The home page looks terrible on my 13" Macbook Pro, the illustration takes up almost the entire screen. Everything feels oversized and unbalanced.

> but I have created websites that look fine on everything

Just checking, but really "look fine on everything", or "need to be zoomed in by many people"?

Nah, it looks fine. You can zoom in, if you want, of course, but it's entirely readable on a retina screen.

Of course, those have been very sparse in layout such as blogs, so it's not a solution that fits all, but in a case like this, it would work just as well.

A site like Hacker News obviously needs optimization for different viewports.

> You can zoom in, if you want, of course,

It's pleasing to be in a situation where I can say (about ALA5.0) "you can zoom out, if you want, of course" :p

It's much more likely that you're creating websites that fail accessibility guidelines and that many people are forced to zoom in to read.

100%/16px is standard for article body copy.

The intro in the linked article is set with a 24px font size and 960px width. For me, on a good desktop screen, that is uncomfortably large on both counts for a full paragraph of body text.

The main part of the article, set at 18px with about 700px width, is sensible IMHO.