Using lynx, the only thing that makes reading Hacker News somewhat inconvenient is the lack of indentation to show the nesting hierarchy, but otherwise it works quite well.
Some other sites are so messed up that it's actually more comfortable to read them in a text-only browser that completely ignores CSS and replaces images by their alt-tags.
Of course I frequently do want to look at images, so my main browser remains Firefox, but it's still useful to remember that other browsers with different tradeoffs exist and can be used.
Sometimes, you really just want to read some text and don't need any of that fancy other stuff.
You can see the indentation if you use w3m. HN uses tables to structure the comment hierarchy, and the w3m browser does a pretty great job rendering tables.
w3m sets the column width for the HN nested table spacer all to one value, so you visually only get two levels on nesting. Here is a screenshot of this thread as rendered by w3m:
I always browse HN using the links2 browser. No CSS! (Although elinks is pretty interesting, in that it's a text-only browser that implements some CSS.)
If a website doesn't look like it was made in the last couple of years (think: Medium-like centered content with large fonts), I click that handy reader view button out of a habit.
I can't stand reading articles with <18px font size. Some pages (like HN) I simply zoom in to something like 150%, but if it's just an article, hitting that button is easier to me than zooming in.
Links (a fork of lynx IIRC) does images, it might be off by default, can't recall. Back when I used Slackware it was handy to have a terminal based browser for looking up how to fix things.
Some other sites are so messed up that it's actually more comfortable to read them in a text-only browser that completely ignores CSS and replaces images by their alt-tags.
Of course I frequently do want to look at images, so my main browser remains Firefox, but it's still useful to remember that other browsers with different tradeoffs exist and can be used.
Sometimes, you really just want to read some text and don't need any of that fancy other stuff.