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I prefer HN website design for an entirely different reason: readability.

More "modern" designs put a lot of crap and distractions between me and what I'm at the site to do: read the articles and/or comments. HN doesn't so that, and that makes the HN design a million times better than most others.

The day HN starts running that awful "squares on squares" JS design method where everything is a button with no borders is the day I leave HN. Luckily I don't think that day is coming.

You can absolutely have both. A little CSS would go a long way here, there is no reason to go full JS SPA to make a page look nice. In fact many times it’s the opposite.