About Your Handle on HN | Hacker News Reader

About Your Handle on HN

6 pointsverisimi10 comments

I see lots of interesting handles on HN, and it often strikes me that it would be interesting to know more, but I don't want to derail... but it's not derailing if I create a post for that very purpose!

Feel free to add a one liner (or more) about your handle.

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In high school I toured Oakland Center, the regional air-traffic control center for much of the U.S. west coast. The controller with whom I sat had the big circular display we've all seen, and I noticed one contact labeled "NASA 714" moving away from the coast to the southwest, and I asked what it was.

It was the Gerard P. Kuiper Airborne Observatory¹, a converted C-141 transport with a telescope inside, en route to Hawaii on a mission. (Nice!)

"714" is also the badge number of Detective Joe Friday from the "Dragnet" TV series², and is a telephone area code serving part of Southern California³.

The "cylinder" part came when I was casting about for an HN handle, and it sounded good in combination with 714.

1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuiper_Airborne_Observator 2: https://www.perfessorbill.com/misc/badge714.htm 3: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_codes_714_and_657

Flight 714 was also a Tintin book:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_714_to_Sydney

RBBS used DOS files for user data, the filename was your username. So the limit for usernames in the software to sign up was 8 characters. But if you could get into the filesystem direct, and create your own user file, you could use the extension and have up to 11 characters (8.3); because it was liberal in what it read and strict in what it wrote.

I'd pop up as "h2odragon" on people's boards and be there for a while before anybody noticed and said "hey wait WTF?"

k310 is the Köchel listing, hence the "K", of a favorite Mozart piano sonata.

It's also the office number I had at Itek Optical Systems.

Must be lucky.

Mine comes from a line in an episode of an 80s American TV series called Riptide. One of the characters used that as an alias. For some reason, that stuck with me ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation:_Mindcrime

I was always enchanted with the name of a cat, "Mister Guts", in the 1967 story "Gonna Roll the Bones" by Fritz Leiber.

It's the alias of a minor character in the novel The Nuclear Age by Tim O'Brien -- one of the two trainers of a small group of radicals that included the novel's protagonist. Not that I train radicals or anything like that.

My (admittedly lame) homage to /dev/null

'verisimi' is a shortening of verimisimilitudinal (too long for HN) where the meaning is that we are all very similar.

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