I sympathize. When I created my account in 2008 it was in no way unusual and had basically zero scope for IRL consequences to have a forum account where one said controversial things.
Today my HN account is by all accounts a major liability to making a living. For the most part I stand by what I’ve said as ethically necessary to be said, but it’s hard to effect change from a position of a structurally precarious likelihood. In retrospect, should have used a pseudonym.
Maybe it’s possible to get one’s username changed. That wouldn’t be a total fix, but it would put bounds on scope for IRL trouble.
I have no idea if such requests are honored. Maybe @dang has a policy on it.
They honor special deletion requests if you have reasons, but otherwise if you want to stay anonymous, I find it’s best to just create a new account and start over to prevent being profiled.
You make a good point but I’d put it a little differently in this case.
My HN comment history is effectively a blog in real time that documents 15 years of stages: when the software business was a real meritocracy or at least rapidly becoming one, then the absurd excesses that to my eternal shame I participated in and profited from, then the realizations that are accessible only to an insider near the apex of status and achievement in this cavalcade of nepotism and corruption who grows a conscience.
I’ve known any number of people who started in a similar place to where I ended up, people who at one time wrote popular books about the sleazy corruption, whistleblowers for lack of a better term. But one by one they’ve knuckled under and become part of the PR apparatus for this sticky and tricky and icky thing.
I know of like one hard-core whistleblower on this particular thing who went the distance (two if you count Snowden and bet your butt he was attempting to hold Silicon Valley to account via thoroughly real and eminently responsible disclosure), and Suchit is dead by his own hand at 26.
I wish I had cut my own hands off before building my part of this architecture of despair, which is regrettably a pretty pivotal part.
So even if @dang honored a deletion request, and it’s pretty likely that honoring such is a matter of law not of backroom discretion, is it really more important that I can get work in the Valley than to keep this artifact around? Maybe I wind up wussing out locally to carry the fight globally, but it’s not obvious. The thing about a world where few software companies go public, none do without serious insider connections, and there are like 3-5 possible ultimate acquirers who have no scruples around cartel behavior (as deemed by the United States Justice Department) is that it’s a pretty narrow group of decision makers who decide if any software venture can exist over time. Juicero is in: Moxie Marlinspike watches his back like he’s Jason Bourne or something.
Today my HN account is by all accounts a major liability to making a living. For the most part I stand by what I’ve said as ethically necessary to be said, but it’s hard to effect change from a position of a structurally precarious likelihood. In retrospect, should have used a pseudonym.
Maybe it’s possible to get one’s username changed. That wouldn’t be a total fix, but it would put bounds on scope for IRL trouble.
I have no idea if such requests are honored. Maybe @dang has a policy on it.