Because he doesn't want to be outed, for whatever reason. Outing someone by calling out their real name is a dick move. It used to be that HN recognized the occasional need for stealth pre-launch, instead of this braggery.

(Disclaimer: same thing happened to my company when we pre-launched.)

I have no idea who Dave Paola is. I saw it posted over on coder.io and I thought it might be of interest

I didn't submit it :-)