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.
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.