are well-known, this translates into legions of horrible people who know who you are and see you as something to maybe bother. Anonymity should be the first choice for public-facing work, if you enjoy your life as it is and are not interested in hiring security.

Enough with the drama. The vast majority of people with public facing work (whether code, books, etc.) use their real names and don't need to hire security. That's not to say stuff doesn't sometimes happen but it's not the norm.

Something with significant risk that is reasonably easy to mitigate should just be mitigated. Nobody loses with that, except maybe if they view that as drama.

There can also be significant disadvantages to totally disconnecting anything you do online from your professional identity. If the two things really don't have anything to do with each other--say you're a developer and write risque fiction on the side--it may make sense to use a pen name and that's not uncommon.

However, many professionals in the tech space and elsewhere have online work that is intimately connected with their day job--and may even be part of their day job. In that case, anonymity is not really an option.

You could take credit in the interview, field questions, and if there is still some doubt, log in to whatever it is you'd like to show. In other words, show privately, not publicly.

For me at least, it's pretty much nothing to do with interviews. Articles, conference presentations, just being "me" at events, social media, etc. is all part of the package.

Sounds like work is a major part of your identity. Personally prefer to keep them separate-ish.

It's more that I'm paid to have a fairly public role which pretty much has to be under my own name.

When you are part of a company or some entity, the risk is smaller since the credit goes to your company rather than yourself. When you work for yourself that's not the case.

If your code is perfectly legit, but lies in shady or non-generally-ethical sectors, like porn, gambling, weapons, one might want to hide their identity to the general public.

A friend made an app based on some calculation method he found in a youtube channel. Shame on him for not crediting the author, but months later this influencer created an app of his method and wrote a menacing review for my friend's app, backed with thousands of upvotes. He found other apps implementing the method received similar threats as top reviews.

There's an interesting piece about being a mini/micro celebrity by Tim Ferriss. Am too lazy to look it up, but the gist is that for every ~thousand people, several are bat-shit insane and looking for something to obsess over.

So if multiple thousand folks know you exist, prepare for some stalking.

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