There is a Github you can use to open issues, specifically #96
<a href="https://github.com/HackerNews/HN/issues/96" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/HackerNews/HN/issues/96</a><p>There are also these mobile-web alternatives:
<a href="http://hnmob.org/" rel="nofollow">http://hnmob.org/</a>
<a href="http://ihackernews.com/" rel="nofollow">http://ihackernews.com/</a><p>You can also look at the source for HN,
<a href="http://arclanguage.com/" rel="nofollow">http://arclanguage.com/</a>
And some other places on github likely; it's not easy to get that code running.
Also, I'm not sure it's easy to make the updates.
Plus, Nick is very busy.
This really is a very simple site which tries to get the the job done (simple link aggregation and self posts with basic discussions). The code and functionality isn't state of the art, because they never really had the proper resources to look into it. I believe that has changed recently and they are slowly trying to bring in changes.
That the current devs are considering it after pg's retirement from the site suggests the reason has been 'because pg considered it a waste of time.'