Yes but I somewhat regret it because Paul Graham won't allow us to delete old comments. Your HN identity is permanent. I personally think this is backwards and unfair to the content creators. The words I type I are mine. Let me delete them if I so choose to at a later date. Otherwise I'll stop contributing out of fear that I might say something I regret at a later date.
"Doesn't that prevent uncivil arguments?" NO. Anyone can make a throw away account and post garbage. It's just hurting the people who are contributing to HN as regulars.
Once you have submitted the words they become part of the thread and not purely your own. However it might be good to allow them to be anonymised later.
I'd prefer allowing them to become pseudonymous later. I still think it's useful to be able to take a comment in context of other things that individual/account has said.
Of course, I guess this could be easily done if you could change your userid (on the backend, it's proabably a GUID or sequence number anyway).
"Doesn't that prevent uncivil arguments?" NO. Anyone can make a throw away account and post garbage. It's just hurting the people who are contributing to HN as regulars.