That's pretty hypercritical. Personally, I'd like HN to have more reasonable typography like a fixed width column for comments—somewhere in between Inbound and HN as it exists currently.
It's also not functionally awful. My wife, an interior designer, has often commented that she doesn't know how I can stand to read comments from this site because of how garish the colors and how poor the type is. We've had time to adapt to the use of HN because the content is great and the software has been evolved to function well.
Inbound also has an entirely different target market, one that is, by definition, more superficial and shallow in regard to design. Nothing that looked like HN would get traction in the marketing community, at least from the people I know.
@randfish and I were very inspired by HN. We understand the tradeoffs in terms of design (we're big reddit fans too).
Your observation that marketers (our audience) are different from hackers is dead-on.
With inbound.org we had some early debate around design. Candidly, I was more on the "lets make it like HN" (I write code every day) and he was more on the "lets do something creative and solve for our audience" (he has a much better aesthetic sense). We're still debating it.
We're also both entrepreneurs, so understand the importance of launching and just getting it out there.
Now, back to dealing with the technical issues we've run into tonight...
The measure (line-length) on HN comments is pretty damn bad, I agree. I'm purely comparing the homepages here.
And I do agree that HN could definitely improve. HN isn't perfect, nor is it beautiful. I think it functions extremely well, but there's still plenty of room for improvement.
It's also not functionally awful. My wife, an interior designer, has often commented that she doesn't know how I can stand to read comments from this site because of how garish the colors and how poor the type is. We've had time to adapt to the use of HN because the content is great and the software has been evolved to function well.
Inbound also has an entirely different target market, one that is, by definition, more superficial and shallow in regard to design. Nothing that looked like HN would get traction in the marketing community, at least from the people I know.