> forever linked to you on the internet
I'm happy for you as a respected user of this site to know who I am. Google - forever and ever - not so much.
As far as comment quality goes, you might cut out some of the crap, but you may also get more sterile discussions from good citizens such as myself. My hunch is that some people just have an attitude problem, and will be a detriment to HN with or without their identities on display.
Unfortunately, you can't get the first without the second, as witness the leak of the "journolist" e-mails.
Don't post, don't publish, don't comment. Simple as that.
Some time ago another person made a comment about pearls and some sort of livestock. Throwing...things...in places?
Was interesting maybe a year back we had someone post anonymously and then had a thread on people trying to work out who it was, knowing it was someone who had commented a decent amount before. People were applying algorithms to attempt to work it out, no idea if anyone ever did, can't find the thread.