Note that very few of the people that I'm talking about are those that I'd call "friends" (and they probably feel the same): they're generally high volume accounts who I have binned based on their views on recurring topics, so I guess they'd be "celebrity" accounts in some sense. Since Hacker News is a small community, this usually gets me a higher recognition rate than you'd otherwise expect; even though I self select by pretty much reading most comment threads about my interests I do glance at a significant fraction of posts that hit the front page even if they're not something I know much about.