[danielhughes]

For those on a wide-screen monitor, it would be nice if you used all of the empty real estate on the right. Move everything up to a single line and take what is currently your second-line content (comments, vote count, etc) and push it all the way to the right. It'll make it a lot easier to scan the headlines. For mobile devices you could always revert back to the stacked approach.

http://i.imgur.com/in4x0Im.png

[Beekon]

While this might look nicer, it's solving one problem by creating another, and in my opinion larger, problem.

The problem when it comes to listings is that information needs to be easily scannable. The information to be scanned usually has a certain hierarchy, so there has to be a separation that reflects this hierarchy. If you use your solution, you favour optimal separation while sacrificing scanability.

This is not exactly a straight-forward problem to solve because the hierarchy is different for everyone. But one thing we can all agree on is that the title is at the very top of it. So, having the title in a bigger font-size, maybe bold, but definitely more contrasted as the stuff around it goes without saying. So the current HN style is not that far off the mark, though I think it could do with less data and/or more whitespace, to counter the "gray haze syndrome".

A straightforward fix for this meta-data clutter would be to make it collapsable, you could then show it in a tooltip on hover for example. Or make it collapsable on a per story basis to cater for tablet/phone users.