Possibly as the GP has been member here for a long time, but they have a very low karma so they probably don’t post very often and may be unaware of what works and does not work here.

HN is a really interesting UX that appears to be deliberately designed to be difficult for new users to keep the signal to noise high. At least that is my charitable interpretation.

When the responsive'ish design for HN was unveiled by dang some months back, he indicated that this is not actually the case. Whether this was ever the case is a question to which I don't have an answer. At this point, I think it's just tech debt, unfortunately :-\

That is exactly the design decision behind HN's bare-bones design, as said by pg somewhere (I don't remember where, but there's an explicit statement about it).