Is Dark Mode Such a Good Idea? • Hacker News Board

Re: Is Dark Mode Such a Good Idea?

#281

Post by noir_lord » Fri, Jun 12, 2020, 11:04 AM UTC

aasasd wrote: post #76

Apparently light-on-dark is terrible if the person has astigmatism: the edges get very blurry and doubled. There was an article on HN about this, specifically about keynote slides. Also apparently “in Europe and Asia, astigmatism affects between 30 and 60% of adults” (says Wikipedia). I have it too, and couldn't figure out in the past why text sometimes looks horribly blurry and sometimes doesn't. With this knowledge…

I'm asytigmatic, light on dark is fine (and what I use everywhere) as long as it isn't #fff on #000 I'm OK so lots of my setup is quite light grey on dark grey.

The thing that really makes a difference for me is screen resolution (or more accurately, pixels per inch) on a modern 27" 4K I have far far fewer issues than I had on a 1280x1024 17" LCD - part of that is improvements in brightness/contrast and the technology as well though.

Re: Is Dark Mode Such a Good Idea?

#282

Post by jpambrun » Fri, Jun 12, 2020, 11:11 AM UTC

jeffbee wrote: post #127

Izkata wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Things have flip-flopped over the years: CRT - Black didn't light up the pixels (I don't remember the details as to how), so it did reduce power usage some. LCD - Had a constant backlight (see sibling comment for details), so there was little to no difference between black and anything else. OLED/AMOLED - Black LEDs are actually turned off, instead of displaying a dark color, so we're back to it saving power - more e…

> no difference between black and anything else. Just a detail that isn't quite right in the article: black is actually the highest power state for LCDs. The backlight draws the same power all the time (for a given brightness setting) but the pixels draw more power when they are black.

Many monitors now have local array dimming to increase contrast. It's probably fair to assume that dimmed backleds lead to decrease power consumption.

Re: Is Dark Mode Such a Good Idea?

#283

Post by dsego » Fri, Jun 12, 2020, 11:13 AM UTC

roelschroeven wrote: post #181

floatrock wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...buried 2 or 3 menu layers deep, using a magic sequence of three buttons to handle all the up-down/left-right multi-level hierarchical menu navigation complexities. One of Apple's biggest innovations imho was to make brightness +/- two of the default keyboard buttons. Every keyboard should replace their F-keys with brightness by default (seriously, who uses F-keys? It's wasted real estate.) TV's should do this too.…

> seriously, who uses F-keys? It's wasted real estate I'm sorry, what? I use them all the time. F5 for refreshing all kinds of stuff, or for setting breakpoints in my IDE. F7, F8, F9 for controlling the debugger, other combinations for building/running. F12 for opening developer tools in the browser. Some programs still use F1 for help. F2 in Windows explorer for renaming things. And so on and so forth. I can't stand…

That's because you're used to them, that's fine. Many of those actions can be done via key combos or other keys (esp on a Mac), like C+R to refresh, C+Sh+I for browser console or Enter to rename a file. Function keys at this point are certainly old school and could even be considered an atavism, like the Print Screen button or the numeric keypad.

Re: Is Dark Mode Such a Good Idea?

#284

Post by yiyus » Fri, Jun 12, 2020, 11:26 AM UTC

pdimitar wrote: post #256

yiyus wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Science is not a faith based system. If you doubt about the rigor of some study, by all means point the errors you find. In the meantime, I will trust those scientific studies more than subjective opinions in hackernews comments.

> If you doubt about the rigor of some study, by all means point the errors you find. Sampling. It probably feels good hand-waving away the problem of "does this study apply to everyone?" by introducing the "representative sample" construct, but it has its problems and I doubt they will be ever solved. You can't speak for everyone when you have several thousands samples -- out of ~8 billion people. This is kind of ak…

> This is kind of akin to that artificially absurd example of "on average, every human on Earth has one testicle".

No. If I claim everyone has 0.5 testicles, that's bad science. If I randomly choose a large enough number of subjects and report that approximately 50% have two testicles and approximately 50% have no testicles, with error bars, p-values, etc., saying that you don't trust this because I am trying to make a career and you prefer to follow your own experience, which after looking between your legs clearly shows that 100% of people have two testicles, would be quite stupid. If I chose only 3 people, or all of them are male or female, or I make any other mistake, point the mistake, but don't attack me personally, and much less science in general.

