Really I am not sure what the fus is over, like what profit making?
I have personally visited each and every app. I could be wrong but I don't think I have seen so much as a single Adsense ad on any of them. Think the only one that is making money is the iPhone HN app.
Isn't this over reacting a little?
Today on a post I released my App list. Check all the apps your self https://spreadsheets7.google.com/ccc?key=tCo5BIN61ciUkDjS2aL...
For this project three hackers got together and saw that we had a common need and that many people hacking together apps too. We wanted to help save everyone the trouble of scraping HN. We did this after speaking to other people and each other asking each other if they had the data. We were trying to make things easier for people in the HN community creating mashups and figured would save Paul and YC some bandwidth. Ronnie already has been donating his time and server for http://api.ihackernews.com/ and Joseph has been running http://metaoptimize.com/projects/autotag/hackernews/ "To learn more about large-scale NLP + machine learning techniques". I have been getting the data because I have been running analysis/status of HackerNews that I want to share with the community.
Do you have a problem with all the HN mashups out there from mobile apps and twitter bots to search sites?