There is a strong correlation between comment quality and length; if you wanted to compare the quality of comments on community sites, average length would be a good predictor.
I'm saying that a paragraph that long is uncomfortable to read, given that HN comments span most of the width of the page. It needed to be broken into multiple paragraphs.
Frankly, I'm offended that I got downmodded so much on this. People clearly did not carefully read what I said.
http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html