It's even more weird on a 40 inch 4K monitor. But it's tuned for a different kind of privileged web developer. The specific privilege that you and I are bringing (large, high resolution displays) evidently makes us not the target audience.
Jokes aside, virtually no sites are tuned for large displays, and there's widespread consensus that you shouldn't simply use the full width of the window for text because lines would be too wide to read comfortably. Still, I think my expectation is that most sites just end up centered within large windows.
The layout seen here, with columns anchored on the left and right sides, is unfamiliar and looks weird to my eye as well.
I don't know about the "widespread consensus", but forcing people to manually resizing their browser window to fit whatever they currently are reading is bad design in my book.
Most good sites, I think, (strangely not Hacker News though) have a width limiting, centered layout which makes it easy to read and browse.
I'll be that odd person to point out that width limiting in a world of widescreens is a strange use of space. I'd personally like to see more love put into CSS3 multi-column support and gentle horizontal scrolling (a standard spec ready equivalent to -ms-scroll-translation, perhaps). I get the feeling I'm in a not very vocal minority of people that currently thinks horizontal scrolling could be a useful answer for an easier to read web on widescreen displays.
I find it strange how many sites seem to be more horizontal gutters than content space these days due their fixed width containers recreating a square virtual monitor inside my widescreen monitor. Admittedly it is good for ad space, I guess, because those gutters can be and often are filled with plenty of ads.
Jokes aside, virtually no sites are tuned for large displays, and there's widespread consensus that you shouldn't simply use the full width of the window for text because lines would be too wide to read comfortably. Still, I think my expectation is that most sites just end up centered within large windows.
The layout seen here, with columns anchored on the left and right sides, is unfamiliar and looks weird to my eye as well.