[sliverstorm]

I personally figure the answer is something along the lines of, responsive design takes effort to add, and nobody on the development team thought it was valuable enough to go to the trouble.

I'm not a web developer, but to my memory responsive design isn't something that just comes by default.

[robgibbons]

Responsive is really not difficult, to the point that it is easy. And I always advocate 'doing it by default' because it's actually more of a pain to refactor later. Basically you just have to understand floats, and using fluid design in contrast to fixed-width/absolute elements.

That said, I'm satisfied by the justification: HN lacks an API, so lots of people have built apps that scrape the frontend markup. It would break many apps overnight to just flip the switch.

[andrewbaron]

I think you are right that it does take a lot of effort for to do it right, one needs to design a whole new compatible experience. On the other hand, this interface and dataset here is fairly raw already, so a lot of the form would follow naturally.

[sliverstorm]

I'm not saying it would be hard. I'm just observing that the default state is not responsive design.