16px is the default text size in most browsers. Text below this size gets harder to read, so it’s safest to avoid it for body text. The higher you go beyond 16px, the easier the text is to read."
Out of curiosity, I played around with HN font size: by default on my monitor is 12px, at 13px is almost the same, at 14px is great, 16px is not better than 14px so it is wasting screen space. I think it depends a lot on the pixel physical size, that means diagonal and resolution.
Hacker News was designed by someone who considers design a waste of time and a distraction from the purity of information, and who made the site ugly and awkward on purpose to keep normies away. Honestly we're lucky it looks as good as it does.
IMO, HN looks better than many sites created by professional designers. It allows you to actually read the content instead of waiting ten seconds for the page to load, then scrolling through kilometers of whitespace and unrelated “hero images”.
>It allows you to actually read the content instead of waiting ten seconds for the page to load, then scrolling through kilometers of whitespace and unrelated “hero images”.
I'm able to read the content on every site I visit even when it has whitespace and images but to each their own. I'm glad Hacker News serves your needs.
Text should have the same size today is it did in the 90s. If your monitor has a higher resolution then please use DPI scaling isntead of wasting screen space for everyone else. That way old websites will still be readable without having to update everything.
HN would have rendered at the equivalent of 16px (exactly, actually) on a 90s computer. The issue here is that Apple and Windows assume two different default DPIs for a 90s computer (72 vs 96dpi), and as result, what 1pt is can differ by 1/3rd.
"Keep body text at 16px or above
16px is the default text size in most browsers. Text below this size gets harder to read, so it’s safest to avoid it for body text. The higher you go beyond 16px, the easier the text is to read."