Unless you're reading a dense novel, that shouldn't really be much of a problem. Line length is only an issue when returning to the beginning of the next line,

Unless you're reading a dense novel, that shouldn't really be much of a problem. Line length is only an issue when returning to the beginning of the next line, and only very long paragraphs will be problematic in this case. Text online usually varies a lot more than a novel - lists, quotes, images, etc. - and the page in question is no exception: it's just a list of captioned images for the most part. Hacker News, even with its tiny font, is still perfectly readable at a width of 1680 because few comments have paragraphs that are more than 2 or 3 lines long.