How about withholding the name still, but offering a way to 'opt-out' from voting. You don't see the name until you either vote up or opt out. After you've withheld your voice, you can't go vote again on that submission/comment.
Your point about valuing an opinion more highly from a person who is known to be accurate on a subject is valid. In the arguments case, I think it's easy enough to follow an A/B conversation, even without names.
In the first case though, it still seems that the majority of comments here are not so specialized as to require the posters identity to determine if the content is accurate enough or not. Ideally, if you could not judge the accuracy of the comment on your own you would leave it alone. There would be enough others that could judge it impartially that the comment itself would get voted up or down appropriately.
There's still the matter of confusion when [name withheld] is responding to [name withheld], though -- and for that reason alone, I'm afraid I have to disagree with your suggestion.
It's also the case that sometimes I'm not entirely sure what someone's trying to say unless and until I look at it within the context of his or her earlier comments in the same discussion. If I can't match someone's comment with the context of previous comments, I sometimes can't tell if they're being sarcastic, accidentally saying "can" instead of "can't", and so on.
I judge by the content of a comment rather than by name, and I agree that's a good way to do it, but I don't think that needs to be enforced by withholding information from us.
That's my point - some people got high karma by posting intelligent comments, but many others just got it by posting a lot and echoing popular views. So, karma score in itself is pretty useless, in my opinion.
I don't trust security advice from tptacek. First because we had a discussion and we clearly do not agree as to who can be trusted, but second (and more generally), I don't trust anyone who has enough time to gather lots of karma on HN.
Most people have better things to do.
If users can no longer rely upon their names being displayed, they will come up with alternate ways of identifying themselves. Forced anonymous has worked in some places in the past.
I don't know why you were downvotted. You do have a point. If we hide the name of the user on the header, they will probably simply post their name on the post itself.
Threads get really confusing when [name withheld until you vote] argues with himself all the time.