To be fair, I've mostly worked for very large companies.

In large corporations, an exception to a blanket IP contract would require approval by fairly high ranking people in both HR and Legal. When you have >10,000 employees, individual exceptions simply don't happen for anyone under any circumstances.

My experience is only reflective of very large companies. I doubt it's representative of smaller employers.

Are you being paid well enough by this bigcorp that it's worth losing the ability to comment on HN without violating the letter of your agreement (since comments are copyrighted by their authors by default)?

That sounds about right.

My last employer was a startup and I had this stricken... as well had privisions in place so I could do outside consulting as long as it wasn't in a competitive industry (this they may have given me as I came to them initially doing part-time consulting).

The place I worked at before, a 15k person corp, is a place I wouldn't have even thought of asking for things like that. It would have a couple weeks just to have gotten a turnaround through HR and legal.

That's true. And of course large companies will work through modifications to your contract too, but only for a handful of those 10,000+ employees.