as the OP I'm obviously biased, but I feel so too. At the same time it looks like more people seemed to be against it though. I would still like to hear pg thoughts on this...
i agree the site is simple and effective as it is. but it's not perfect. there is always something that can be improved. this probably doesn't include adding social share buttons and 2KB of new JavaScript every week. Like you said. And I agree, so would many people, so would pg, and this would also be the conclusion of an open feature discussion and wouldn't result in a successful pull request.
but think about it from a different perspective: there is a feature that many people agree would make the site better. e.g. a new job board for non-YC-companies, like discussed here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4993571. lets assume that after openly discussing the problem, pg and the majority of the community agrees upon a solution. now lets assume that there are more features like this, and that pg hasn't the time to implement them all. wouldn't it be nice if the community could help out?
thanks, but to clarify: I'm not proposing to open source it for the purpose of looking at the code or forking my own HN-version.
instead i'm proposing that building _this_ site becomes an community effort, with open feature discussions and people committing code to the HN code base.
there is an army of people who deeply care about HN, and are very skilled to help out. i think it would be smart to use that asset.