I strongly recommend you continue to focus on user experience in the short run. Objective no. 1 has to be getting folks to keep coming back, and if there's some small improvement to how the site behaves each time a user visits, you're much more likely to keep the user, get him/her recommending you to others, etc.
Much better. I might make the text a bit larger. My eyes are probably older than yours. Flipping back and forth between HN and HM it feels like less work to scan HN.
I wonder if you can predict the age of a site's creator based on text size? :)