Hacker News' design has a lot of personality and I would never recommend redesigning it (for the same reason I enjoy Craigslist's "design") but making it resolution independent and maybe even responsive sounds like a great idea.

Personally I prefer a slightly larger serif font when reading comments on here which is why I wrote a quick dotjs [1] script that now also replaces the upvote arrow GIF:

Preview: http://cl.ly/I3o0 Script: https://github.com/max/.js/blob/master/news.ycombinator.com....

[1] http://defunkt.io/dotjs/