Hacker News Reader

Not OP: for what it's worth I understood your intent, and it didn't bother me

Definitely not the end of the world - no worries! It just feels a bit uh, haphazard in a way. My eye is leading forward for the next words only to find I need to skip to the next line. I usually read very fast so I'll be a bit more sensitive to variations in formatting like that, I guess? All good though, like I said a great read anyway!

Worse, the formatting failed. Lines are breaking before the sentence is over, leading to two words in the next line, then a new line. (Linux, Chrome)

Just because they didn't see your vision doesn't mean it wasn't good. You clearly had an intent with it.

For my anecdote, it worked for me and I didn't even notice the spacing until they pointed it out.

If you have a wide screen, you won't notice it so much. Try reading on a narrow screen in just about the wrong resolution and it will look like the author used notepad and hit enter every time they were too close to the edge instead of letting the program do the wrapping.