Plenty of other sites manage to use open source code and even take pull requests without spilling their business secrets.

Then again, those sites are built on frameworks designed with modularity and separation of concerns in mind, while HN may not have been, so fair enough.

There's really no call to be a jerk about this. Keeping this site running is a galactically annoying job, and Dan and his team --- who have repeatedly said that nothing like this happens --- do it for us round the clock, for free.