Ask HN: Dark mode for HN please?

Please, for God's sake, don't screw it up. I can keep up with news on this site from a 15 kb/s shared satellite link when I'm out at sea. Except perhaps for the really big threads. I love the simple interface. It's text, it's simple, it's readable, and when I hit the spacebar, it scrolls down a page. No fancy fonts, no javascript, no nothing. I love HN for its simplicity and speed. Thanks for maintaining a good engineering philosophy.

Screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/mxaNky4

Whipped this up real quick... keeps the spirit of HN I think, and is pretty minimal. Not my best CSS but tables/current CSS make some selectors a little tricky and after all, it's less than 1kb added, no markup or stack changes needed, and this is 'Hacker News' right? :D

@media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) { body { background-color: #1F2430; }

  #hnmain { background-color: #232834; }

  a:link.storylink,
  #hnmain > tbody > tr:first-child > td a,
  .commtext, .commtext a:link,
  td {
    color: #fafafa;
  }

  #hnmain > tbody > tr:first-child > td { background-color: #333a4a; }
  
  a:link,
  .sitebit, .subtext, .sitestr, .subtext a:link,
  .rank, a.morelink,
  .pagetop, .yclinks a,
  .comhead a:link, .comhead,
  .hnmore a:link, .reply a:link {
    color: #8c96ac;
  }

  a:visited {
    color: #979cf4;
  }

  .votearrow {
    overflow: visible;
    position: relative;
  }

  .votearrow::before {
    content: "";
    width: 0;
    height: 0;
    left: 1px;
    top: 3px;
    display: block;
    position: absolute;
    border-left: 4px solid transparent;
    border-right: 4px solid transparent;
    border-bottom: 7px solid #bebfd1;
  }

  input[type=text],
  textarea {
    background-color: #333a4a;
    color: #fafafa;
    border: 1px solid #1F2430;
  }

Edit: missed a few on other pages! Added arrow CSS patch, added screenshot from imgur, added text input colors for profile and replies.

I have some styles I use. Screenshots:

