Insane! But in a good way. I've been very slowly working towards refactoring Gnus to use real OO classes to implement backends, and I always thought I'd know I was done when I could implement a HN backend without too much trouble. Both sad and happy to see that someone got there first. I will give this a try.
The naming confused me. I love the name though. "Back End for HN" made me think it was another HN-clone. It's an Emacs client for HN if anybody is wondering.
Gnus is a venerable e-mail and newsgroup reader for GNU Emacs. What is new here is a backend (i.e. datasource) for Gnus to fetch from HN.
After seeing how the D forum is done, it might be interesting to see a HN->nttp bridge/server.
I mean, you could read hn with rn.
A news reader layer to Hacker News... I love it. I am to this day fascinated by the D forums. I don't know anybody else who does that. There's some newsreader client for KDE I was using and I was able to download every single thread from the D forums, so now I had them all available offline.
By "D forum", are you both talking about the D programming language forums[1]? Or what D forum?
Having a forum-like interface for newsgroups isn't something new, from the top of my head Borland had a web-based forum-like interface from at least 2000.
Yesterday only I set it up with B R command. But that just shows just three links - two to the comments, and one to the article.