Another item I was curious about is how it would look at different screen sizes. The current Hacker News scales reasonably well down to phone size, but could easily be improved upon with a little white-space below each story.
IMO, HN scales very poorly down to phone sizes. Text does not wrap, so I either get to scroll horizontally, turn my phone sideways, or read 2pt fonts. Interacting with the site isn't any better. It's a gamble whether I will hit the comments link or the article link, and the only way to vote on anything is to pinch to zoom in because the arrows turn sub-pixel on a phone.
In the end, while HN's design is firmly in the utilitarian-but-useful camp on the desktop, I feel it is firmly in the failure camp on phone-sized devices. I rarely interact with HN on my phone because of it.
Edit: And I didn't even mention trying to deal with the comment box on a phone...
Plain html[ed] without any graphics would be a major improvement for hn on the phone. Even on the note3, which has about as big a screen as anything called a "phone" could reasonably have, it's pretty awful. It even manages to combine too small text with using too much of the screen/inducing scroll due too poor layout.
I'm not sure why nothing's ever done about it -- style aside hn has three serious usability problems: non-wrapping text, hopelessly small voting widgets ("up", "down" text buttons/links would be an improvement) -- and the comment box on mobile/small screens.
Am I correct in my understanding that there isn't a (current) public repo where one might suggest fixes for this? I really do enjoy the utilitarian "feel" to hn, but these long-standing issues really need to be fixed, and at least fixing the first two is quite easy.
[ed: by "plain html" I mean not simply wrapping the page in a table, and allowing a more normal view. Technically one could use the table markup and just change the css too, of course]
Last I looked, hn was built with functions that wrapped primitive/direct generation of html... I can't imagine it'd take that many replacements to change the structure to use a hierarchy of paragraph-tags or divs (ironically that might also be easier to style with parent-child relationships...).
But I didn't look very hard at the code last time I looked.
Another item I was curious about is how it would look at different screen sizes. The current Hacker News scales reasonably well down to phone size, but could easily be improved upon with a little white-space below each story.