https://imgur.com/a/WZAaJST

I don't love when dark modes skew blue, so tried to keep it neutral with blacks and greys

``` @media (prefers-color-scheme:dark) { body { background-color: #2a2b2e; } #hnmain { background-color: rgb(32, 33, 36); }

  a:link, .hnmore a:link, a:visited, td, .c00, .c00 a:link {
    color: #e8eaed;
  }
  .subtext, .comhead a:link, .subtext a:visited, span.subtext a:link, .subtext a:visited {
    color: #9aa0a6;
  }

  @media (prefers-color-scheme:dark){body{filter:invert(1) hue-rotate(180deg)}}

minimal CSS to add (nothing to remove):

https://pastebin.com/4JYbSi5F

[edit]: fixed, shorter version: https://pastebin.com/dT4KKt3s

[edit 2: fixed textarea, dead links: https://pastebin.com/CKy4HQXE ]

[edit 3: added a screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/Ont553x ]

I'll check this thread but also feel free to email me zain@yc for more feedback - just add [HN FEEDBACK] in the subject :-)

don't worry, we'll make sure we don't pull a reddit on you ;)

You can look at UserStyles.org for inspiration. They have many user created Hacker News dark mode themes available there: https://userstyles.org/styles/browse?search_terms=hacker%20n...

Append this to news.css;

  @media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) {
      
      body { background-color:#000; }
      #hnmain { background-color:#000; }
      
      a:link { color:#eee; }
      a:visited { color:#b2b2b2; }
      
      .default, .title, .subtext, .yclinks, .comhead { color:#a2a2a2; }
      .admin { color:#eee; }
      .pagetop { color:#222; } /* not inverted */
      
      .c00, .c00 a:link { color:#eee; }
      .c5a, .c5a a:link, .c5a a:visited { color:#a5a5a5; }
      .c73, .c73 a:link, .c73 a:visited { color:#8c8c8c; }
      .c82, .c82 a:link, .c82 a:visited { color:#7d7d7d; }
      .c88, .c88 a:link, .c88 a:visited { color:#777777; }
      .c9c, .c9c a:link, .c9c a:visited { color:#636363; }
      .cae, .cae a:link, .cae a:visited { color:#515151; }
      .cbe, .cbe a:link, .cbe a:visited { color:#414141; }
      .cce, .cce a:link, .cce a:visited { color:#313131; }
      .cdd, .cdd a:link, .cdd a:visited { color:#222222; }
      
      .pagetop a:link, .pagetop a:visited { color: #000; } /* not inverted */
      .topsel a:link, .topsel a:visited { color:#000; }
      .subtext a:link, .subtext a:visited { color:#7d7d7d; }
      .comhead a:link, .subtext a:visited { color:#7d7d7d; }
      .hnmore a:link, a:visited { color:#7d7d7d; }
      
      textarea { background-color: #000; color: #eee; }
      
  }

#eee for text colour.

#000 for bg (body, #hnmain)

#hnmain's background is set with an HTML attribute, !important might be necessary for some browsers? Not sure, but works on my machine(tm).

Edit: s/html/body/, wasn't necessary to select on <html>. Split body and #hnmain selectors.

I've been using a "Hacker News Dark" userstyle [1] with Stylus for years, it's only ~30 lines of CSS with a permissive license (CC0). I'd love to see something like it integrated into HN itself.

It'd also be nice to have a way to enable the dark theme without logging in, alongside a persistent setting for logged-in users. A link in the header/footer to set a cookie is probably the simplest way to accomplish that.

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

Small request while you're at it: preformatted/code blocks don't display well on smartphones in portrait mode, as there's too much margin at the sides and scrolling becomes awkward. You can test it here:

    text = '"The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" is an English-language pangram—a sentence that contains all of the letters of the alphabet. It is commonly used for touch-typing practice, testing typewriters and computer keyboards, displaying examples of fonts, and other applications involving text where the use of all letters in the alphabet is desired. Owing to its brevity and coherence, it has become widely known.'

    for i,c in enumerate(text):
        print(i, ord(c))

Alligator energy.

I hadn’t heard this term before, and just read that an alligator can store up to 60% of the energy it gets from food as fat, mostly stored in the tail.

A large adult in average condition could survive two years or more without food!

https://books.google.com/books/about/Alligators.html?id=0UDL...

My version looks like this: https://imgur.com/a/KCHi5mO

CSS:

@media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) { body { color:#cccccc; background-color: black } center>table { background-color: #222222;} td { color:#cccccc; } .admin td { color:white; } .subtext td { color:white; }

    a:link    { color:#cccccc; }
    a:visited { color:#eeeeee; }

    .default { color:#b2b2b2; }
    .admin   { color:#ffffff; }
    .title   { color:#b2b2b2; }
    .subtext { color:#b2b2b2; }
    .yclinks { color:#b2b2b2; }
    .pagetop { color:#dddddd; }
    .comhead { color:#b2b2b2; }


    .c00, .c00 a:link { color:#cccccc; }
    .c5a, .c5a a:link, .c5a a:visited { color:#aaaaaa; }
    .c73, .c73 a:link, .c73 a:visited { color:#838383; }
    .c82, .c82 a:link, .c82 a:visited { color:#727272; }
    .c88, .c88 a:link, .c88 a:visited { color:#777777; }
