Your fontconfig install should really take care of this for you locally without HN needing to change anything. You shouldn't need to install mscorefonts either since there are reasonable free alternatives.
It is a valid point, though. Others have had the same issue. It would be better to use families that worked in most major linux distros in the last few years without tweaking.
Totally agree that there isn't a good reason to specify Verdana instead of a more universal font family. But even if you get HN to fix this up, there will remain many other sites with similar odd choices.
So it's easier to insulate yourself from the issue instead, with a proper fontconfig setup. I'd have thought most recent distro's come configured to avoid this issue completely. If not, it's pretty simple to configure your system to substitute a font of your choice in all these cases.
