
Ask HN: Am I allowed to embed HN discussions on a site, like Disqus does? - gitgud
Does Hacker News or YCombinator allow anyone to embed a &quot;comments discussion&quot; into a website?<p>I&#x27;m looking at implementing a solution which dynamically checks the URL and renders the discussion in an iframe. But I&#x27;m interested to see if Hacker News will allow this?
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KajMagnus
I'm also interested in this :-) I had a look here:
[http://www.ycombinator.com/legal/](http://www.ycombinator.com/legal/), and
found this:

> _" By uploading any User Content you hereby grant and will grant Y
> Combinator and its affiliated companies a nonexclusive, worldwide, royalty
> free, fully paid up, transferable, sublicensable, perpetual, irrevocable
> license to copy, display, upload, perform, distribute, store, modify and
> otherwise use your User Content for any Y Combinator-related purpose in any
> form, medium or technology now known or later developed. However, please
> review the Applications Privacy Policy located at
> [https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/privacy](https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/privacy),
> for more information on how we treat information included in applications
> submitted to us."_

> _" You acknowledge and agree that any questions, comments, suggestions,
> ideas, feedback or other information about the Site (“Submissions”) provided
> by you to Y Combinator are non-confidential and Y Combinator will be
> entitled to the unrestricted use and dissemination of these Submissions for
> any purpose, without acknowledgment or compensation to you."_

That's the text related to people's comments that I found. It grants
permissions to Y Combinator, and they don't grant the rights they get, to
anyone else. So, as far as I can tell, you're not allowed to do that. (I'm not
a lawyer; this is not legal advice. (Does one need to say that also if not in
the US? :- P ))

What do you think?

Instead, I'm thinking about dynamically check for URLs at HN, and then auto-
post a _comment_ in an embedded commenting system I'm developing (See my
profile :- )), that links to the discussion at HN. And maybe manually reply to
the comment, with a brief summary of the HN discussion. And the same, for
discussions at Reddit, maybe Mastodon, etc.

~~~
gitgud
Thanks for having a look. I'm not a lawyer either, but it appears they just
want the rights to do whatever they want with the content from Hacker News.
They don't seem to explicitly forbid the use of content from the site.

I mean they provide free access to their content API [1]. So that's a good
sign sure they want people to use the content. Although I'm sure they want you
to reference the Hacker News source link in whatever purpose you use it for
though.

That's also a pretty good Idea, have you got much.

[1] [https://github.com/HackerNews/API](https://github.com/HackerNews/API)

~~~
KajMagnus
Hmm that's interesting, that they do that via their API. At the same time,

using an API for analyzing data privately inside one's organization,

or for re-publishing content on one's own website (even if there're
attribution links),

are two very different things. The first is allowed I think; I think the
second is not, although I'd guess Y-C is happy with people doing that too, as
long as it has good effects for their business — after all, is it a bit free
marketing for HN & YC. :- ) ...

if however ... another website with YC content becomes too popular instead of
YC, I'd think they'd tell that website to stop.

------
gmemstr
I'd read through the Legal section at the bottom of the website
([http://www.ycombinator.com/legal/](http://www.ycombinator.com/legal/)).

~~~
gitgud
Thanks for that, A lot to read there...

Anyway, it seems they've set a Header on all their pages which makes iframes
"refuse to load"...

Devtools error:

"Refused to display
'[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7211514'](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7211514')
in a frame because it set 'X-Frame-Options' to 'deny'."

