While I generally agree, I'm not surprised mobile browsers did weird things with HN. Look at the source, it's nested tables with expanded invisible 1 pixel gifs used for indentation.
I've not designed HTML since the early 2000s but that was an easy, workable, way to do layout then and should still work now. HTML takes are just weird and require tricks like that to work. I understand the current preferred way is creating a grid via CSS.