Here's my own dark theme userstyle for HN, with the colors from Firefox's dev tools.
For news.ycombinator.com - https://pastebin.com/K1KS64KR
For hn.algolia.com (the search form) - https://pastebin.com/ksH6QcV4
Ask HN: Dark mode for HN please?
11–20 of 469 posts
Re: Ask HN: Dark mode for HN please?
#12There may be third party solutions to this. The management around here is very conservative about changing things and explicitly has policies to "Move slow and preserve things" (as opposed to "Move fast and break things"). So, as a guess, the answer to that is probably "No" or, at best, "Not any time soon." But the management is very tolerant of and even warmly welcomes the fact that the membership includes a lot of…
The thing is that this is a CSS change, which makes it declarative, which means it would almost certainly not "break" anything. Also, if it were made optional via a personal setting or by hooking into the user's system-level setting (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/pref...), it wouldn't even be a "change" for anyone who doesn't want it to be.
I understand and respect the general philosophy, but I fail to see how this particular request could be anything but a strict improvement.
Re: Ask HN: Dark mode for HN please?
#13If you use Firefox you can use the addon Dark Reader, so you can get dark mode for every site if you want at night
Most of those extensions work by just inverting the colors of the entire page. Pretty unideal, compared to an intelligently-written dark theme.
Dark reader by default uses a different approach than that, but it can fallback to inverting colors IIRC
Re: Ask HN: Dark mode for HN please?
#14There may be third party solutions to this. The management around here is very conservative about changing things and explicitly has policies to "Move slow and preserve things" (as opposed to "Move fast and break things"). So, as a guess, the answer to that is probably "No" or, at best, "Not any time soon." But the management is very tolerant of and even warmly welcomes the fact that the membership includes a lot of…
The thing is that this is a CSS change, which makes it declarative, which means it would almost certainly not "break" anything. Also, if it were made optional via a personal setting or by hooking into the user's system-level setting ( https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/pref... ), it wouldn't even be a "change" for anyone who doesn't want it to be. I understand and respect the general philosophy,…
I'm not in charge around here. My opinions about what I have observed over the last decade are just that: My opinions.
Feel free to prove me wrong and talk management into making such a change. But talking at me to convince me I'm wrong is probably not really the way to do that. I have zero decision-making authority in this matter.
Re: Ask HN: Dark mode for HN please?
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
The thing is that this is a CSS change, which makes it declarative, which means it would almost certainly not "break" anything. Also, if it were made optional via a personal setting or by hooking into the user's system-level setting ( https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/pref... ), it wouldn't even be a "change" for anyone who doesn't want it to be. I understand and respect the general philosophy,…
I'm not in charge around here. My opinions about what I have observed over the last decade are just that: My opinions. Feel free to prove me wrong and talk management into making such a change. But talking at me to convince me I'm wrong is probably not really the way to do that. I have zero decision-making authority in this matter.
I figured; I'm just presenting my counter-point in a place where hopefully management will see it :)
Re: Ask HN: Dark mode for HN please?
#16Other comments have good solutions but if you are accessing via mobile try out Octal. Dark theme by default, great UI/UX, complete with search, etc. I’ve been very happy with it and have tried out multiple third party clients and this has been my favorite
Re: Ask HN: Dark mode for HN please?
#17Here's my own dark theme userstyle for HN, with the colors from Firefox's dev tools. For news.ycombinator.com - https://pastebin.com/K1KS64KR For hn.algolia.com (the search form) - https://pastebin.com/ksH6QcV4
The problem is most browsers don't have an easy way to add custom styles any more.
Desktop Safari does, surprisingly, and I use it there.
Firefox removed that feature.
There are extensions, but browser extensions are a massive security hole so I don't use any that aren't too-big-to-be-corrupted.
Re: Ask HN: Dark mode for HN please?
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most of those extensions work by just inverting the colors of the entire page. Pretty unideal, compared to an intelligently-written dark theme.
Dark reader by default uses a different approach than that, but it can fallback to inverting colors IIRC
Extensions are also a huge security liability; I install very few of them these days
Re: Ask HN: Dark mode for HN please?
#19For context (and also protip if you weren't aware), there's already precedent for user-defined CSS in HN. I don't remember if everyone has access to it, but there's a topcolor setting in your profile that sets the color of the top bar. Maybe that could be extended to include other CSS properties? I wouldn't mind having to write hex color codes...
Re: Ask HN: Dark mode for HN please?
#20Octal is a great iOS app for HN with a nice dark mode.