[Alupis]

You must be reading a different article. The OP does not circumvent authentication in any way. The OP caches it... that's it. And, that was only for some of the data, not the entire app.

So yes, his app is mostly like a news aggregator.

[sxtxixtxcxh]

since we've established the data is not public, and is in fact restricted and controlled, how is it anything "mostly like" hacker news? hacker news does not store your NYtimes username and password, scrape the NYTimes site for an auth token, make a login request on your behalf to copy that article and display it, in full text stripping out the NYTimes attribution and branding, on hacker news.

what would happen if they did is a thought experiment i'll leave up to you.