HN is not for directly communicating with single people. HN is for conversations with a large community. By commenting you can discover and/or influence the col

HN is not for directly communicating with single people. HN is for conversations with a large community. By commenting you can discover and/or influence the collective opinions of a large number of people. But that only works while the community's attention is on a discussion. Once the community moves on, there's no point in continuing a discussion here. Move 1:1 conversations to another service. Many people put contact information in their profiles, and others can often be found with a little searching. I've had a few people contact me about HN conversations over email and twitter and it's been a generally positive experience. Maybe HN should do more to encourage people to include contact information in their profiles so that this can happen more often.