Considering the site uses a bunch of CSS classes that end up always using the same visual style (e.g. black text), i'd say that "good hackers" can use Stylus or

Considering the site uses a bunch of CSS classes that end up always using the same visual style (e.g. black text), i'd say that "good hackers" can use Stylus or some other similar addon and customize the site's look. You can do a lot of customization with it, while overall my HN looks 90% the same as the default style (since i don't dislike it), i have done some customizations like making every other comment have a slightly darker background (to easily distinguish them when scrolling) and added some color to distinguish different parts of each post.