Hackers like dark modes. Hacker News therefore should provide its users with a dark mode option. Maybe even automatically select it based on their browser preferences.
Note: Telling me to load up some browser extension to handle it is a bit silly as it requires me to implicitly trust the author of said extension which will see and have access to virtually everything on every website I enable it for.
All thoughts and criticisms of this statement are welcomed.
I could knock it out in a single day. The people running this site are simply dedicated to the Craiglist style of thought, which is antagonistic to change for "culture" reasons whilst purporting to be for "practical" reasons.
It's interesting - in the linked thread, someone (who seems to be affiliated with hn) said that they're willing to do it but they don't have the CSS expertise. I know I'd be willing to devote some time to it and I'm sure lots of other people would as well.
I'm going to work on implementing the CSS changes when I get bored. If that's the only thing standing between a bunch of hackers and dark mode on the hacker news website, I'm going to be very disappointed ;)
This is a pet peeve of mine precisely because of the first line in that article:
> It’s become a virtually unchallenged piece of conventional wisdom that exposure to blue light—the type emitted by electronic device screens—is bad for sleep.
I read somewhere that blue light theory is a corporate bullshit financed by glasses makers to add 50$ by glass the sell you for a production cost of ) 50 cents.
A little like the 2000kcal by day by the agri-business lobby or the 1,5l of water by the water and soda business lobby.
Weird to exclude the ultimate form of corporate bullshit: vaccine makers (ie: corporations) are federally protected from any and all civil action against them. And they're one of the few drugs that are effectively mandatory for approximately 76 million children. Every single year. A literal money making machine. Protected by law. For the benefit of corporations.
I'm a graybeard, but I find dark modes to be much more difficult to read than light ones. I've never really understood the appeal of dark modes (outside of just aesthetics), but I do understand that they have an appeal to some.
Fair enough. For sure it's subjective factors (personal taste, etc) + objective ones (surrounding lighting, time of day, how long you've already been looking at a screen, and so on ...).
No. The primary benefit of "dark mode" is that it reduces eye strain for folks using their monitor at a brightness set too high for their environment. It can also just look cool, which is fine too.
>using their monitor at a brightness set too high for their environment
That's rather dismissive and ablest.
I need high contrast. Dark background and bright text allow me to view the content. Screen brightness plays a role here too, but it's used to enhance the contrast, not compete against it.
I could go either way, but switching back and forth is hard on me, so I tend to go light because the web is light. (Also because a lot of dark mode stuff tends to be crazy low contrast.)
I do however use dark mode when reading in bed and wish there was a pdf reader that did it.
No, maybe it's your eyes that are okay with non-darkmode. I am not using darkmode by reducing by using nightmode all the time but darkmode is totally a fine way to spend time in front of the computer if that makes you comfortable.
I understand the appeal of dark mode - to reduce eye strain, especially in dim environment.
I suggest to not read your screen at all in the bedroom. It is the best down time for one's mind.
Maybe I have undiagnosed eye problem. If the dark mode has a strong contrast with text, I see shadow/aura for minutes. It doesn't happen if the contrast is reduced nor in non-dark mode. I wonder if anyone has similar problem?
I think it's largely a matter of taste, although there are people for whom bright interfaces cause accessibility issues.
Personally, I can't stand light-on-dark interfaces and turn them off wherever I can, although that may be because I have an astigmatism and dark interfaces supposedly cause problems (although I'm not convinced that's the reason in my case).
the older i was getting the more i noticed that i can read light mode better than dark mode.
one day, when i was about 42 years old, sitting on a ferry on a very sunny day, i could hardly see my MacBook screen.
switched to light mode and while the image was still a bit faint, it became totally readable.
The argument is that dark mode is needed to tackle the problem of blue light messing with your melatonin. However, this has not only never been proven, there are studies to the contrary:
Moreover, dark mode hurts my eyes and does the opposite of the other purported benefit.
Screens induce anxiety after long periods of usage, and it has nothing to do with the colour of the light. If you're reading your phone in bed before sleep, you have bigger problems.
When you get older, and cataracts are a thing... white backgrounds blur and essentially "fill in" dark text, drastically lowering the perceived contrast ratio, and this makes it very hard to read.
