I second that. The designers I work with have this fetish for low contrast designs that may be super mod and hip, but seem to lower usability to me.

In general I agree that black on white might be a little harsh, but when you have squint to make out the text it's over the top.

One option under Firefox is View > Page Style > No Style.

It's black text on a white background, but you lose indenting. I tend to use this when I want to read text from a site that's really hard to read.

Easy on the anti-designer bigotry there, dude, it's only the crappy designers that use super low contrast text just because they think it's cool. That's not the case here - see my comment below and pg's confirmation for a rational discussion behind its usage here on HN, it's a very intentional decision and serves the intent well.

Now whether the intent is right or not (should HN morph more into a Metafilter-like free-for-all message board for hacker types, rather than a structured conversation around links?) is a different discussion. I like the current orientation towards news.

Remember CSS Zen Garden (http://www.csszengarden.com/) and The Zen of CSS Design book? And Zeldman (http://www.zeldman.com/)? Way cool when cutting edge designers were figuring out what CSS 2.1 is capable of. But such low contrast! And lots of tan. Then the candy-colors-on-white "Web 2.0" look hit... Another year, another DTD.