It looks pretty damn good. You should file an appeal tonight. They're pretty quick about responding, so shouldn't be more than a couple days at most.
Be very nice to them in your email.
Don't mention that you posted about this on Hacker News. The approval team explicitly does not like when people try publicly shame Apple for not approving someone's app. The approval process is actually not as arbitrary as is commonly believed.
In your email, explain that Hacker News is a popular technology news website and that your app is an interface for it. Do a search in iTunes for Hacker News and copy links to all of the other apps that have already been approved. That's your prior art argument.
Apple also has a policy about too many low-quality identical apps (i.e. the 1001 fart and flashlight apps). But that's not the reason your app was denied so you should be ok on that front.
The homepage (linked just under the post, http://newsyc.me/) has there's a few screenshots, and there's also a slightly outdated video (http://vimeo.com/21962215) on Vimeo.
Be very nice to them in your email.
Don't mention that you posted about this on Hacker News. The approval team explicitly does not like when people try publicly shame Apple for not approving someone's app. The approval process is actually not as arbitrary as is commonly believed.
In your email, explain that Hacker News is a popular technology news website and that your app is an interface for it. Do a search in iTunes for Hacker News and copy links to all of the other apps that have already been approved. That's your prior art argument.
Apple also has a policy about too many low-quality identical apps (i.e. the 1001 fart and flashlight apps). But that's not the reason your app was denied so you should be ok on that front.
Let us know how it turns out!