On the flipside, HN is the only site I don't have to zoom out of to keep it comfortable. Most sit at 90% with a rare few at 80%.

16px is just massive.

Sounds like your display scaling is a little out of whack?

Yeah, this is like keeping a sound system equalized for one album and asserting that modern mastering is always badly equalized. Tune the system to the standard, and adjust for the oddball until it's remastered.

Except we all know what happened to the "standard" with the Loudness War.

I'm not a fan of extreme compression and limiting, but doing so in a multiband fashion (as occurs due the loudness war) actually does result in more consistent EQ from album to album, label to label, genre to genre, etc. which virtually eliminates the need to adjust EQ at playback time between each post-war selection.

You're obviously being sarcastic, but I don't think that it's a given that "those are old font-size defaults" means "those are bad font-size defaults." I like the default HN size. There's no reason that my preference should override yours, but neither is there any reason that yours should override mine, and I think "that's how the other sites are" intentionally doesn't describe the HN culture, so it need not describe the HN HTML.

Don't do this.

I agree, don't set the default font size to ~12px equiv in 2025.

Do you think that "Don't do this" as a reply comment is following the spirit of the guidelines? It doesn't seem very thoughtful or substantive to me.

on mobile at least, i find thati can frequently zoom in, but can almost never zoom out, so smaller text allows for more accessibility than bigger text

Browser (and OS) zoom settings are for accessibility; use that to zoom out if you've got the eyes for it. Pinching is more about exploring something not expected to be readily seen (and undersized touch targets).