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Show HN: Orange Juice – Small UX improvements that make HN easier to read

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131–140 of 165 posts

Re: Show HN: Orange Juice – Small UX improvements that make HN easier to read

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dang your comment excites me to think that Hackernews can have dark mode in future. Aside from all of this AI hype, This is the feature I am most excited about xD! Dang, genuine question but when you moderate/view Hackernews yourself, I suppose that you must yourself be using dark mode too correct? or do you view hackernews in light-mode?

Out of interest, why do you suppose that?

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: Orange Juice – Small UX improvements that make HN easier to read

#132
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure that will never happen, as it would've happened already by now. People can and do already use custom CSS or Dark Reader for dark mode.

Some things have taken us 15 years and then pow they happened

dang, i pitched this on reddit like 20 years ago. I've always wanted to know what putting the new page on the front page would do to content quality. Something like this https://keizo.github.io/hackernews/

Re: Show HN: Orange Juice – Small UX improvements that make HN easier to read

#133
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Minimalist" in 2026 is different than what it used to be in the '90s.

Of course, and part of my reason for being brought onto the team full time is to explore ways we can develop HN for the future. That doesn't mean that every 3rd-party HN project represents a feature that should be added to the core HN UI.

I didn't know, and I thought only @dang was working on HN. You must agree that at least some basic features, like a dark theme and indicators for new comments, could be easily handcrafted or implemented with coding agents!

Re: Show HN: Orange Juice – Small UX improvements that make HN easier to read

#135
post #129
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What features would you welcome?

I like how on Reddit you can click to the right of a comment header (username, timestamp, etc) to collapse that subthread. Gives you a much bigger hit target than just [-]. Also saves putting [-] over near the up/down arrows for consistency of positioning, a decision which could otherwise just create trouble on mobile.

Ooh, I'm having that feature for the next version of Comments Owl for Hacker News (which already moves the [-] to the left and increases the size of it on mobile), but does that not lead to accidental collapsing while scrolling on mobile?

I've already added using a confirm() for flagging and hiding in list pages on mobile to it because it's so easy to accidentally hit while scrolling.

Re: Show HN: Orange Juice – Small UX improvements that make HN easier to read

#136
post #116

So many extensions and services, because YCombinator cannot have a part-time employee working on such an important community: * https://hncompanion.com/ * http://oj-hn.com/ * https://hnrelevant.imadij.com/ * https://hnreplies.com/

Dan and I are full time YC employees and other engineers at YC do plenty to keep HN running. HN’s software is continually developed to handle growth in traffic, along with abuse, spam, and (particularly recently) bots and generated content. The lack of new UI features is not due to lack of resources/investment but because it’s always been the HN way to maintain a minimalist design and for the content and discussions…

I think the minimalist design is good. But hasn't the font size decreased over time in practice? When HN was first created, the average monitor had a much lower resolution, which made text appear larger. Now I think it's quite difficult to read compared to other websites. Obviously it's easily solved by zooming, but I think it would make sense to adjust for the change in resolutions over the years

Re: Show HN: Orange Juice – Small UX improvements that make HN easier to read

#138

Latchkey, would you be comfortable with HN adopting your dark mode styling as a user choice someday, if they came around to liking it? I really like it and I think it’s in the spirit of the site.

I'm pretty sure that will never happen, as it would've happened already by now. People can and do already use custom CSS or Dark Reader for dark mode.

It does not work in embedded browsers inside RSS readers

Re: Show HN: Orange Juice – Small UX improvements that make HN easier to read

#139

So many extensions and services, because YCombinator cannot have a part-time employee working on such an important community: * https://hncompanion.com/ * http://oj-hn.com/ * https://hnrelevant.imadij.com/ * https://hnreplies.com/

That's not the reason, it's mainly because the current awful interface is a distinguished mark of pride, so there is a noticeable resistance to changing that, so it's easier to not change

Re: Show HN: Orange Juice – Small UX improvements that make HN easier to read

#140
post #51
post #6

I want hacker news UX to stay as it is, mostly, but these are features I'd welcome.

What features would you welcome?

> What features would you welcome?

1. Dark mode

2. (Now that i'm seeing it in action for the first time) inline responding. That said: this increases the weight of the page considerably (in JS code), so delegating it to the various third-party apps is arguably the better approach for this specific platform. (But now that i've seen it in use here i'll have to add this to the Fossil SCM's forum at some point, as this is sooooo much more comfortable.)

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