I wonder if people would be interested in an HN style site, but one that is fantastically designed, and scales to all sorts of media (phones, tablets, desktop).

I wonder if people would be interested in an HN style site, but one that is fantastically designed, and scales to all sorts of media (phones, tablets, desktop). I think that's what it needs. You can't simply download the news.yc, make a new colour header, give it a name, and then set it off into the net. I think you need to distinguish yourself and really just use news.yc as a base to build on.