The user content is supposed to be licensed only Y Combinator and (bleah) its affiliated companies (which are many, all the startups they fund, for example).
If it's owned by you and only licensed by HN shouldn't you be the one enforcing it?
> ... a nonexclusive
I.e. this section is talking to additional rights to the content you post to ALSO go to YC, not that YC is guaranteeing it (+friends) will be the only one to hold these rights or will enforce who else should hold the rights to your publicly shared content for you.
There's a more intricate conversation to be had with GDPR and public data on forums in general but that's wholly unrelated to what YC's legal page says and still unlikely to end up in an alarming result.
Imagine Facebook claiming that by uploading images you are granting them exclusive usage rights to that image. It would mean you couldn't upload it to any other site with similar terms anymore.
That said, there are "no scraping" and "commercial use restricted" carve-outs for the content on HN. Which honestly is bullshit.
Your submissions to, and comments you make on, the Hacker News site are not Personal Information and are not "HN Information" as defined in this Privacy Policy.
Other Users: certain actions you take may be visible to other users of the Services.