"I’d also hoped that I could convince them to let me change my account name to dannysullivan..."
I contacted PG a while back about changing my username to something else, and he replied
"Unfortunately due to a design flaw in HN there is no way to
change usernames."
This is probably a good place to point out that the "email" field in your profile is ONLY visible to HN admins. So if you want other users to be able to see your email, you should also put it in your "about" field.
I'm not sure why I expected there to be more to this post.