There is nothing to fix: code blocks do (almost) exactly the right thing for code. (the indentation on the right is unnecessary and counterproductive, though, but that's not the main source of the complaint here.)

They are horrible for quotes, especially on mobile, but that's not what they are for. Admittedly, quotes are vastly more common than code on HN and HN could use a good quote formatting mechanism, but that's a missing feature, not a bug in code formatting.

Yes, but that one line is very long and nobody knows how it ends.

Prepending a line with two spaces is not intended for quoting people. It is intended for posting code in a comment.

If you're quoting someone, stick to the well-established standard of prepending with a > symbol.

Formatting may improve such quotes that already begin with ">", but the problem is that people come up with their own inferior solutions instead of simply using ">". For example, some people try to use italics which are hard to see, hard to distinguish as quotes, and don't even render as italic on some of the HN native apps I've used.

If ">" was good enough for decades of email and usergroups, it's good enough for HN. No, your quotes in this one post doesn't need anything different or special.

What HN needs is a simple formatting-help blurb when writing a post to set people straight once and for all like reddit (or res?) had/has. The first line of it, if I wrote it, would be "Prepend > for quotes, prepend four spaces to format code."

dang, was that something you were testing?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc

  white-space: pre-wrap;