[drostie]

The freaky thing is that the YC rep appears, from these transactions, to have no idea how to communicate with the HN production database. (Perhaps the costs are so high that they simply refuse to do so.) They appear to have made no effort to check.

So for example they say "we can't authenticate you." That could mean one of two different things: it may mean "we can't verify that you are who you say you are," or else, "we can't change the system to reflect the fact that we have confirmed who you say you are."

In the former case, it's pretty straightforward to see that username `delan` has an `about` section which contains just one link, and has three times submitted posts of content on that domain name. Clearly they identify with the owner of that domain. And hey, the owner of that domain appears to now be contacting you, wanting access! So in this case, with less than five minutes' inquiry you can see that this is probably a legit request.

Since they say things like "well, maybe we don't have an email for your account?" rather than, "I checked and you forgot to set an email for your account," it seems rather like the latter -- they just don't have database or admin access, period. That sounds crazy, though.