Hey!
Writer here, I just thought it might be worth saying that I am indeed 17! :)
I started programming aged around 7 or 8, and have won a couple of awards (Most recently a Google Code Award for ProjectHermes - a natural language analysing bullying detector for twitter), and spoken at a few events as well.
I'm incredibly surprised myself by the things I've done over the years, it's a pretty awesome world!
It's a personal preference thing, personally, I felt that News:YC was kinda bloated when all I really wanted it for was reading.
My app was built to be nice and simple, with a core feature set, News:YC does have benefits for some people, like the ability to post, not everyone wants to though.
Hey Evadne,
The text shrinking was actually requested by 20 different beta testers, even though I initially hated the idea, and am looking at ways of improving it.
The UIActionSheet should come from the bottom, it's a bug I need to fix (that randomly came about as I deployed)
I accept the point on comments, I'm currently redesigning them for the next version.
As for readability/social etc, it's a useful feature, so why not include it as a bonus?
HackerNews for iPhone is a new client for HackerNews, with readability integration, read-later services and social sharing.
At 69p (99 cents), it's less than your morning coffee, and you deserve that right?
My parents did try to sort things out, nothing happened though, so I stopped telling them about it.