You should find a better font and work a little on the proportions. Nice to see the images, a little more polished and I would use this instead of the normal HN website.
I agree about the spacing, it feels off to me too but I couldn’t put my finger on why. Whitespace has always been a challenge for me (I still remember my mom looking at my elementary school projects and telling me repeatedly, “Margins! You need more margins!”) and though I’m getting better at it I don’t expect to get a job in graphics design any time soon. If anyone has suggestions for improvements I’d be glad to hear them.
The default serif fonts on most systems aren't the best choice for a site that is trying to imitate print media.
body {
font-kerning: none;
letter-spacing: -0.00214em;
font-family: Helvetica;
}
You probably shouldn't use serif, Helvetica is much easier on the eyes and more forgiving.
Why disable kerning? If the user's font has kerning information, surely a newspaper should respect it.
But perhaps this varies between markets/regions/languages/etc.
Which would affect every site.
Also for large device widths margins of something like 20% makes it more readable. Visit somethings like https://www.nytimes.com and compare how much narrower the content is.