I guess you made it before hacker news released their API?

I'm not that familiar with the topic, but it's one thing for HN to provide an API and quite another thing for them to be Ok with being used as a "comments section" or forum for someone else's site, blog etc.?

I'd be very interested in someone pointing the TOS to see if this is explicitly blocked.

IMO: If Hacker News doesn't want this kind of thing, it should be explicitly called out in the TOS. Otherwise, they don't have much of a leg to stand on. (Except by blocking these kinds of things server-side.)

No TOS needed, there's already international copyright law that explicitly disallows this. With a system like this, you are _embedding copyrighted content into your website without consent_. If it was a single quote, a comment, or maybe even a screenshot it might be exempted, but you cannot just copy/paste someone's full content into your website without permission.

PS, Hacker News might not even be in the position to officially allow this, similarly to how a generic OSS dev cannot just relicense a project without getting consent from all contributors (or a previous CLA).

I feel like HN is small enough/ small townish enough to not have everything in the TOS and I like it that way.

Absolutely it is not. No interactive site is too small for a clear terms of service, otherwise it's rule by arbitrary judgement

That's pretty extreme: I don't think random bloggers that host comment sections need to be laying out terms of service. Instead, they can handle things as they come up, and the community is small enough, and stakes are low enough, that this is fine.

HN is bigger than a blog, but it's still small enough that it can be fully moderated with 1-2 people, and I think similar tradeoffs apply here.

if we always demand to be told how to behave, no one will actually understand how to behave in isolation.

you wouldn’t download a car.

A Terms-Of-Service document enumerates your rights and the rights of the owners of the property under the terms of service, anything that isn't explicitly named you can assume to be disallowed unless you have a document to prove that you have an exemption.

i wonder why they wanted it shut down.

there are a few alternate frontends to hackernews. technically this would be no different.

likewise linking to hackernews discussions should also be ok.

maybe an issue with load on the site if this becomes to popular?

Because it doesn't scale.

But I thought we were meant to do things that don't scale?

Hacker news is meant to be a news discussion site focused at a particular crowd, not a bastardized website comment section.

It actively ruins the experience here by allowing content that doesn’t originate from this website.

A changed UI and making the site a “feature” of another site are not the same thing.