OTOH, I'm in the habit of scanning for double-digit comments when I want to save a little time, so I miss that.
In these cases, I have a neutral feeling about the comment, but upvote it because 0, -1 etc. seem unfair.
Hiding the points will mean that HN will lose some of its self-correcting capacity (when it comes to comments that were downvoted unfairly).
Anyway, it will be interesting to see the results of this experiment.
When my number changes, I click threads and scan for a different number than I recall for my posts.
This tells me which ones are still being read.
If there was a visual indicator of posts that had the arrows ticked since I last looked - this would be solved.
Otherwise, it is akin to throwing your comments to the wind with no indicator of how each is received unless they get greyed out by down voting.
EDIT: I don't feel like I have any incentive to click the arrows on anything if I cant see the result of that click. This really really is a bad design choice.
At a minimum we should be able to see our own scores.
EDIT #2: Also, assuming two people reply to a questions asking for a recommendation for X with a link -- you have no idea what the crowd's opinion may be of the links without them replying.
Typically good content is VOTED UP as an indicator that it is, in fact, good content.
The more and more I think about not seeing content scores, the more obvious it is that this is just flat wrong to not show them.