[twelvechairs]

Whilst I don't want to pick on the OP, this is such an important point. Its all too often that 'design' gets confused for 'eye candy'. This doesn't just happen on websites, but in all design based professions. And this is a bit of a case in point.

The HN audience tends to want high-information-density, not necessarily visual joy (or for that matter extra sugar for clarity of new users). Its a very different thing to design than a website-shopfront. Generally I think it works very well as is....

[chevas]

"As is" is still lacking. Reading these comments across almost the entire width of my monitor is not good design. You do get information density, but my belief is that in the case of reading paragraphs, information density is secondary to readability.

[mehulkar]

Agreed. That 70 character width rule would be nice on HN.

[redthrowaway]

All of these things may be true, but the biggest usability issue facing HN right now is load times. HN has undergone exponential growth even in the short time I've been here, and the site hasn't kept up with it. Given that we're all programmers, perhaps we should take it upon ourselves to dig through the source and see what we can speed up.

[eru]

> HN has undergone exponential growth even in the short time I've been here, [...]

Nitpick: Observing exponential growth doesn't depend on the time span.

[redthrowaway]

You're correct; that was sloppily written of me.

[blahedo]

The solution to this is not making a design that is too wide to fit in my window, however.