HN Alternative UIs

You actually have to go into your profile and enable a checkpoint just to see them at all.

The thing modern web UX trends forget is that human visual system is amazing at pattern-matching and filtering. It's literally what it does all the time - subconsciously sifting through large amounts of data and focusing on things of interest. As long as there are patterns in the data the brain can use to slice and dice it, you can dump a lot of data on people with no confusion or loss of effectiveness.

A reason those HN readers look like entire rewrites (besides being rewrites) is because they are not dangerous rollouts, and because they have to provide strong reasons to use them as third party sites over the "real" HN.

Literally it. Please don't break it!

The moderation system and the article ranking algorithm were completely rebuilt too. And both were biased in a direction the community hated (quite explicitly, and since before the change).

And the problem with Reddit didn't stop at the design. Yeah, the new site is slow, ugly and hard to use, but the larger issue is that the new design favors video and memes over good content. If not for that point and the lots of on your face growth-hack, I don't think the reaction would be that strong.

And none of those despised changes happened by bad luck or technical incompetence. They all come from managerial decisions. The technical act of redesigning can be harmful, but it's not as risky as they examples make it look.

One issue is that HN is not really open source. Although there was an open source release years ago, the current code base is an evolution of that and closed. It then comes down to how much time/money Y Combinator is willing to invest in enhancing it, and I assume more essential stuff takes priority over nice-to-haves like dark mode.

I think, ideally, the current version could be open sourced, and then people could contribute PRs to add stuff like dark mode. I think dang has said before that the reason why they don't do that, is they don't want to expose certain "secret sauce" (abuse/spam detection, voting code, etc), since if the algorithms were exposed people would exploit them.

I guess one solution would be to split the code base into open core and closed plugins, open source the core and then keep the secret sauce in the closed plugins. But, I guess that would take time to carry out that refactoring, which comes back to the issue of limited development time/resources and what priorities that will be spent on.

There is no need for a dark mode. Just use a style extension. We are all tech savvy people here.

  Dan,

  Re: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23197966

  It's been four months since you agreed that dark mode for HN is a good idea. Any progress? If not, what is blocking you? Can I help?

  Craig

  --

  We just don't have much dev time. Sorry for the delay. We'll get there. I appreciate the offer of help but we're not currently set up to accept contributions that way...

  Dan

  /** 
   * The following colors are chosen with the linear map f(c): [#000000, #ffffff] -> [#dcdccc, #404040] where 
   * f(#000000) = #dcdccc and f(#ffffff) = #404040.
   */
  .c5a, .c5a *, .c5a a:link, .c5a a:visited { color:#a5a59b !important; }
  .c73, .c73 *, .c73 a:link, .c73 a:visited { color:#96968d !important; }
  .c82, .c82 *, .c82 a:link, .c82 a:visited { color:#8c8c85 !important; }
  .c88, .c88 *, .c88 a:link, .c88 a:visited { color:#898981 !important; }
  .c9c, .c9c *, .c9c a:link, .c9c a:visited { color:#7d7d76 !important; }
  .cae, .cae *, .cae a:link, .cae a:visited { color:#72726c !important; }
  .cbe, .cbe *, .cbe a:link, .cbe a:visited { color:#686864 !important; }
  .cce, .cce *, .cce a:link, .cce a:visited { color:#5e5e5b !important; }
  .cdd, .cdd *, .cdd a:link, .cdd a:visited { color:#555553 !important; }

"Unlike other similar extensions, we don't find you to be all that interesting. Your questionable browsing history should remain between you and the NSA. Stylus collects nothing. Period."

Great if you just wanted to see what was new, but not get lost in the comments.

It's a little dumb, I could just make my own clone in 30 minutes.