Source: Hacker News
Article note: This is a persistent culture-clash thing in my corner of academia (and me personally), conventional academia is really in to "real names" and the computing world is not.
IMO it's most likely largely because academic publishing is a copyright cartel running a prestige game, and pseudonyms are a problem for the publisher's making indefinite private income streams out of public research.
I personally think the real names thing _encourages_ reputation inflating misconduct and discourages doing anything that might step on toes, so it actively makes academia worse. I regularly make jokes about how things (especially code) posted by stable pseudonyms on the Internet are far more reliable than things that come through the academic publishing system.
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