Yes, it's hard to read.

On my laptop screen a single line is about 35cm long and individual glyphs are about the size of those used in my 3 year old's book. In fact, this is exactly the problem with all such websites - they all look like kindergarten books. It is as if they are trying to speak to you s-l-o-w-l-y because you are both dumb and legally blind.

I had the opposite experience, although I would have preferred it just a teeny bit smaller. Coming back to read long lines on HN is quite awkward.

There's a reason I limit my source lines to 78 columns too. Well, many reasons if you consider 80x25. :-)

FYI, you can get a plug-in such as Stylish for a lot of browsers that will let you override styles for specific sites. For lightly formatted discussion sites that I visit often, I typically set a font and a (max-)width for comments and related material that I find comfortable.

For HN, I personally set a max-width of 700px on .comment and pre blocks, to go with fonts of around 18px. If anyone new to Stylish wants the exact overrides I use to paste in verbatim, feel free to ask and I’ll look them up.

Yeah, I stopped reading it due to the huge font being too hard to read.