I guess my aesthetic sense is different from the author's in a way which places greater weight on functionality, because there is nothing ugly about this web site in my eyes. It has lots of text, there is nothing in the way of the text, and the content is generally interesting: ahhhh, yes! It's lovely. Give me more!

I strip away virtually all the designery fluff from the web via Reader View, anyway; if a page doesn't work in Reader View, I probably won't bother with it.

One of the last bastions of ugly/functional design I encounter on a regular basis is restaurant/bar Point of Sale systems. Look over the host's shoulder at a busy restaurant and you'll see something that looks like it just woke up from a nap it took in 1995. Do an image search for "restaurant POS" and you'll see what I mean.

Even this is changing though. Online SaaS POS platforms have to be "beautiful" and "modern" to sell to startup restauranteurs, so they're slowly just becoming fashionable websites. But in most large/busy/established restaurants, you'll see people running software that would make an art school grad weep.

I think I know what you mean. I guess one reason could be what a restaurant, especially an established one, prioritizes.

wow, i've had the Georgify extension (https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/georgify/ofjfdfaleo...) for so long I forgot HN was actually "ugly"

I knew Hacker News would be at the top of the list!

It's like a litmus test and a captcha, for those who wander merrily

To me both approaches have their place. Text-heavy sites like HN are like small hardware stores that look like a mess and you can barely walk in but they have exactly what you need and give you advise on how to install it, design-heavy sites are like neiman-marcus stores, they don’t have what you want but you spend 1 hour inside and still buy something.

I didn't know neiman-marcus, nice comparison.