For example, I followed the link to the study by the Nielsen Norman Group and then the reference to the study of Piepenbrock. They explain well their sampling method, with different groups by age and depending on vision problems. You can clearly see the individual results and the variance, and it is obvious that generalizing to the 100% of population would be wrong, but there are some very clear trends. Calling these researchers "someone trying to p-hack their way to a publishable result that's sensational enough to advance their career" without any proof whatsoever is insulting.

To be clear, I do not intend that anyone changes habits because of these studies. I agree that this is subjective enough to make it a personal decision. But as a scientist trying to make a career, I found the above comment very disrespectful.

Re: Is Dark Mode Such a Good Idea?

#285

Post by yiyus » Fri, Jun 12, 2020, 11:27 AM UTC

ColanR wrote: post #279

yiyus wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Science is not a faith based system. If you doubt about the rigor of some study, by all means point the errors you find. In the meantime, I will trust those scientific studies more than subjective opinions in hackernews comments.

You seem to have a lot of faith in scientists.

I don't, that's why I'm a scientist.

Re: Is Dark Mode Such a Good Idea?

#286

Post by jasoneckert » Fri, Jun 12, 2020, 11:27 AM UTC

There is quite a bit of personal preference in every situation where someone prefers Dark vs Light Mode.

I prefer Dark Mode for certain tasks and in certain environments (lighting conditions, etc.), while I prefer Light Mode for other tasks and in other environments.

Moreover, I've experienced times where both modes have caused fatigue of some sort.

Thus, I'm skeptical whether an argument can be made for one mode over the other in all situations.

Re: Is Dark Mode Such a Good Idea?

#287

Post by giggly_gopher » Fri, Jun 12, 2020, 11:28 AM UTC

I used to use dark mode, but now I just turn down the total brightness of my screen and I like it much more. I think people are confusing eye strain for staring at a bright light all day.

Re: Is Dark Mode Such a Good Idea?

#288

Post by tomp » Fri, Jun 12, 2020, 11:32 AM UTC

yiyus wrote: post #254

marcus_holmes wrote: post #241

Wait. So. "Multiple studies show that light mode is better" trumps my actual experience, with my eyeballs, in my office environment? No. No it doesn't. 1. I don't have that much faith in scientists. Someone trying to p-hack their way to a publishable result that's sensational enough to advance their career is not going to produce good advice for me. 2. Even if they were perfect scientists, they're not using my eyebal…

Science is not a faith based system. If you doubt about the rigor of some study, by all means point the errors you find. In the meantime, I will trust those scientific studies more than subjective opinions in hackernews comments.

> by all means point the errors you find

That it's conducted on humans (a.k.a. very small sample, not generalizable, non-objective metrics, hard to remove observer bias etc.)? I think regardless of personal opinion, just based on a Bayesian / base rate mental model, you should default to disbelieving any published social studies (I refuse to call it "science") that haven't been rigorously replicated.

Re: Is Dark Mode Such a Good Idea?

#289

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet » Fri, Jun 12, 2020, 11:34 AM UTC

robotmay wrote: post #197

Dark modes are a choice. Light modes are a choice. Everyone is free to choose what they like, so trying to influence people one way or another, or criticising their choice, is unproductive. I live in Wales, a country where our default weather is "meh". I live on the dark side of a mountain. I work in a room with no external windows. Yes I use dark modes, and if you used light mode in my office I'd think you were a fu…

> Dark modes are a choice. Light modes are a choice. Everyone is free to choose what they like

In the Windows 95 era, we really could just flip a few settings in our OS and everything[0] would conform to our color and font preferences. Unfortunately we have no regressed to the point that only two options are offered, and even then only sometimes.

Hooray for progress.

[0] very nearly everything.

Re: Is Dark Mode Such a Good Idea?

#290

Post by upofadown » Fri, Jun 12, 2020, 11:43 AM UTC

Dark mode is certainly better if you have haze problems (e.g. cataracts). The last thing you want in that case is a lot of extra light around to be diffused all over the stuff you are trying to see.