Painful, but I guess it's up to the individual AppStore reviewer to figure out what is ok or not. I actually created a few years ago a HackerNews client as well for iOS, but it never got through the review process, not even version 1.0. I was surprised, since many other HackerNews apps with similar features were allowed. At that point I just gave up and put the source code on Github, for whole the world to see.

I believe this way it might still have helped me find new job opportunities, since companies could see a bit of my coding style. So I believe in the end not all work was for nothing.