I'm gonna go ahead and suggest the opposite: keep the news as is, but reduce the textual noise. That is, remove the tld, "upvote," submitter, etc. and only show

I'm gonna go ahead and suggest the opposite: keep the news as is, but reduce the textual noise. That is, remove the tld, "upvote," submitter, etc. and only show them on mouseover. These are all distractions from the important content, the article names. That's why the NY Times skimmer works; all the metadata is absent. Since your audience are front-end designers and developers, they like to look at pretty things. The Hacker News crowd strives for functionality.