HN has chosen to use very small fonts; I also leave it a bit zoomed in.

Specifically, they have:

    .comment {
      font-size: 9pt;
    }
    .commhead {
      font-size: 8pt;
    }

If I turn off all the site's font-size overrides, I no longer need to zoom in.

Personally, I'm not a fan of having a web site designer thousands of miles away from me just decide what font and text size I should be using to read their web site. Why not let the browser more easily control/override this? We already have PDF if your content truly needs pixel-perfect layout. Browsers have kind of dropped the ball. They're limiting user choice and slowly turning into desktop publishing platforms rather than being agents of the user.

Most browsers have a "minimum font size" setting, which would be applicable here.

In general, CSS already provides a bunch of generic font families and sizes. So a page could style something as e.g. "sans-serif" and "large" - and then the browser should figure out what this actually means according to user settings. The problem is that very few sites actually use these. But for those that do, the browsers do the right thing - and, again, most of them let you configure what the generic font families map to.

Both Chrome and Safari has accessibility features to set a minimum font size in their settings page. I can't see how it could be easier.

It could be easier in Firefox where it applies per language, with no "just set everything" option (at least Latin and Other are needed for english). I highly recommend using it, although it does break sites occasionally (seems like less often these days).

And it would have been avoided entirely if HN simply used relative font measures (em/rem) and allowed the user just set the damn base font size in the browser settings.

So it’s not just me. I think HN is the only site I use that I’ve bothered to configure custom zoom factor for.

It's definitely not just you. And I really get sick of the people saying things like "just zoom" or "set a custom minimum font size".

When I read that, I read, "we're ableist and here's a few crumbs so we can feel better about ourselves".

Do you also think every site should come with a built in screen reader? Accessibiliy should be about enabling everyone to use the website - using additional tools if needed - not to dumb it down to the lowest common denominator. If zoom / min font size breaks things complain about that, otherwise don't force giant fonts on everyone else.