[grey-area]

On HN, your line here is 200 characters in 9pth Verdana, so it's also pretty extreme (perhaps because I have a wider screen). Personally I find the max line length on HN really uncomfortable.

> nature of the longest line, i.e. 132 characters in 12 point Arial (rather than 10 point Arial used by Dyson and Kipping). The line length therefore not only has more characters but is also physically longer because of the larger type size.

I'd say anywhere from 50-100 characters is fine for line length, stray too far outside that and you're not allowing enough words to scan well, or have too many so that it's hard to jump to the next line.

[thaumasiotes]

> On HN, your line here is 200 characters in 9pth Verdana, so it's also pretty extreme (perhaps because I have a wider screen).

I'm actually doing two things to shorten the line width as measured in characters. #1, my browser window is set to a size I find reasonable, not fullscreen. #2, I have HN configured at "110% zoom" (not sure precisely what that means, but it's how Firefox reports it), which makes the text larger and therefore allows fewer characters per line.