[kctess5]

Is that so bad? Granted maybe it's annoying looking at old threads, but as a user, the ability to go through and remove old and potentially regrettable posts is quite welcome.

Maybe a good compromise would be to remove the user information after a certain time period (~2 years). Hashing the username salted with the post title would be a decent way of systematically respecting user privacy while also keeping old threads readable. I wouldn't mind if HN did this.

[ryandrake]

You'd be surprised how much you could piece together with obfuscated (but still unique) usernames. I'd be in favor of your system if the hash was salted with the article's id, so that the hash of my username in one article was different than the hash of my username in a different article.

One day I'm going to run for office and I'm going to have to get lawyers to scrub HN of all my comments because they have no way for users to manage their content :-)

[krapp]

Really, usernames only have to be unique within a single thread, don't they?

You could get away with something as simple as incremental ids in that case - user1, user2, etc.

[tokenizerrr]

Yep, it's awful. I find a thread in Google and all the useful comments are gone.

[gaius]

Why do your think your right to read a "useful" comment overrules the rights of the original writer of that comment? Not snark, a genuine question.