Two suggestions - totally personal, so curious what other's think:
1) get rid of the front page dominating "welcome", I think it's unnecessary and annoying - people will click on the link and read more if they want to.
2) make the interface exactly like hacker news. For instance I think the bold titles is a bit distracting, esp after navigating over from hn.
3) one of my favorite features of hn is that I can often just type "n" into my browser address bar and the browser autocompletes to news.ycombinator.com. This is particularly useful on my mobile. Would be cool if the name of non-hn had some similar sort of name that leveraged autocomplete.