Hacker News Reader

Comment by Reason077 | Hacker News Reader

Hacker News itself is a prime example of a website that doesn’t support dark mode, but could do so trivially (and, IMO, would look so much better if it did!)

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My HN is in dark mode, though the honors for that accomplishment go to the duckduck browser. Been reading HN on dark mode a while now (light mode burns me eyes, only way to use HN for me now is with the Duck)

P.S. the Duck browser literally has a universal dark mode setting, I don't recall a site it wasn't able to dark-force darkify for me (language is fun)

That browser, just like all Chromium based browsers, get that setting for free from Chromium making that a thing in the first place. Some browsers choose to bring up that option in settings, but it's still just the same thing as the #enable-force-dark flag. (What's really unfortunate is that Firefox doesn't have anything to match that feature, and all of those "auto dark theme" addons are just awful, they're less reliable and look worse.)

There is no downside to having prefers-color-scheme media query set up, even for HN. Too bad still roughly 1 in 4 popular websites support it.

no, choosing light/dark mode should be manual

Per website...? Why would anyone want that instead of just using the system-wide preference? Many sites/apps have an option of system/light/dark.

For me, most dark mode styles are awful (jet black background bright white text). I'd rather have per website toggle so I can apply my own styling when the site's styles suck.

But you can have both? Automatically switching between light and dark mode based on system preferences is handled by CSS, which you can override with your own styling.

I have found it incredibly hard to override dark styling, at most you're modifying/merging styles. Dark reader extensions don't work well turning a dark site light, and I've had limited success injecting styles with tampermonkey/stylus. Of course it can be done, just override every style set by the site. But this involves setting a lot of styles and must be done case-by-case rather than using an auto styler. The only thing that works reliably in an automated way is starting with a light style and then modifying it to dark styling.

I also detest the conflation of OS dark preference, browser chrome theme preference, and website rendering preference. It should be obvious to anyone that these are three different concepts where people can have different preferences for each. The cargo-culting in silicon valley drives me nuts.

> But this involves setting a lot of styles and must be done case-by-case rather than using an auto styler.

If the website is using modern CSS then the colors would be set via CSS variables instead of being set inline in lots of places.

> I also detest the conflation of OS dark preference, browser chrome theme preference, and website rendering preference. It should be obvious to anyone that these are three different concepts where people can have different preferences for each.

Most people definitely prefer consistency so I don't think it is unreasonable to default to following the system preference.

I don't mind the default, but it's the lack of customization in most apps that is a severe oversight. I can't change my theme in the OS without it telling apps I want a dark theme (I don't). I can't change the theme in the browser with it telling every website I want a dark theme (I don't). There are no overrides to force the website rendering theme to be decoupled from the browser/OS theme. In everyone's mad dash to implement a dark theme, no one stopped to think for half a second. It's asinine.

Hard disagree here. Follow my system default.

Iam a both kind of guy.

There should always be three options. System (default), Light, Dark.

No, it should follow system defaults with an option for a manual override. People like you are the reason the internet is broken.

My Hacker News extension [1] re-applies the colours from HN's news.css (including the mistakes in it ^_^) using CSS variables [2] to make it themeable, and adds a default dark mode with an OLED variant, and a way to apply your own theme CSS.

Personally I'm using an HN version of Twitter's Dim theme [3]

[1] https://soitis.dev/comments-owl-for-hacker-news

[2] https://github.com/insin/comments-owl-for-hacker-news/blob/m...

[3] https://imgur.com/a/comments-owl-hacker-news-dark-modes-iFSk...

there are a lot of design choices which Hacker News does not support ;)

Not sure if you would like my dark mode modifications to HN, but here are my CSS[1] and JS[2] modifications.

Javascript: https://pastebin.com/50EUfktL CSS: https://pastebin.com/nzEhxxBY

The only chrome extension I have is to make hackernews support dark mode. Love having it

I do appreciate how minimalist hackernews tries to be, but I think respecting the operating system's theme can be considered very minimalist

This feature works well on Hacker News, just trying it on the beta.

I use Stylus to apply a dark theme to HN, and much prefer it. https://i.imgur.com/USbXXEK.png

People should stop using Imgur. 99% of the time when I click an Imgur link, I get a 403 Imgur is temporarily over capacity. Please try again later. I highly doubt that they are, and they are just blocking VPNs.

