If HN applied the Creative Commons Attribution license to comment text (by adding a notice to the comment submission form) then comments could be republished in Hacker Monthly, and in general it just seems like the Right Thing. Any concerns or reasons why this isn't a good idea?
The magazine is fantastic and I completely support it, but I do think this should be an opt-in. Perhaps it would be easier for commenters who wouldn't mind their work being published elsewhere to just drop a note like "All comments licensed CC/NC/SA" in their profile?
(I've dropped this in mine).
Opt-in wouldn't solve the problem for Hacker Monthly, as few people would bother. Opt-out would be fine. BTW, CC/NC precludes inclusion in Hacker Monthly as it is sold and contains advertisements.
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HN cannot apply the Creative Commons Attribution license to our comments. HN does not own our comments. We do. We are implicitly granting a license to HN to store and display our comments, but we are not implicitly granting HN a right to re-license our comments. HN needs to specifically ask for our permission in order to license our comments under a CC license, just like Wikipedia does with its content. It's not enough to just say that the comments are licensed under CC. This is what StackOverflow does, and it's ridiculous. Let's not have the same thing here. I would be more than happy to license my comments under a CC license, but I would not be happy at all if someone else thought they had the right to do it for me.
Conclusion: Be like Wikipedia, not StackOverflow.