> that does what he wants very efficiently.

I'm not sure I agree that it does. HN ships a bunch of extra DOM content that it really doesn't need to ship. If you're optimizing for page size, the HTML could be lighter.

The site does what pg wants, but he really shouldn't be proud of it for doing what he wants well. It's not that the HTML is super-optimized but that the optimization has tradeoffs. It's more like whoever programmed it is very familiar with tables, and when all you have is a hammer everything starts looking like a nail.

That's fair, but if you might have blind users wanting to use your publicly-facing site, just making it do what you want isn't enough.

For visual use, I would agree that the site is great, far better than most of the bloated nonsense that is out there these days.