[danso]

This is one of the more pleasant unsolicited redesigns of HN, because it keeps a lot of the subtlety that makes HN an easy site to return to constantly: a prioritization of the headlines and a deemphasis on username and points (the position of a story is more than enough of an indicator of the story's current popularity). The bigger upvote arrows are nice, though I guess one could argue that ease-of-upvoting is not a priority.

My biggest complaint is the relatively massive header. I disagree that Search needs to be prioritized...in a news site, even the New York Times, I am hardly ever using the site search...if a news site is doing its primary job well (providing fresh links), then I almost never have the time or desire to search the archives. I'd say 50 to 80 percent of my search bar usage is mainly to complain about how many times a currently-trending story has been posted in the past. The search bar should stay at the bottom of the site, allowing the header to be a little more compact than it is in the OP's proposal.

[FreezerburnV]

I'd actually disagree on the search not needing to be prioritized point. I think search could actually be a very powerful feature of HN allowing for readers to gain a deeper insight into various topics. Imagine if someone was reading about Rust for the first time (hey, there's even a "Rust vs Go" kind of post on the front page right now!) and wanted to learn a bit more about it by seeing what people have said about it in the past on HN. Said user could easily see the search bar at the top of the page, and use the (hypothetically good) search engine to discover articles about lifetimes, green vs native threads, etc. with little effort. Doing so otherwise might involve spending a decent amount of time exercising Google-fu to find the same information.

Sure, the focus of HN is still on the new content that people want to see, but it could also be a place to learn more. Or even find old posts that maybe you didn't bookmark at the time, but suddenly want to see now.

EDIT: Apologies for the triple post (if anyone saw that). I tried to submit the post three times, and two of the times went to a HN error message. I deleted the other two posts.