Thank you dang, you've been an amazing steward for this community and the technology that powers it.

Keeping something the way it is, is super hard in tons of ways a lot of us probably don't understand. We appreciate you.

Can we have a review before we merge the change? Make sure all issues are ironed out.

HN design is simply the best thing out there. "Moving slowly and preserving things" - I would get this engraved on my grave. This philosophy has died unfortunately and with it went robustness, simplicity, elegance, poise, beauty, accessibility, elegance, maintainability and practicality.

Thanks dang for your gandalf-like wisdom and your resilience. I like Alligators over goddamn mosquitos that have taken over the internet.

We can have what would undoubtedly be one of the world's largest code reviews, and for a vanishingly small piece of relatively mundane code.

Please dang!

The mother of all bike sheddings. A whole subcommittee to decide if the Braille version should have indents instead of bumps.

How can anyone even dare to think about indents? C'mon, I thought this was settled. Did you know that human fingers can detect roughness value down to N7? That's 1.6 micrometers. There is a bigger fish to fry than just think about indentations or bumps. Texture. Texture is everything and there is nothing else to talk about, although I am open for other ideas. Thoughts?

my favorite version of this is "man lsmod". About 70 words and supposedly maintained by multiple people.

Couldn't agree more.

There are many ways for end users to force dark mode without any change on HN. "invert page colors" chrome extension, for example, does a nice job. Not ideal, but good enough.

I second the other commenter, don't do anything. Or get someone really good to help you!

There's a very solid Stylus theme for HN that I've been using as long as I can remember. Until just now I had honestly forgotten that this wasn't what HN looked like by default.

https://userstyles.org/styles/113994/hacker-news-dark

Upvote and downvote buttons become invisible.

Edit: my fault. I have too many dark mode addons/stylesheets enabled at the same time.

There are 2 HN dark themes available at https://github.com/UserStyles.

Midnight lizard (chrome) https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/midnight-lizard/pb... is a good extension that can create a dark theme by changing the contrast & things like that. It does it in a way that the same theme will work on a lot of sites. They do have more dark (& light) themes on their site & you can create your own by entering a few colors & it will create a theme based on that. Stylus is good (NOT stylish), but Midnight lizard creates themes in a way that are compatible with a lot more sites that Stylus.

I just tried out Midnight Lizard. It works surprisingly well but I can see myself wasting hours fighting with it trying to get it tuned perfectly.

Is there a non userstyles.org link for this? I've blocked cookies on userstyles.org (For obvious reasons) & when you black cookies on that site it gives you a blank page. If you enable cookies it comes back.

Doesn't work without JS.

hmm. I just tried turning off JS and reloaded Firefox. Everything seems to still work fine on HN with the theme on. I don't know much about web dev so I'm not sure what could be causing it.

I tried various of dark mode plugins in Firefox and none of them seem to be able to do their job without obvious shortcomings. For example most of them don't check the original color of the website and just invert colors of dark pages as well. Or in some cases it doesn't invert all text colors, making hyperlinks hard to read.

None of the extensions I've tested can match the dead simple CSS override I used in qutebrowser.

Have you tried Dark Reader, I'm pretty happy with it: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/darkreader/

I just started using Dark Reader yesterday, and for the most part, it's excellent.

old.reddit.com comments are mostly unreadable, and it cripples gmail, but I've learned to take advantage of Options-Shift-D to flip it on and off when needed.

It's now part of my web browsing workflow.

It's also supported by current Firefox Preview on Android. Works well.

I flipped a flag in chrome for mobile. HN Looks very good (The reply button is white on grey)

An alternative is to "opt-in" sort of how you can change the top bar color with enough Karma. Maybe that CSS is not loaded for people who dont have that same Karma? I assume people asking for the feature post often enough.

Edit:

To clarify what I mean is maybe toggling which style sheet HN gives you in settings would be ideal for all. Web standards are nice but they dont help in the minimalist ideals of HN too much.

Really? How much karma do you need for that? This is my first time hearing about this.

250 iirc

Daaamn, I'm at 60, so a little over 20%, I will geet probably thhe general dark mode before the customize topbar css feature lol

What browser support do you expect?

https://caniuse.com/#search=css%20variables

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/44271920/css-variables-w...

Also, not only should "dark mode" be the responsibility of the browser, it already is. There's plenty of plugins that do this and people that want it should use them.

(http://i.9ol.es/dark.png)

Dark mode is an accessibility and ergonomics feature that should be supported by websites through CSS whenever possible. Of course browsers need to support it in the first place for it to work, but that seems to be mostly the case:

https://caniuse.com/#feat=prefers-color-scheme

Sadly few browsers support extensions on mobile, which is possibly where dark mode is most useful.

firefox does;it works great

chromium for android is open source ... that's where the solution should be and if you're really passionate about it, go do it. It shouldn't be the responsibility of every individual website to independently implement the feature.

Could you imagine if we entrusted every website to independently implement scroll bars and zoom? What a mess that'd be.

While I partially agree with you (that's why I upvoted) in that it's a waste of everyone's time having every website developer worry about dark mode I still think scrollbars and zoom are fundamentally different from a dark mode in that the latter cannot be detached from aesthetics.

The color pallete of a page is important, and maintaining a consistent look and feel across normal and dark mode can only be done reliably by each website's designer.

So I guess we need both the ability to have the browser auto-calculate a default dark mode, and a way for aestetically-conscious web designers to override it, and that's what we're moving towards.

but dark mode is an accessibility feature and used to be called high-contrast mode. This is a solved problem and has been for at least 30 years.

In fact it's already in chrome on android, no work needs to be done (other than enabling it). Here's an image gallery guide I made: https://imgur.com/a/njNTO6T

This is the right approach, it should be solved at the browser level. In fact, it already is.

The only responsibility of web developers should be to not go out of their way and do silly things that break this.

IMO it's two separate things. Both useful on their own right.

High contrast is very useful for people with visual difficulties, but might even be counter-productive for certain types of eye strain.

I'm under the impression people asking for dark mode are looking for something that will emit less light off their screens, not necessarily make it look nore contrast-y, and the two are more often than not opposite.

People can edit HN CSS with extensions. There is actually an extension that inject CSS into websites. So you can do that.

Such extensions do not work everywhere.

They work everywhere Firefox can run.

I screw up ceasing and desisting all the time :-(

Q.E.D