Insane! But in a good way. I've been very slowly working towards refactoring Gnus to use real OO classes to implement backends, and I always thought I'd know I was done when I could implement a HN backend without too much trouble. Both sad and happy to see that someone got there first. I will give this a try.
The naming confused me. I love the name though. "Back End for HN" made me think it was another HN-clone. It's an Emacs client for HN if anybody is wondering.
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.