Requiring a real name will have a chilling effect. Someone might be willing to share their name internally to aid verification, but not want their name attached to their story.
NYT is seriously harming their data collection by insisting real names be attached and published.
I’m pretty sure the clause at the end of the questionnaire is just their default. They say “no, your contact information will not be published” right before the questionnaire, which I’d take to mean that no, they aren’t going to include your name.
There’s no article, nothing new or technically interesting, nothing to even read. It’s a solicitation of anecdotes to be used by a news outlet.
It’s clearly off topic according to HN guidelines:
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
NYT is seriously harming their data collection by insisting real names be attached and published.