A lot of these redesigns share the common look of spacing everything out, which looks good. But I've gotten used to the compact layout of HN that lets me browse through stories really quickly.
Particularly the big annoyance in the latest version of UI/UX wave is the small fonts. I always zoom to about 150% and in instances where the pages are spaced out very little content is visible in one screenview. I just hope this phase passes soon and never comes back.
Don't forget small light grey fonts on a white background. I have terrible vision and have firefox set in a way that absolutely destroys websites in proportion to their trendiness (in order to make them readable). I'm still waiting for accessibility to become trendy.
To be fair, even places that should know better, like Mozilla Thunderbird and Valve's Steam client, are impossible to increase fonts in or are destroyed when you force them to.
I think the large, bold story numbers draw too much attention that would otherwise be focused on the headlines. What a story is about is more important, and contains more information, than its ranking on the front page.
Hacker News may not be all that pretty, but it's designed to bring out the important parts and communicate them quickly. Less relevant, less commonly accessed bits or information like numbers and usernames are available but don't stand out.
As a designer, I don't get a lot of value for DN that HN doesn't already provide. With the membership being closed down its too cliquey - -
It feels like these design sites are offering design for design sake instead of designing something usable on a daily basis. This is one area where HN has done quite well in my books. Once our arrows are unicode we're set. :)