> I’m an embedded dev, so websites and web tech are a black box to me
You should start tinkering with embedded webservers then (civetweb, etc)! Even embedded devs should learn web tech because often browsers are the easiest way to interface with router/modem settings, IoT settings, etc.
In this case "##" is uBlock filter syntax. Basically "news.ycombinator.com##html:style(filter:invert(100%) hue-rotate(180deg))" means "if the host matches news.ycombinator.com inject the following CSS"
I've gone through every different feature on HN to tweak the colors, including details like down voted comment colors and obscure things like the special colors at Christmas.
I understand not trusting random developer, which means your only option is to create your own extension. Shouldn't be that hard, considering the scope of what's needed.
If you don’t mind using an alternative front-end, I’ve built an open source one[0] that supports dark mode and some other things I was missing when using HN on larger screens
Dark Reader has a sepia-mode as well as night-mode. I remember reading some pg essay about how he patched a customer's issue with lisp while the customer was still on the phone... but still no night-mode after 10 years of begging, oh well, first world problems I guess.
I have it setup to enable according to the system. Also, I use the whitelist mode, so I enable on specific websites instead of having it enabled for every one automatically.
for anyone trying this for a first time, after installing, click the icon, click more, and there are 4 ways to darkmode a site. filter, filter+, static, dynamic. youll find different ones work better for different sites. then go back to the filter tab and modify brightness and contrast. sometimes the filtermode that is not immediately the best looking "works" the best once fixing the contrast.
Darkreader seems to always induce a noticeable performance hit on each computer I've ran it on for some reason when I run it with the default settings. I may try your whitelist method instead and give it another chance...
I personally disable all extensions except uBlockOrigin from auto-updating. If they break, then that prompts me to re-check if they're legit or if they've been bought out (like Stylish) before updating.
Funny that I've been on this site for years yet I don't actually know if it's open source. Does anyone know whether it is and if it's open to pull requests? This sounds like it would be a fun project I could knock out in a weekend or so.
I use the Chrome and Brave browsers on Android. Both support dark mode just fine. And it's automatic for every website, the site itself doesn't need to support it.
> As Gizmodo wrote in 2014, citing research by the Sensory Perception and Interaction Research Group, at University of British Columbia, white backgrounds act as a "crutch" for astigmatic eyes: "People with astigmatism (approximately 50% of the population) find it harder to read white text on black than black text on white."
what many of those hackers don't realize, it's that their dark mode theme is very hard to read at low brightness levels, so when they switch to some light windows, it pokes their eyes out obviously.
instead of forcing everything to be configured for dark theme, it would be a lot simpler to just drastically lower the brightness at night and keep using light themes.
one trick is to lower the brightness slightly dimmer than comfortable and let your pupils take 2-3 seconds to adapt.
another trick, on iOS/macOS, if you combine this with true tone and night shift, then your eyes will be strained even less!
I was sorry to learn that this feature request hasn't seen much traction. However @ksec gave me an idea by linking me to an earlier thread on this very same topic in which somebody suggested that we just create a patch for the existing news.css file.
Not sure why this thread got flagged, but I took it upon myself to create a patch for the existing news.css file as well as producing a new news.css file with dark mode support:
Again, all thoughts and criticisms of this work will be welcomed.
Please help those of us with a dark mode preference enjoy this website more by implementing these changes (after a proper code review of course, as I would expect nothing less from fellow hackers)
> Note: Telling me to load up some browser extension to handle it is a bit silly as it requires me to implicitly trust the author of said extension which will see and have access to virtually everything on every website I enable it for
If the extension asks for permissions to all websites instead of just this one, then yes.
Also, "hackers" fix things like this themselves.
Also also, I may be reacting strongly to this because I don't like dark mode, or the assumption that I should because I'm a "hacker".
Here's my custom dark mode CSS if anyone enjoys the google dark mode aesthetic (I inject with the "Stylus" extension, avoid "Stylish" extension at all costs):
https://pastebin.com/CsVkRbYM
If you welcome criticism, then here it is: I find your generalization particularly silly ("Hackers like dark modes"). You could have just asked (begged) for a dark mode without invoking a fallacious argument.
Note: Telling me to load up some browser extension to handle it is a bit silly as it requires me to implicitly trust the author of said extension which will see and have access to virtually everything on every website I enable it for.
All thoughts and criticisms of this statement are welcomed.
Viva la Dark Mode!