I think the original commenter was hinting at the opportunity for the author to provide a service on top of HN data, like monitoring posts, replies, karma level

I think the original commenter was hinting at the opportunity for the author to provide a service on top of HN data, like monitoring posts, replies, karma levels, or providing more categorized feeds based on preferences. It could violate terms of service as it could at its most basic level scrape Hacker News for this information, but there hasn't been any issue with it so far.