    .c9c, .c9c a:link, .c9c a:visited { color:#6c6c6c; }
    .cae, .cae a:link, .cae a:visited { color:#5e5e5e; }
    .cbe, .cbe a:link, .cbe a:visited { color:#4e4e4e; }
    .cce, .cce a:link, .cce a:visited { color:#3e3e3e; }
    .cdd, .cdd a:link, .cdd a:visited { color:#222222; }


    .pagetop a:visited { color:#cccccc;}
    .topsel a:link, .topsel a:visited { color:#222222; }

    .subtext a:link, .subtext a:visited { color:#727272; }

    .comhead a:link, .subtext a:visited { color:#727272; }

    .hnmore a:link, a:visited { color:#727272; }

    .hnmore a:link, a:visited { color:#727272; }
}

Please, don't just force a dark mode to everyone with "prefers-color-scheme: dark".

Some are using OS in light mode, but would still like to use the dark mode. Sometimes, it might be useful to use the light version on dark systems. (e.g. if the dark css is not well made or looks bad on some monitors)

Here's a good thread about it: https://twitter.com/SaraSoueidan/status/1245722023361380354

Here's a version based on the one by ldd. Unlike the others I've seen posted, it maintains the original contrast, the orange header, and doesn't make the upvote button ugly.

https://0x0.st/iLYb.txt

EDIT: one problem. The header image on pages like[1] doesn't look good. Can you change the white background to transparency?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

Are you ok with using CSS variables? Without them or some preprocessor, a dark theme would mean a lot of repeated selectors. https://caniuse.com/#feat=css-variables

I have run an HN clone for China's Linux hacker community, we use dark & green color and it's pretty cool in my view, you can check the page archive here: https://web.archive.org/web/20170905074904/http://hack.fdzh....

The source code: https://github.com/fdzh/anarki/commit/5a58ef38111215258a2694...

BTW, I would recommend using Eigengrau rather than total black. https://twitter.com/AustinTByrd/status/1105822085362925568

Anyone who wants to make a suggestion is welcome to.

I'm not a programmer, so I'm probably saying something incredibly, fantastically stupid. Take this in the spirit of "Brainstorming" where you say even the stupid stuff because that sometimes leads to good things.

I am not a programmer, but I do know some HTML and CSS and studied it a bit and Blogger (aka Blogspot) let's you dig in the code of the theme if you want, but it also has a user-friendly section where you can change colors and stuff and it let's you "add CSS" there and I do add CSS snippets there to tweak my websites.

I have tried digging in the code a few times. It's never worked for me. But adding CSS snippets is something I can handle.

You already have a feature to select your top bar color. Would it be feasible to expand that feature a little to let people select dark mode colors? (Ie to change more colors than just the top bar.)

Right now, the profile has a single property "topcolor" where you can slightly customize HN. It seems that this could easily be extended with a few more similar properties, suitable values of which could produce a darkmode.

You already let us change the top bar color I preferences. Really, this is just a adding “text” and “background” colors - swapping white and black.

This could be a check in preferences, load from the DB the same time as the top bar, then insert into template or however HN is organized server side. Probably <10 lines of total code, If you include DB changes.

It would be all server side so we shouldn’t have an issue in terms of bandwidth.

Would it be an idea to open a github repo for this and let the community contribute their efforts there?

Most solutions seem to be aiming for a quick fix. HN’s classes and HTML probably rarely change, but using css variables would lead to a more maintainable solution than duplicating all the selectors.

(I’d contribute a solution but currently moving across the country with only my phone available)

Challenge accepted: https://github.com/prettydiff/hn_dark

The CSS works well for me, but I understand presentation is highly subjective and some people may not like it.

Perhaps more important is that tiny bit of JavaScript in the readme.md so that anybody can rapidly experiment with CSS themes for Hacker News on live pages with just copy and paste.

This was my first time to do a deep dive into the front-end code of Hacker News and the HTML is archaic. If you would like I can help spruce it up to modern 2008ish HTML code that is fully semantic, accessible, and much better for SEO. Just let me know how I can help.

Don't go the way of CSS filters. I tried some of the CSS people here pasted that used it and it is slow. When I scroll fast Firefox can't keep up and I see white background for a second or two before it renders.

What about just grayscale[1]

[1] https://i.imgur.com/ZfoXaem.png

Parts changed [HTML]: <body style="background-color: #1a1a1a;"> <table bgcolor="#2a2a2a"> <img src="y18.gif" style="border:1px #353535 solid;">

Parts changed [CSS]: a:link { color:#808080; text-decoration:none; } .subtext { font-family:Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 7pt; color:#606060; } .subtext a:link, .subtext a:visited { color:#606060; }

