[dieselgate]

One of the things I like most about HN is there is not, to my knowledge, any "social" features like this. As mentioned by other comments there are possibly third party UIs/clients that offer a similar feature set. Easiest solution that comes to mind is writing down a username and just checking in when desired.

[mharig]

This is my opinion, too.

If you want deep discussions, you have all the Xchans

[dieselgate]

Coming back to this randomly - some folks put their contact information in their bios. Not my style but there probably are better formats for long discussion. Plus the HN indentation on long threads is slightly callback hellish