Again, each to his own, but I find it pretty ironic to find this comment here of all places. HN isn't that far in terms of design either. This site spent a bit more time choosing colors but font is too small, and lines run a similar length.
Curious to know what minimum formatting you expect.
HN does get called out for that, and additionally, HN is not presenting a critique on communication.
> Curious to know what minimum formatting you expect.
For a CS professor? Little to none. For a CS professor that is providing criticisms in how papers are presented as "sins"? A minimal amount of formatting to provide some readability, such as what they would likely critique in any paper they expected others to read, would be a good minimum.
As I noted in another reply, once you start critiquing communication issues, you're fair game. Otherwise, I could care less, and I'm not usually one to complain about site design or usability, because honestly I generally prefer it somewhat minimal (but "minimal" that becomes "somewhat unreadable" over time is something that can and should be avoided).
One day, I truly wish to come to hacker news and not have this type of comment be the first thing that people decide is worth posting.
The entire page I'm critiquing is itself a critique of poor methods of communication. That's the only reason I bothered to post a critique at all. If someone's going to post a rant about how people aren't writing their papers well, I definitely see them as fair game for a critique on how they chose to communicate that to the reader.
You can try to equate what I did to someone complaining that some site explaining a math concept breaks their scrolling, or that the color scheme is hard to read on mobile for some game blog, but I think this is different. When the subject matter is communication, and that communication is done in a way which aged very poorly, I think that's worth pointing out. I doubt this person would have submitted a paper with poor font sizing and spacing, because those are fairly well established as to what's acceptable and what isn't, yet they haven't bothered to make sure their own writing doesn't confirm to many other widely accepted sins.
For what it's worth, he has another, newer page at http://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~jrs/ with links to items as new as in 2021, yet still prominently links this same page and doesn't have any formatting on the rest of their content.
In my eyes, that makes them fair game for criticism of this sort, and I think that also makes it relevant.
For what it's worth, if you look at the source of the page, you can see how he actually does seem to care about line length with respect to legibility for himself, it just doesn't seem to extend to something he cares about with respect to his readers.