This made me laugh out loud. I too forget this little website is run by an enormous Venture Capital firm.
I don't think it's "run by" the YCombinator. If I recall correctly, YCombinator pays for HN costs, in exchange for 3 things: recruitment posts, YCombinator new startups posts, and having alumni see each others as orange.
It’s really only the plaintext styling that contributes to the humble appearance.
The tech behind the scenes is pretty advanced though, from what I've read. (At least compared to reddit, along with apparently pretty good bot detection and such.)
That was so creative of them.
I seem to recall Hacker News being run of a single thread on a single machine. In that case, perhaps it's time for 'dang to upgrade it with an M1…
And here we are trying to please managers who need a kubernets cluster for our 100-customer website.