You'll be able to claim your account on the site and then set yourself to "redacted" so that your content doesn't show up on it. (The claiming process is fun: I generate a 6 digit number, you put it in your HN profile, and then you get a link to reset the account password and sign in: https://i.imgur.com/OYaFZOI.png)

Certainly not trying to cheat anyone here. You ever make a model train set? It feels fun like that. Obviously it's not the real HN and I don't claim it to be. Suggestions welcome.

Part of the point of this is to offer an extended API that shows downvotes/flagged/collapsed/dupe/etc, all stuff the official API doesn't cover.

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superloika 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Making it opt-out instead of opt-in is shitty. Here's a better idea: don't disrespect the hackernews users in the first place.

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xigoi 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

How is archiving content disrespectful toward the creators of the content? Are you also going to sue the Internet Archive?

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sillysaurusx 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I mean no disrespect. The site simply wouldn't work without it. HN has a million users or so.

Opt out is the best compromise I can offer. Without it, no site is possible.

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akerl_ 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Why does the site need to be possible?

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sillysaurusx 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Philosophically, it doesn't. No art project needs to exist. Neither did the first HN client app, or any of the dozen HN readers on the app store.

But "Why does it need to exist?" kills every art project, side project, or anything built for the love of building. None of those need to exist either.

There's also the argument that if something isn't forbidden, it should be allowed. The way you lose rights over time is by your existing rights getting clipped off at the edges.

A lot of the criticisms leveled at me here would also apply vs Google back when Larry and Sergey were grad students. If they'd had to worry that indexing content equals copyright infringement, they'd have a steep hill to climb.

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akerl_ 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Except this isn't indexing, this is creating a replacement frontend.

> There's also the argument that if something isn't forbidden, it should be allowed

That's a really fun legal argument but a pretty irrelevant ethical one.

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krapp an hour ago | parent | next [-]

I don't know why people decided to jump on this one specific project but there have been numerous replacement frontends for HN published over the years, and put on Show HN. And clones of HN. And datasets of HN comments.

	▲	akerl_ an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I can't speak for other people, but I commented here because the person I replied to shared their project and then in response to concerns about it copying other people's content, tried to position that first as being OK because they'd offer opt-out, and then said that was viable because if it were opt-in the site wouldn't be possible.

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ButlerianJihad an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> replacement frontend

No, they are not "replacement frontends". Those are known as "3rd party clients". These are not clients but clones. They are cloning all the content. That means they've replicated the backend, the frontend, and the database full of content, by scraping/pirating it from the original source.

old.reddit.com is an "alternative frontend". Clones of scraped content are not.

	▲	akerl_ an hour ago \| parent [-]
		It feels odd to nitpick the terminology of somebody who is agreeing with your concern.

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ButlerianJihad 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> You ever make a model train set?

Yes I have, but for some reason I did not go to Union Pacific railyards and pry metal sidings off of the rolling stock. Nor did I siphon diesel fuel out of the locomotives! FFS!

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sillysaurusx 5 hours ago | parent [-]

When you do that, the locomotives lose diesel and I gain diesel. When I copy a comment nothing is lost (except an insignificant amount of HN's performance, which I'm working with Dan to make sure to stay in bounds of).

It's open source. The point of open source is that you have a lit candle and I have an unlit one. Lighting mine with yours doesn't extinguish your flame; there are now two flames.

The site will eventually offer an extended API that shows content that the official API doesn't, like downvotes and [flagged] status. It's partly why I made it, since there was no way to see flagged comments without visiting HN directly.

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ButlerianJihad 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Comments are not open source! Our contributions are copyrighted and we didn’t give y’all no license for it! We license to YC, not to randos!

I spit on your fucking illicit candle, bro! I slap that candle out of your hand! “You Didn’t Build That!”

You pirated it all!

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sillysaurusx 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Actually, scraping a publicly accessible website has been litigated extensively. In hiQ Labs vs Linkedin, the court held that scraping publicly accessible data doesn't violate the CFAA.

Regarding copyright, copying for display purposes non-commercially seems to be fair use. There are four factors to fair use analysis: purpose (non-commercial art project), nature of the work (short factual public comments), amount taken (individual comments in context), and market harm (none, your comment still exists on HN and YC loses nothing). Three of the four factors favor fair use, and arguably all four.

The point is, it's not as cut and dry as you're portraying it to be. If you post data publicly on the internet, you should expect it to be read. The current legal system seems to support this theory.

Since this neither violates the CFAA nor copyright, it seems ok. Publicly posted content carries an implied license for reasonable access and display. That's why you can quote HN comments in a blog post without getting sued.

	▲	ButlerianJihad 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Considering the topic of the very thread you are posting in right now, your comment is steeped in irony and ignorance. Good luck, have fun, don’t get sued.