> dang told me “tough luck”

He (nor I) would never write that or anything like it. What we always say is that we aim to find a compromise between a user's wish for their entire history to be erased and the rest of the community's expectation that when they participate in discussion threads, those threads will persist unadulterated into the future.

We are always willing to redact PII and do other things to prevent people's real identities from being recognized from their HN activity. We help people with requests like this all the time.

Edit:

Now I can see the email in question, I can confirm that dang did not write “tough luck”. We were, and still are, happy to work with this user to redact material that reveals their identity or location from their old comments.