HN forum software is inadequate to represent initial spacing. I replaced it with more hyphens. It wasn't intentional as you can tell from the first 'simulated post' which has no code formatting.

I understand. Thank you for updating it!

Please don't cater to bad mobile browsers and lazy CSS [0]. Fix these problems at the source.

[0] https://jsfiddle.net/rvtgq2dh/

<div class=prewrap>Strephon kissed me in the spring, Robin in the fall, But Colin only looked at me And never kissed at all.

Strephon’s kiss was lost in jest, Robin’s lost in play, But the kiss in Colin’s eyes Haunts me night and day.</div>

The proposed method is not applicable to the HN Comment Formatting Problem.

I would email hn@ycombinator.com about that. I’m just a user who reads HN on my phone.

I made my own user stylesheet for HN a looong time ago, so why would I email anyone? I showed a simple fix, but oh well. If I wanted to paste something big in block formatting I would put it on pastebin, in this context I'm just a bystander trying to help people with a problem I don't have.