Hacker News may not be very pretty, but it gets a lot of things right typographically, by not trying very hard. I think this might be a good opportunity to play around with learning to improve your layout and type skills a bit. In particular, I don't think that slab serif typeface with dangling descenders is a good choice for what is a list of a few closely grouped lines of text, as opposed to something like the para…
I actually borrow the Zilla Slab[0] font from Mozilla Foundation website[1] just because I thought it looks pretty good. I don't realized how much it is a problem to everyone (It seems like typography and links are common problems of my interface). I will need to find a more appropriate font to use for this case then.
[0]https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Zilla+Slab [1]: https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/