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.