I use my real name here and in a few other online communities. The choice wasn't intentional. I'm just really self-critical about the dorkiness and unoriginality of any usernames I'm able to come up with. (Pop culture, video game, and sci-fi references tend not to age gracefully beyond a certain period in one's life.)

HN has been my first major experiment with RealName™. It's gone fairly well so far. People who want to talk shop can get a hold of me. People who want to talk trash can get a hold of me, too, but fortunately those people seem few and far between. Prospective employers are free to search my corpus on HN, and in doing so, they'll probably find better content than they would on Facebook or elsewhere. In fact, I've had some opportunities come my way via HN that probably never would have elsewhere. (AngelList is the one possible challenger in that respect.)

Most important: using my real name forces me to think before I post. That's not to say everything I post here is a gem. Far from it, as the record shows. But I don't mind that the record shows something here.