This kind of UI would work well on other HN-like sites, e.g. links to pretty web designs, but the nature of HN links means the screenshots are almost all the same thing: an article, a possible image, some ads or links on the side.

Because of the extra space taken up by screenshots, the most important thing - link title - has to be truncated, and it's not showing vote/comment counts.

It's always good to experiment with UIs, but in this case, I think the experiment shows the UI is more suited to other kinds of links.