I think I might have seen the "column-ization" method once and was impressed by it.
HN's handling of different browser widths is... pretty weird, at least on my Desktop Safari browser. Looks like from browser widths of 1920px and greater, HN maintains fixed size whitespace borders and scales the content width. Nice. When you shrink the window past 1600px, it holds the content size fixed and shrinks the borders. I guess the intent is to smoothly transition into a mobile design without the borders. Past 1516px, it removes the borders altogether, and seems to transition into this "mobile" design. Between there and around 610px, it seems to shrink the content width by discrete fixed amounts every 200px or so, to "keep up" with the browser width. Finally, below 610px or so, the site goes back to the non-mobile design, laying out as if the browser was 1600px wide (and actually truncating the right hand side of the text)--totally broken.
All that complexity--for a text only site! When they could just make the text 100% of the browser width and let me as the user decide what is comfortable to view. It's still much, much better than sites that just limit the content width to 600 pixels and fill everything else with whitespace!
HN's handling of different browser widths is... pretty weird, at least on my Desktop Safari browser. Looks like from browser widths of 1920px and greater, HN maintains fixed size whitespace borders and scales the content width. Nice. When you shrink the window past 1600px, it holds the content size fixed and shrinks the borders. I guess the intent is to smoothly transition into a mobile design without the borders. Past 1516px, it removes the borders altogether, and seems to transition into this "mobile" design. Between there and around 610px, it seems to shrink the content width by discrete fixed amounts every 200px or so, to "keep up" with the browser width. Finally, below 610px or so, the site goes back to the non-mobile design, laying out as if the browser was 1600px wide (and actually truncating the right hand side of the text)--totally broken.
All that complexity--for a text only site! When they could just make the text 100% of the browser width and let me as the user decide what is comfortable to view. It's still much, much better than sites that just limit the content width to 600 pixels and fill everything else with whitespace!