Show HN: HNCute, a pretty pink Hacker News theme

So my biggest immediate complaint is that the up/down hearts are misleading. I was a little excited that the uphearts/downhearts appeared to be slightly offset, which would deal with one of HN's most annoying design flaws -- accidentally hitting the wrong vote button. As it is, your hearts have the same horizontal hitbox even though they appear visually skewed. Having the hitbox match the appearance of the hearts would be welcome!

The other fix I would make is in the font-color of a few elements that are now more emphasized than they need to be. e.g. The "unvote" label seems to be in the darkest shade of font color.

As someone who doesn't mind that it is a Chrome plugin, since Chrome is the browser I use for HN and because I don't mind that the plugin has access to that page -- I say keep it as a plugin rather than make it a CSS sheet. With a plugin, you could provide a polished config panel experience that makes it easy for a user to disable/enable features. For example, I could see myself liking the "Hacker News" masthed back in the header and in a hot pink shade -- but other users may want it gone like it is now.

Of course as a plugin it could add all sorts of features to the HN page, at risk of breaking the minimalist experience. All I think I would want in extra features is maybe he ability to switch between a few different variants of pink styling.

If you're running FF 57, you could try https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/chrome-store-... to install chrome extensions on FF. Some work. Some don't.

I reaaalllyy like this theme! As others have said, it would be great to have it in the UserStyles library.

You can change the colour of the logo with CSS filters, something like this:

  [href="https://news.ycombinator.com"] > img {
    filter: hue-rotate(-50deg) brightness(150%);
  }

… but that doesn’t fix the favicon.

Some of the other bits done in JS can be done in CSS; this snippet, for example:

  for (let i = 0; i < document.getElementsByTagName("font").length; i++) {
    if (document.getElementsByTagName("font")[i].getAttribute("color") === "#ff6600")
      document.getElementsByTagName("font")[i].setAttribute("color", "#FF83C6")
  }

This is very inefficient (though document.getElementsByTagName is probably O(1) due to its return type HTMLCollection being live, so the end result is probably still only O(n) on the number of <font> elements in the document; it’d be O(n²) with document.querySelectorAll); you should only get the <font> elements once, like this:

  const fontElements = document.getElementsByTagName("font");
  for (let i = 0; i < fontElements.length; i++) {
    if (fontElements[i].getAttribute("color") === "#ff6600")
      fontElements("font")[i].setAttribute("color", "#FF83C6")
  }

It can still be made more efficient, but all I wanted to do was rewrite it in CSS anyway:

  font[color="#ff6600"] {
    color: #ff83c6;
  }

Same deal on the table cells just above it:

  for (let i = 0; i < document.getElementsByTagName("TD").length; i++) {
    if (document.getElementsByTagName("TD")[i].getAttribute("bgcolor") === "#ff6600")
      document.getElementsByTagName("TD")[i].setAttribute("bgcolor", "#fbbfdf")
  }

Use this CSS instead:

  td[bgcolor="#ff6600"] {
    background-color: #fbbfdf;
  }

On the performance matter, a rule of thumb: don’t call getElementsByTagName, getElementsByClassName, querySelector and querySelectorAll more than you absolutely have to. Or anything, really. Cache things in temporary variables aggressively. Take these two lines, for example:

  document.getElementsByClassName("pagetop")[0].innerHTML = document.getElementsByClassName("pagetop")[0].innerHTML.split("|").join(" ")
  document.getElementsByClassName("pagetop")[1].innerHTML = document.getElementsByClassName("pagetop")[1].innerHTML.split("|").join(" ")

You’ve evaluated `document.getElementsByClassName("pagetop")` four times instead of once.

  const pagetops = document.getElementsByClassName("pagetop");
  pagetops[0].innerHTML = pagetops[0].innerHTML.split("|").join(" ")
  pagetops[1].innerHTML = pagetops[1].innerHTML.split("|").join(" ")

Even then, this indexes pagetops twice as often as is necessary, but that operation is quite a bit cheaper than getElementsByClassName. I’d say then to use for..of or forEach or similar, or assign temporaries.

Have you thought about doing a write up on how to build a extension like this for Chrome?

I myself have often been thinking about building a Chrome extension but never gotten around to do it because I'm not sure where to start, something like this seems like a good scope for a first Chrome extension.

Also on a side-note, I checked out your github and saw your foureyes repository, that's a really neat idea I really love that project. You could probably turn that into a business (especially if you build an app for it and sell inbound traffic/affiliate marketing to resellers of glasses/sunglasses).

While you are at it, have you considered publishing it to the Firefox and Edge extension stores? Supposedly it is pretty easy to convert a Chrome extension to work in Firefox and Edge these days.

(I'd consider using it on Edge, for at least one user.)

^^

But on the other hand a user who is already interested in overriding the styling for one site is a likely candidate for wanting to install more.

Furthermore, having one extension to trust for security's sake is much nicer than having one for each and every site you want to custom theme. Especially since the general theme is going to want to build up a library of themes and requires user trust to do so, phoning home secret information would eventually destroy that trust. But an extension that only themes Google.com is a more likely candidate for harvesting credentials, for instance.

Creating an extension is also a browser specific process. If there's one browser extension for all sites backed by a repository of plain CSS themes, then users on multiple browsers can benefit from theming with minimal porting effort on the part of the theme author.

too shiny :/

Thanks for the heads up, I didn't know that.

It takes the grumps out of HN and replaces them with cuties!

https://i.imgur.com/GNpBKlj.png

your comment can be said to be grumpy also. See? sorry i dont get why people are salty, I dont find it interesting and just wondered what people found interesting. Why do you have to get defensive?

Thanks, implying that HN had lost its cuteness was also extremely rude

They're referring to the POTUS campaign slogan, which isn't overtly racist but can be interpreted in such a way depending on your read of the message.