One of the things I like about the existing Hacker News design is that it's simple and very easy to read. Your redesign uses smaller fonts, which, in my opinion, is definitely not an improvement.
Whitespace doesn't exist just for the sake of being pretty. At least to me I find this mockup much more readable than the current design, as the space between links clearly separates them. This makes it much easier to read their titles.
I agree. My intention is to use white space to separate things, vs lines or other graphical distractions. Having said that, I still need to work on the list part of the design.
There will be less white space and it will be used more scarcely, however I'd rather use a little bit of white space instead of something like a horizontal line. Wouldn't you agree with this? :P
I opened up two, identical browsers (Chromium version 25) on my 27 inch IPS monitor. I opened up the redesign in one browser, and the regular Hacker News in the other. The redesign has visually, noticeably smaller fonts.
I want to remove the metadata if I can. Would you agree that the titles and "comhead" (the domain name) should be the visually promenant part? My goal is to minimize on the meta as much as possible without removing the usefulness of it.