That said, I've wanted this feature desperately for a long time. Browsing HN on my desktop monitor in the evening is blinding and gives me a headache. I find myself resizing the window to be phone-sized just so my eyes are assaulted with less light.
If you need a hand with the CSS, I'd be happy to write it myself (speaking of which; is HN open-source?)
Thanks, I'll look into that, and you're welcome to ping hn@ycombinator.com about it.
If it's simple to add and isn't going to break anything for anybody, we'd be happy to.
Edit: ok, as I understand it, it's simple enough to add except that you have to figure out what the color scheme for dark mode should actually be. Is that accurate?
I have to say - if your monitor is blinding you, you have it set to too high a brightness. You're doing yourself a disservice by not turning it down. It should only throw out as much light as a piece of pristine printer paper in the same orientation.
In the middle of the day my monitor tops out at about 30 of 100, and in the evenings I will occasionally turn it down to about 5 or 10. Many modern monitors will offer an option to save multiple settings, or they at least make brightness a top level configuration setting.
EDIT: Is saying "If your monitor is hurting your eyes, turn it down," really such a controversial statement?
I like having my display as bright as possible without it being uncomfortable; it helps with readability. On my laptop and phone I'll shift the brightness throughout the day to meet this heuristic, but alas, Windows does not make this trivial with an external monitor. Usually you have to fiddle with the monitor's physical buttons and navigate down into a menu. So I just don't bother.
Most desktop monitors have their brightness & other config exposed via the DDC (DDC?) protocol. This is a simple UI that exposes the brightness controls on Windows. Much easier than using the buttons.
You might need to go to the monitor's menu and enable DDC if it's disabled by default.
Windows has a brightness slider in the side bar, but it doesn't seem to work with external monitors. Probably because OS-level brightness controls were implemented when laptops became popular, and traditional PCs with external monitors became an afterthought.
Just realize when you use them as a justification for changing defaults which work fine for most everyone else, you're going to annoy people. Especially when your preferences tend to fly in the face of common sense.
In my experience, low contrast text is going to have a low contrast no matter how bright or dim your computer screen is. That is, turning up the brightness will only wash out the text as it overwhelms your eyes.
It’s also an accessibility issue, but that’s a comment for a different article.
Yep, came here to suggest exactly this. Especially because then it works for all sites, not just HN. I can also second Dark Reader specifically; it's nicely tunable, supports per-site toggles, and lets you set a schedule to automatically toggle dark mode in the evening. I think my only complaint is that it might be the reason why my Firefox on Android gets really slow / hangs occasionally, although that might be unrelated; haven't gotten around to testing (and it might also be the old-ish hardware and >>100 tabs, so grain of salt).
It makes FF on my high-end desktop slow too, sometimes.
In the dark reader popup window you can set the Mode; the default of Dynamic does an excellent job of making everything dark but is pretty slow. The other modes have basically no performance impact but you might see some visual bugs from time to time.
Yeah, the tab counter hit "∞" (>99 tabs) ages ago, but they're lazy-loaded so it's just a little slower and a lot more scrolling to get to older tabs. Moto G5 Plus (XT1687), 4 GB of RAM, crDroid 6.5 (Android 10) if it matters.
I added themes to the Anarki forum a while ago[0], along with a quick and dirty dark theme. Please ignore the garbage quality of my PR and code, but if the HN devs want to rip it off they're welcome to.
A less controversial solution would be to simply hook into the user's system-level light/dark setting: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/pref...
That said, I've wanted this feature desperately for a long time. Browsing HN on my desktop monitor in the evening is blinding and gives me a headache. I find myself resizing the window to be phone-sized just so my eyes are assaulted with less light.
If you need a hand with the CSS, I'd be happy to write it myself (speaking of which; is HN open-source?)