I'm not really a programmer, so I can't volunteer for this, but: Assaf Arkin, who ran the co.mments.com site, might be willing to let some true programmer work

I'm not really a programmer, so I can't volunteer for this, but: Assaf Arkin, who ran the co.mments.com site, might be willing to let some true programmer work with PG to bolt his code onto the HN site somehow - his main site is http://labnotes.org/ http://labnotes.org/.