We take care of these requests every day and have bent over backwards (e.g. spending hours writing code) to help people individually in cases where their needs were unusually complex. I can tell you for sure that whether the person is high- or low-status in $whoever's eyes has nothing to do with this. Often I don't even know who the person is.

Our approach boils down to this: we don't want anyone to get in trouble from anything they posted to HN. It doesn't matter who the "anyone" is. Countless times I've deleted posts, redacted personal data and/or randomized usernames for accounts that had long been abusing and trolling HN. I don't rub their nose in it—I just pretend not to have noticed. You'd be surprised how polite and thankful people become when they need something.

I'm not surprised to see accounts like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40732721 being scurrilously silly, but you've been around here long enough to know better.

Edit: here's the last time this came up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26949343. It's a more complete explanation than I have time to give right now, and nothing has changed since then.