Looks good from the screenshot, but for me, votes and comments is way more important than who submitted it. And: What happens to titles which are too long?
Well, it does depend on the width of your terminal, of course, but the title could be abbreviated, there's no need to repeat "ago" in the time column and, as others have pointed out, the submitter's name is pretty irrelevant. I'd go title, domain, votes, comments and try to fit that on one line. In fact, now I compare that to the actual web home page where it's impossible to easily compare things like comments or age, I just want to redesign that ...
Like any feature rich application, it takes a little time to learn the ins and outs, time saving features and such - but it's very usable for a site like hacker news, you can even navigate via the numbered links on the site.
I've tried HN on all the major text browsers in the past and they never seem to indent comments correctly. Without proper "spacial nesting" conversations are nearly impossible to follow.
Have you tried using any of those browsers? I don't think they're very convenient for frequent use. In Lynx, it takes 10 keystrokes to navigate to link #1 on Hacker News. 11 if you count accepting the cookie, which you have to do every time you open it, since it doesn't persist your choice. In my terminal, Lynx fits 5 stories at a time and navigating from one to the other takes 5 key strokes.
I use Lynx frequently. You can, for example, press > to go to the next link in the 'same column', which cuts down the keystrokes to go to the next story to two keystrokes.
If I'm browsing a site with a top menu in lynx I press the delete key to scroll down past the menu so I don't have to press down repeatedly. Then capital V at the cookie prompt rejects it "foreVer" (for the rest of the session).
My version does, however, default to nntp for news.* subdomains unless you supply the protocol, so that's annoying.
Or you can use elinks and click on the links with the mouse...
I see these solutions a lot lately, HN browser, weather, etc, all in the terminal. Perhaps a silly question, but why the need for browsing it in the terminal instead of a browser like say, Chrome or Firefox?
But more to the point - it fits with many keyboard only work flows and/or tiling WMs (i3, awesome, etc). At least that's what it's good in it for me. One less context switch.
Don't those reasons also soy to browsers? My tiling window manager is perfectly capable of tiling browser windows. Browsers like Firefox and Chrome can be controlled fully by keyboard, even very comfortably with the right extension.
Sometimes I just want to kill some time while code compiles/tests run. This way, HN is just on a different split pane, and I can stop browsing as soon as the other job is finished.