Accessible UX results in good UX. I use a modern browser and appreciate how reliably Hacker News works. It's a great example of less is more when it comes to UX.
Well, I think proper font scaling would do wonders for making HN more accessible. As things stand, I have to zoom to 120% to read the text. I recall WebKit making a special case in its font rendering logic just for HN.
I can't speak to the font sizing. If I could change anything, I'd replace the table design with a plain ordered-list (ol). Simply because it is the proper semantic tag, and reading the table is unnecessarily verbose with modern browsers and a screen reader. Somehow ironically, Lynx fails to render the table as a table, so the main page is still nicely readable with it.
I can recommend the browser extension "modern for hacker news". Some features are premium (no subscription though) but only the defaults gives SO MUCH ux like font size, spacing between lines, text width.
Another great accesibility feat is the APIs for this web. I use upvoterate listing from quality news as front page.
To sum it up, opening the tab previews under Zen Browser made my experience feel like the coolest SPA, haha.