I'd like collapsible comments more :)

There's several extensions folks have written to add layers of functionality to HN -- collapsible comments being a major one.

I use HN Enhancement Suite: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-enhanc...

There's about a dozen extensions adding this feature -- it's an HN evergreen (because everyone loves it, and it's so easy to implement?):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8706496

(I wrote one of the Firefox ones -- CollapsableThreads.user.js)

This is up for contention but I'm not sure it takes just 3 lines of CSS to a make a table heavy layout responsive :D

Is is actually tables? I haven't actually looked at the source, but I imagine that tearing out all the templates and styles, and redoing roughly the same design can't be more than a day or two's worth of work.

Maybe there's a fear that if it got too pretty, they might start to attract the wrong crowd?

HN hasn't always had an API, so they didn't want to change the HTML because it would break the apps that rely on scraping the markup to get the content. You can read more at this blog post [1] announcing the HN API.

[1]: http://blog.ycombinator.com/hacker-news-api

Seriously, don't make it responsive. I'm already shortening my eyesight by reading HN compulsively on a large iPad, I can't imagine the effects of reading it on a phone.

MiniHack is pretty awesome.

If you use opera on a smartphone, just go to the settings and enable text wrap. You're welcome :)

Try this http://hn.premii.com/#