At least ">" doesn't break anything.

    Pre is broken on mobile, forcing users to scroll a horizontal line which is incredibly annoying if it's a long line.

Here's a screen shot: http://imgur.com/Ru56wMK

And pre with very long unbroken lines is even worse.

I wasn't expressing a value judgment, just trying to explain how HN works.

I agree with you that it's annoying when people post long indented lines.

it can be touch-scrolled here, there just aren't scroll bars. Took me a while to find, but maybe your browser is buggy, eve.

I noticed people were doing this and wrote a userscript a while ago to make it work. I kind of wish HN supported it.

https://gist.github.com/kennethrapp/7a21c0187fedd6f47e7c

I wrote in a while ago to ask that it be officially supported, but apparently that would break something that HN's spam filter relies on.