I missed the original postings so it's nice to see this for the first time. That would be difficult if HN didn't allow reposts. Though I can understand if I had seen it already.
On a sidenote, I get a weird feeling from HN's simple UI/UX. On one hand, it feels like the old CLI machines that put the focus on "content" - kinda like "do one thing and do it right".
On the other hand, reading all the comments, getting notified for replies on comments, etc. is really hard. In this day and age, one would wonder if HN really hates JS (well, except for the upvote button).
Community building and maintanence is a very tough job, and the simplest of things can end up nudging people towards unproductive behaviour. HN has consistently maintained at least a decent quality audience and community by keeping the UI free of bells and whistles, and thusly being unattractive to certain kinds of low-effort users. At this point, any change would probably count as messing with a good thing, so the thinking is probably "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."
They are however acknowledging some things that are broken and need fixing, and in recent days have been introducing small changes to correct those (eg. the unvote button, ability to fold). I do hear you on the notification for comment replies thing though, I was really surprised when I found that feature wasn't there, and at times end up missing out potentially good conversations because I didn't check for and notice the reply comment until too late.
I agree with you that HN has maintained a quality audience and community. This is really one of the main reasons I check HN daily.
Although, even top-tier programmers and professionals are eventually "human", and design rules apply to them as well. It's like saying these folks are more comfortable to use some strange user-undfiendly smartphone, while they mostly just use an iPhone instead.
I get some weird enjoyment out of this site not having any modern features and little to no JavaScript, even though I'm a JavaScript developer by trade and open source.
There is no need for JS on a site like this. The ajax upvote is convenient but they could (unconveniently) reload the whole page and set the location with an anchor to go back to the upvoted comment, 1994 style. Any real time notification system requires a backend infrastructure that maybe they don't want to have.
They could also use a better CSS but who cares, text is king in this kind of sites. It displays quite well on mobile too, especially with Opera which reflows text after zoom (the very reason for using Opera).
I find notifications on replies annoying. The one feature I do want is better understanding of where upvotes are coming from: when I suddenly get a surge of upvotes that didn't seem to come from any comment of late, I just kind of want to know where it's coming from, as it annoys me to no end. I wish I could somehow see which of my comments were upvoted recently.
