This appears to be the personal blog of a lone Erlang developer-- why should they put in effort to make bring it up to current design standards?
It does what it's designed to do. It conveys information in a simple, readable way, same as HN itself. IMO there's nothing worth criticizing here.
edit: typo
I'm curious what makes this an out-of-date design. Did easy to read go out of style at some point?
As far as I'm concerned this is the purest form of a text based blog. Pure content, decent font, Good contrast, no bullshit popups or animations to distract from the point.
I'm not a designer myself but the things that strike me immediately are that the fonts and colors seem out of fashion and the site looks somewhat awkward on mobile. But that's my whole point. You wouldn't want those things on the homepage of a startup, but this isn't that. It's just a simple blog and it does a good job of being a simple blog.
Ah... yeah I'm on my desktop right now so didn't even think about that. I don't love the colors/ fonts or justification, but they also don't interfere with readability which is my #1 criteria for evaluating a site.