I think the concept is amazing, so don't take the rest of my comment too seriously.
But why do we anchor naming to someone who made something popular? Why do we upvote similar names too? For example, openclaw became popular then there were similar projects with the "claw" naming.
It's just a very fascinating psychological thing to do, and I don't understand why. Because if you copy part of a name, generally you'll never get more popular than the original name. So why do this?
If you are referring to the "Hacker" part, I guess it makes sense since this is a list of books referred in "HackerNews".
If you were referring to why Karpathy's name was invoked in the post, piggyback effect I guess?
Like how people talk about “Uber for x”? There’s probably a whole bunch of benefits - a vague sense of already being familiar, a quick understanding of the underlying similarity if you’ve done it well, a halo effect, etc.
I’m not sure where you get your evidence for “never get more popular than the original”. I’m sure you just haven’t heard of the originals that faded away.
Describing things by reference to other, similar things is sort of how language works. Humans aren't quite Tamarians, but denotative meanings do often derive from connotations that originally attach via metaphor, analogy, or other forms of comparison.
Obviously _some_ users are better than _no_ users on your app.
Some reference to something known is better than no reference.