If you've got a better suggestion, I'm open to it. I generally just want a throwaway place to host an image publicly for a specific purpose.

Buy a domain and server, rack up the server in a nearby datacenter, and host on that. Easy.

If you go with a cheap enough colo provider, you can get it down to like $200/mo (depending on electricity prices and such where you are) with an initial cost of like $800 for some used server hardware.

Dark mode and some small improvements for mobile usage would be amazing and don't seem at all hard. It's pretty amazing HN hasn't implemented them.

HN works just fine on mobile. I am posting from a GrapheneOS phone. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

I misclicked "hide" on quite a few articles when I meant to read the comments

I disagree. It's pretty terrible. I use hackerweb.app on mobile and it's much better however it doesn't support posting. Thus I have to torment myself with the regular website to post a comment such as this.

If anyone here is open to using the Stylus extension, I've re-shared a dark theme for Hacker News recently and it's been lovely. [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49686639

I hate that folks recommend random extensions. Browsers should include style/css editors (with the ability to save and reload styles later) for accessibility. Since we don't have that, uBlock Origin does a lot of heavy lifting, and can add a dark mode to HN and other sites.

I'd share my ruleset, however, I am missing one. Before I switched PCs (motherboard caught fire) I had one that made everything dark mode, didn't dim the text, and buttons/text inputs/other inputs were also properly inverted. I had to make it myself because googling Hacker News dark mode always led to the same broken themes. I forgot to back it up. Adding dark mode doesn't need a bunch of extensions, and while I'm sure the "stylus" extension is probably useful (I haven't used it, sounds like a CSS override extension), UBO does CSS and JS.

Just my thoughts. Don't mind me.

I still miss Omniweb, a browser with user defined stylesheets, per site settings, and workspaces… so many good things. Free browsers killed it off.

And vertical tabs, only two decades before Safari did.

Opera had this in 2003, but sadly none of the major browsers copied it.

Indeed, I just figured I'd share the full setup. IIRC, Stylus was derived from "Stylish", which was a hugely popular CSS override extension that became spyware around 2016 and was taken down in 2018, and now Stylus (and others of course) fill the gap. It would be very nice to have this integrated into the browser, I agree.

Safari and Firefox both support loading user styles from disk.

The latest Safari also supports creating limited extensions on the fly via AI.

No thanks. When you are my age you will understand.

I have no idea why all the fucking vibed websites that swank around the web these days are unable to do a simple thing:

  * Have one or more "themes" with dark and light variants
  * Query the browser for a preference of light or dark and offer the default theme with the probed variant.

There is also the rather wider issue of accessibility in general. I happen to be an older bloke with astigmatism and rapidly worsening ... fucked up focussing and glasses and that. I'm lucky to have both eyes and decent colour perception and general all around acuity (for a given value of acuity).

It's 2026 FFS. Why on earth is this even being discussed as an issue? We have all these cool vibed efforts that can't even be bothered with simple basics.

They’re now formally interested in doing one but, I imagine, not very urgently relative to flag reasons and other stuff.

I use a chrome plugin precisely for this and I can confirm - my eyes hurt less

https://hcker.news was originally made so i didnt solar flash my kid in bed while they were sleeping

it now has many dark themes, bloomberg is my favorite.

It's great!

Where are the themes? (I might be missing on mobile)

my bad, upper right corner half moon icon!

Gotcha I was looking for a Bloomberg terminal like theme, whoops

Whoops is on me, I misunderstood your question. That theme is there, you have to long press the theme button. Just realized how unintuitive it is, gonna move it to the settings.

I got neurological lyme disease a few years ago. Anything with a white background was like a VGA cable being half plugged in.

The fact that this website wasn’t capable of dark mode made me create a CSS overlay on desktop.

I am back to somewhat normal now with my eyes, but I feel really bad for anyone in the same position.

I know that the current exact HN is magic, but come on. There is CSS to detect the system’s theme. There is no need to create a button or anything.

Please no. Dark mode is extremely difficult to read for me.

Are you supposing they would they force it on for you? Or does your dislike of it mean nobody else should have the option?

This is, in fact, what drives a lot of politics. "I don't like X therefore nobody may have X."

Bean Soup Theory: https://www.merriam-webster.com/slang/bean-soup-theory

That’s why it’s a mode :-)

I'd prefer dark mode because then I notice my eye floaters much less when reading.

Ironically this comment is now almost impossible to read.

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