Yes, it will happen. Yes, we're working on it. The reasons it's taking so long are: (1) the change required is not tiny; and (2) everyone working on it has many other things to do, most of which are more pressing.
That doesn't make it a low priority (it's a high priority), but it means we have to do it as a background process.
I know that you must be sick writing that response, and I'm sure I'm missing the complexity somewhere, but it's been put off for years now.
Maybe the conflict is that you want to do everything in a big step; making vote buttons etc more accessible, but there are some quick changes (I mean maybe 2 lines added to the style sheet which surely is one file?) that would make a vast improvement at least to our ability to use HN on our phones.
If you guys are lacking time, I'm sure that there are some companies out there who would love the kudos of some pro bono work.
If only there were some way to make source code accessible to the general public, and to allow people to... i don't know, "request" various changes be... "pulled" into the codebase?
As a fellow very busy programmer I can easily see where you're coming from, but surely for several years time a background task must be pushed to the highest prio tickets eventually?
Even if you simply steal LWN.net's very basic comments CSS, it wouldn't take you more than a full working day, including testing on few iPhones and different-resolution Androids.
A passionate community whose quality of life needs aren't met is a big missed opportunity and I find it strange that I have to be telling you that.
Apples and oranges, but still -- don't forget what happened to SourceForge. Used to be the go-to place years ago. Now it employs malware technics to not go broke.
Everybody can have hubris when famous, busy and (somewhat) rich. Question is -- can you treat your community right even at the height of your pique in popularity and usage?
It's shameful and baffling that the community must take over with shady proxy sites and apps to fill a gap you've been avoiding to fill for years.
Suppose, and anecdotally for me it's a very plausible supposition, that there are significant qualitative differences between users' behavior when interacting via mobile browsers versus desktop browsers. This would make improving HN more complex than simply changing CSS styles. User behavior matters more than browser behavior in terms of the value HN does or doesn't provide.
In pure speculation, it is possible that mobile/desktop browsers correlate with the pipeline into YC's primary business. Though the business is probably clearer.
That would seem to be probably true, that the nature of the interface shapes the nature of the community in some way, but I don't understand how it follows that mobile browser use implies poor user behavior.
My anecdotal observation of sample size one is that I tend to write better using a laptop or desktop system than when using a mobile OS, and when using a mobile OS, pop up touch screen keyboards tend to produce worse writing than mechanical keyboards.
I suspect that YC could have measures of comment quality and record browser agents. It certainly has the mental muscle to correlate them if it has them.
But me, and many others, aren't requesting full redesign so as we can interact with this site like in a native app. I don't request the perfect UX. I would simply like a mobile-friendly website with:
(1) Bigger font size; (2) Proper line wrapping; (3) Offset for nested comments. Something like 5%, no more than 10%; (4) Bigger buttons|links for the upvote / downvote / comment actions.
...and I think that's all.
As a programmer myself I know the terrible, almost like drug|alcohol addiction, need to make everything perfect on the first go, but at 35, with total of 23 years doing programming, of which 14 as a professional experience, I am perfectly aware that this is not possible.
Iterative changes, one by one.
People will complain even if you clean a pile of fresh shit which gets in their way every day. That's hardly an argument against cleaning it up anyway. Whoever wants to be stuck in 90s and craves poisonous USENET romantic dreams -- I sincerely wish they would finally move on.
(That's one of my possible explanations on why would people be unhappy with a mobile UI readability improvements)
In the end, I'll simply install one HN Android app and then cripple its permissions with AppOps for Lollipop and be done with it. Or move to another website / Twitter feed. <shrugs>