If you read the thread JeremyBanks points to, you can see that pg thinks it's a waste of time to be hand crafting, to be optimising when it's already so small a

If you read the thread JeremyBanks points to, you can see that pg thinks it's a waste of time to be hand crafting, to be optimising when it's already so small and to be following recommendations beyond what is needed from standards bodies. More importantly it's about where you spend your time. Pg's a busy guy but HN is good advertising for his business. He does spend time optimising the whole thing though, technology and community. Just look at the experiment, now finished, to see whether displaying average comment scores would alter community behaviour in a desirable way. These and the other tweaks - downvoted comments fading toward background colour, the front page algorithm, the effect of flagging and associated moderation, when people get voting rights - are the things which improve the website. There are plenty of places and forums with which are standards compliant and have a lot of seemingly whiz-bang features, but their commentary sucks and their community has an aggressive tone and is ridden with trolls. Too many people here think it's all about the technology when there are other factors. Even if pg held a "redesign HN" competition, to which many would respond for free, reviewing the submissions and implementing the changes into the server would be a waste of time compared to the opportunity cost of trying out something else to improve the community and defend it against degradation.