My job two jobs ago did start out with their eyes open. I was up front about it and it was a question on the application. I wasn't going to lie. They told me it wouldn't be a problem .... and it wasn't. Until someone else found out and wasn't so non-judgemental. that's kind of how this goes-- whoever I first start working with, whoever is doing the hiring, whatever. I get the green light. I get hired even. It's ... what happens next.

You got new coworkers? A lot of people start digging. I don't survive that digging.

Part of the problem is I went to prison for eight years. And I am just a computer nerd with no criminal background, I've never even had a parking ticket. I act like every other nerd in a dev environment. I love hardware, I'm very passionate about operating systems, making them run juust right.

Where it's a problem is when people look me up and are like, holy cow this is a hardened criminal! but I act... so... normal. and you wouldn't guess. it actually flips people out. it feels like I'm lying about a whole lot of things suddenly. I must be. I have to be. and it goes downhill from there. Whatever trust I earned gets taken away because people are judgmental and often not reasonable about that judgement.

I know it's a possibility, so all I can do is mitigate the risk. I've intentionally focused on very small companies (<5 employees typically) where I almost always report to the top. I put myself in positions where I'm not just rank and file, but am essentially a hard dependency. Also in contracting roles you're usually not around that long. It's tedious finding work, but so is looking over your shoulder.

> This is a "throwaway" account for obvious reasons.

You should know that if you also have a non-throwaway account, HN will unify your accounts in their backend records.

It’s fine to have multiple accounts on HN as long as you use them with good judgment. I do. I have spoken with DanG about this before and he seemed fine with it.

Yes, you should assume that the moderators will know, and you should be fine with them knowing, because you’re not using the multiple accounts to escape moderation, but rather for greater anonymity in the comment thread.

The rules that I follow, which I think are implicit in “use good judgment”:

1. Don’t vote on the same thing from multiple accounts.

2. Don’t participate in the same comment thread with multiple accounts (or if you do, only separate parts of the thread). Don’t create a fake impression of consensus or have your accounts interact with each other.

Those are probably the two big ones I would imagine.

Whether the accounts are actually tied together on the backend, I don’t know. I would suspect that they are not automatically linked, but could probably be linked if the moderators are investigating you for bad behavior (like voting on the same thing with multiple accounts).

Generally speaking, not really worried about it. I don't see HN as a risk vector. If I was worried about it, I would have run it through a standalone browser on a fresh machine (or VM) behind a VPN, and not spoken in my "voice" (I would have used ChatGPT to rewrite)

Not the first time I've used a throwaway, and they've never merged my comments into my main account (only use throwaways for these types of discussions - I assume abusing it, such as ban evasion, would be a different story)

No, they don't do this. It's not even clear how they would; the closest thing would be merging based on IP or fingerprinting, but both are extremely noisy.

You can easily demonstrate to yourself that they do.

And the situation here is that felon_in_texas visits HN in his usual manner, views a topic he wants to comment on, creates an account on the spot, and leaves his comment. How noisy do you think the IP identification can be?

Very noisy, because I'm not concerned about HN. Not the first time I've used an alt, whether as a throwaway or logging in via my employer's account. I have comfort in HN's integrity when I'm not abusing the privilege.

> You can easily demonstrate to yourself that they do.

How?

Extremely, if they’re on CGNAT. Or live in a house with more than one person.

Please be precise about how I can demonstrate this to myself.

How then? No need to be cagey

Is there proof of this?

Proof definitely needed. Honestly this doesn’t sound like something HN would have any interest in doing, they don’t serve ads or anything like that so why would they care?

Ban evasion?

They do definitely limit upvoting/downvoting from similar accounts, so this isn't out of the realm of possibility. They care to avoid false votes, voting rings, etc.

Oh yeah that’s a fair point! But I’d hope the data isn’t used outside of that use

GDPR would prohibit this, and since they never ask about consent, I would assume that they have no legal basis to collect personally identifiable information on anyone.

If you have evidence of the contrary, I would love to know.

I do not have any employment at this point to risk with my identity, and given that I have lost it over and over again from people who did not know about my past finding out about it and objecting to it enough to cost me my job, it's easy for me to be open at this point. what have I got to lose?

I'm an ancient linkedin account, because I made it way back when linkedin first came out. it's an easy one to remember, lol.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/werewolf/