Looks nice and inviting :- ) Took a while until I realized what to click, to jump to the actual discussions. What about showing a "NN comments" clickable link at the end of the articles? But: "... the master branch. SDF, 1" — then not so obvious what to click. This "HN newspaper" could maybe be a good way to make people interested in tech, if anyone wants that for some reason
I avoided the word “comments” to keep the newspapery feel—I fear that mentioning the ravening hordes just around the corner would rather spoil the effect. I agree that the result isn’t entirely intuitive, but I’m not sure what to do about it. (It’s not obvious that the headlines are clickable either, but underlining them looks ugly and letting them be blue is even worse. Such are the perils of skeumorphism.)
(Maybe a comments icon instead, + a number?
Or "123 readers thoughts" or "123 replies"
or "123 people talking about this", here 123 would be unique users not comments)