I reject the premise of the question. For the most part, I find HN far more usable than most web sites1.
My operational definition of "usable"? It is easy and effortless to scan headlines, to scan articles, and, when I find something of interest, to switch mentally from scan to read mode. And - and this is very important to me - it works well with the FF extension I use to mark all unvisited links as read, so that I don't notice them next time1.
Most other web sites are simply too busy, too loaded, trying to hard to impress to usefully support this scan, open-in-new-tab, then read mode of operation (I still do it elsewhere, but it requires more effort on all other sites than HN).
Is HN ugly? I honestly have no idea. Maybe it is, but it stays out of my way, so I don't care.
1 use hckrnews.com to find articles to read - by opening in new tabs - simply because it has more articles on one page than HN; really, that's it: If the main HN page was longer, I'd visit it once, just like I do with hckrnews.com, then alt-f2 to mark all as read - as it is, I have to scan-open-altF2-next-repeat, which is tedious. Not effortful, but not seamless, either.
My operational definition of "usable"? It is easy and effortless to scan headlines, to scan articles, and, when I find something of interest, to switch mentally from scan to read mode. And - and this is very important to me - it works well with the FF extension I use to mark all unvisited links as read, so that I don't notice them next time1.
Most other web sites are simply too busy, too loaded, trying to hard to impress to usefully support this scan, open-in-new-tab, then read mode of operation (I still do it elsewhere, but it requires more effort on all other sites than HN).
Is HN ugly? I honestly have no idea. Maybe it is, but it stays out of my way, so I don't care.
1 use hckrnews.com to find articles to read - by opening in new tabs - simply because it has more articles on one page than HN; really, that's it: If the main HN page was longer, I'd visit it once, just like I do with hckrnews.com, then alt-f2 to mark all as read - as it is, I have to scan-open-altF2-next-repeat, which is tedious. Not effortful, but not seamless, either.