Standard disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. This seems like the sort of thing people would be able to sue you for. As far as I can te

Standard disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. This seems like the sort of thing people would be able to sue you for. As far as I can tell, Hacker News doesn't do anything special with copyright of comments. As with all text you write, as soon as it becomes "fixed" by being recorded, the author has the copyright to it. Since the author decided to publish it in a Hacker News comment thread, that basically implies that Hacker News has permission to copy their work and publish it in the standard ways that it does. Now there is the concept of "Fair Use". Hosting interesting comment threads may or may not be "Fair Use", but either way that's the sort of thing you find out by getting sued and seeing if it works as a defense. If you host it without any commentary, that's less likely to qualify as Fair Use than if you summarize stuff, say what you like about the thread, add your own commentary, etc.