I find it offensive there's no dark mode. It's discrimination against people with a vision disability. It's a small and insignificant change on their part, could be made in 5 mins.
I whole heartedly want dark mode HN but your comment seems insincere and hyperbolic.
Most major purveyors of UI have somehow recognised the importance of offering a dark mode - I guess they all just did it for a lark? At this point, HN's refusal is wilful.
Sure, plenty of annoying ways around it for each affected person to figure out - or one tiny change to the God-like and permanently-infallible UI of HN. All hail!
It's annoying as duck to 1.) have a disability in the first place and 2.) have every random person ever acuse you of lying about it for literally no reason.
Any time you split your UI (for example, light mode and dark mode), it effectively doubles/multiplies all future UI testing you do from then on out (testing all new views/features on both light and dark mode). It can also add additional strain on bug reports / support, since you no longer know what UI configuration a particular user might've been using when they complained about something.
Slightly less of an issue on a site like HN where the UI is somewhat simple and static and changes happen at alligator speed, but still a long-term commitment to make (as opposed to 5 min of dev time).
(In case it isn't obvious, I'm a little salty about how much time I still spend testing/fixing my own site changes in dark mode over a year after adding it.)
I agree it takes more time but isn't double an exaggeration? New features would presumably reuse light/dark UI components you've already tested. And are they really that likely to behave unexpectedly?
It's funny how developers will boast "it'll only take 5 mins" when they're not the ones having to code it though.