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.
Yeah, even posting anonymously on the internet your identity could probably still be found, given someone sufficiently motivated to find it.
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.
I think there is a distinction between saying stupid things, contributing to sensitive topics, and outright trolling which you're ignoring here. All three of them are things that I wouldn't want to be part of my permanent record, but:
* Saying stupid things (Software X doesn't support Feature Y, which is good if you want to do Activity Z) and then be corrected (because in the meantime, Software X got a Feature Y for the latest version) provides overall value to the discussion because other people are likely to have made the same mistake that I did.
* Contributing to sensitive topics (be it gender equality, the question of "race", or any political question) will always send the goon squads your way whenever you voice a non-majority opinion. Admittedly, HN has a policy that these contentious topics are not great material for posting, but you get one of these once in a while and it's hard to make an informative contribution to such an issue without drawing ill will from anyone (which will result in downvotes to an anymous HN poster, but could be potentially harmful if those trying-to-be-well-informed-but-not-necessarily-popular opinions ended up on your permanent record). As an example, consider the question of founders being able to raise kids at the same time. While there are people who do a good enough job at it to be able to step up and say, I can do it just fine, and people who can claim anything because people will listen to them anyways, anyone in between would run the danger of drawing the ill will from people of one side or the other for claiming that it's possible or not so possible.
* Outright trolling is something you would not want in the comments, but there's a very fine line between a pointed remark that someone made, and trolling. And as with blog posts, successful trolls are still successful when they are not anonymous.
I think one of the problems here is that, when the audience grows large enough, a pointed post will draw a larger number of upvotes than a boring-but-informative one. So it may be useful to partially decouple the comment-ranking function of up-downvotes with the karma calculation to disincentivize karma whoring.
For example, one could reduce the weight of comment up-/downvotes whenever the total number of (comments+upvotes+downvotes) of an article crosses a certain threshold - say 100. In this way, having a +20 voted comment on an article that barely made it to the frontpage would count more than a +60 voted comment on an incendiary topic that draws a total of several hundred up/downvotes.
