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Comment by xpto123 | Hacker News Reader

Just to understand, why do you believe using an anonymous handle skews the results downward? Most persons use anonymous handles online, except on places like facebook its a generalized practice. I personally don't see the correlation between those two things.

The name of the site is Hacker News, so I would expect a lot of people here to be security aware and in general use pseudonyms anyway.

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I believe the argument is that most top commenters (which I suspect correlates quite well with high rates) are not pseudonymous, and thus unlikely to respond. See: patio11, tptacek, etc.

OK thanks, I see that that could have been what was meant.

But in my view there is no apparent co-relation between top commenters or rates. Most HN posters are likely anonymous independently of their rates, as in most programming forums.

FWIW: I bet you that there exist people with 0 < n < 100 HN karma who have weekly rates which beat Thomas' and my peak career rates, combined.

Oh, I don't doubt it. Outliers among outliers and all that.

I didn't mean to pick you two out as particularly high earners among the top HN users, FTR. You're just the two username/real name pairs I can come up with off the top of my head.

"Hacker" meaning a good programmer, not hacker as in someone who maliciously gains access to systems.

http://www.paulgraham.com/gba.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_%28term%29#Hacker_defini...

I agree, it also means at least somewhat security aware. Posting anonymously seems mostly common sense, almost everybody in the internet does it.

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