Ask HN: Why HN is so ugly?

I'm a web developer and UI/UX "adventurer". I understand the idea behind the HN's UI is simplicity and that's cool, but, sometimes too simple is too simple. I wake up every morning to HN and my eyes hurt. Let me just mention a few things I notice so you see what I mean:

1. Leverage Mobile: See HN in your mobile, can you read it to me please?

2. Padding: Look at the numbers to the left (numbers inside tags, are you using a for loop? hehe), can you see they are 0 pixels from the side of the page, why? Are those numbers needed anyway? I find it difficult to read and click the article I want to read, the posts are too close!

3. With more padding and a bigger font everything should get much better to read and process, not just for mobile...

4. The colors seem old-fashion and not in a good way if you ask me but if that's the branding that's fine, just do it right. For instance, look at the top-menu, open up your browser's inspector and change the color to white, much better ah? The "active" can be something else.

5. I would underline the article links on hover, it makes it easy to see what you are clicking.

6. The gamification controls are weird. Example: 126 points by user 1 hour ago | 26 comments ... See how it looks like "user" gave 126 points to the article? What about: by user 1 hour ago | 126 points | 26 comments ?

7. Separation: Maybe enclose the articles in boxes of some kind or just throw a line between the articles, it is so close and compact...

8. Submission form: why not adding some optional WYSYWYG goodies? If the limit is 2000 characters why i have to hit submit to find that out?

9. Ah, TABLE seriously?

These are just some of my findings (2000 chars limit). I would recommend other kinds of ordering, ability to curate the listings somehow, etc, but for now let's focus in the UI/UX. I'm hereby offering my services as developer to make this happen, let me know!

Use extra linefeeds to get proper line spacing for lists. Or use some spaces before each line to format as code.

Your auestion has been asked and answered quite a lot before, so you might find some interesting answers if you search.

Thanks for your reply, I just fixed the formatting of my question, still think that patching with more newlines is uncool though. Also, mine is more a proposal than a question...

Sorry, it wasnt my intention to be presumptuous, just wanted to get your attention and looks like i have, so mission accomplished! :) I understand minimalism is a feature and actually is one feature i love, as you can see i'm not proposing getting rid of the minimalistic look and adding lots of easter bunnies everywhere or anything, i'm just focusing on readability and the most basic things, wouldn't you agree HN can benefit from this?

You have asked a question, and then actually presented a bunch of proposals based on your biases and non-understandings of both the aims and the audience. Many, many proposals have been made for "improving" the interface. People have presented many alternatives. None have stuck, all have been critiqued. I you did some research you would see their fate.

Are you so sure you really do know better?

  > "I wake up every morning to HN and my eyes hurt."

Then write your own style sheets and GreaseMonkey script (or equivalent) to fix your rendered. When you're convinced you've got it right and it's significantly better, then offer it.

And best of all, do some research on previous answers to this question and present a "proposal" that actually addressed the previous discussions.