I have taken UI aspects from the HN approach to a news site (plus a few ideas from StackOverflow) to include news pages on a site otherwise developed using ASP.

I have taken UI aspects from the HN approach to a news site (plus a few ideas from StackOverflow) to include news pages on a site otherwise developed using ASP.NET, SQLServer and jQuery - point being that it was not very difficult to build an effective news page (learning from the best) using just about any platform. In my view, way easier than learning the ins and outs of someone else's approach. Should be pretty steady using any MVC stack.