[code_duck]

My impression is that pg wants to encourage the hacker spirit by providing a bare bones service which could easily have a 'hacked' api built upon it.

[taliesinb]

My impression is that HN's link and comment data is too valuable for pg to give away.

Certainly, if I have had access to it I know I could do some pretty useful sociology on HN's audience (= the pool of startup hire material).

[code_duck]

I don't believe that HN restricts or discourages the scraping of HN content in any way... Other than the restrictions here: https://news.ycombinator.com/robots.txt

If you have a fabulous idea for how to use the data contained on this site, I'm sure everyone will be impressed and interested to see it.