Header links: #b5b5b5 Header link divider: #666

+darker icons

Here's a custom theme I've been using for years: https://github.com/darekkay/config-files/blob/master/userscr...

And please, don't _force_ the theme by using prefer-color-scheme. Use it as default, but please give the option to override it.

This commenter linked their own custom stylesheets that they've already been using: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23198500

I haven't inspected their quality or thoroughness myself, but it seemed like a certain amount of that was implied

"Move slowly and preserve things" killed me. Not sure if I agree with it entirely but I love having this in my vault

In our profiles we can already set topcolor, why not just add fields for bgcolor and textcolor too?

Website with no images? Easy, this is all thats needed:

    @media (prefers-color-scheme:dark) {
      html{
        filter: invert(1) hue-rotate(.5turn);
      }
    }

Don't over-do it: just start by inverting all the colours ( https://imgur.com/a/uOVCoWz ) and then tweak as necessary for branding.

for the ui pros that want to take a shot at this you can use Charles proxy to redirect the css of the live site to a local file for testing.

it's a good hack to save you a bunch of dev setup time or if you have a production only issue.

happy hacking

Great! And a big thank you for managing the site!

Btw. TIL that you can use `comments > $x` in Algolia's search. That's a cool feature (didn't know about that) or use popular search engines' `:site` ...

@media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) { { html {filter: invert(1)} }

Firefox for iOS has an “Enable Night Mode” that does a great job with HN in dark mode. Maybe you can start with the Firefox iOS Night Mode CSS and minify from there...

Please consider 2 different dark modes:

a "normal" dark mode and one for oled screens which has the background straight black

on the topic of css I've been meaning to ask why hn is so big on iPads since ios 13 (https://imgur.com/bcfeEWB)

is that just me? phones work fine, laptops work fine. But iPad pro 12.9" has been like that since the release of 13

Please make sure the background color is actually black or dark grey, and not some shade of blue.

Perhaps make a mobile friendly stylesheet? Please!!!!

Good job preserving the HN spirit!

My only feedback is the gray text (#808080) on the dark gray background (#222222), has a contrast ratio of ~4:1 which some people may find difficult to read (and slightly below WCAG recommendation for regular text[1]). I think you can lighten the text slightly without disrupting the surrounding color hierarchy.

[1] https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/

I love the top bar, this is fantastic. Saw the domain, then your username, then the bio: "Author of the original Monokai color scheme". I didn't know there was a person behind it, I thought it was just a name! Sounds like you should definitely be on the Hacker News Color Advisory Committee to make this work well for everyone given your experience in designing dark modes.

The tracking is too tight for light-on-dark.

You focused on colors and forgot about the content. You can't just invert colors and think that the typography automatically works. It often doesn't.

That’s the best one I’ve seen so far. Especially how you dealt with the top bar.

Very nice! I will use it for the time being via Stylus.

> Alligator energy

This is a great metaphor.

This is definitely my favorite and retains the unique HN look.

I love it! Looks natively enough.

A question, how would the black bar appear in dark mode? It should be set out somehow. Also would be useful if when the black bar appears there’s a link to the person honored.

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?

Edit: see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23199062.

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?

You can stop assaulting your eyes by simply installing an extension: https://darkreader.org/

It takes 15 seconds and you will have solved your problem.

>(speaking of which; is HN open-source?)

No, but also yes, but mostly no: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23191206

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.

[0]https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki/pull/171/files

I did just that in this pastebin[0].

we can even start a github repo, if anyone feels so inclined to do so

[0]: https://pastebin.com/4JYbSi5F

[edit: shorter, fixed top bar version: https://pastebin.com/dT4KKt3s ]

[edit 2: fixed textarea, dead links: https://pastebin.com/CKy4HQXE ]

Not sure it's feature creep to just make long lines friggin' readable. We can't seem to teach people not to use code blocks for quoting text, so either we need to "feature creep" a quote feature or we just fix this thing.

Yes please! The lines don't even need to wrap, but for some reason the <pre> blocks have `max-width: 200px` on small screens, making them infuriating to read on mobile.

Moving slow is good, but if every comment that uses it has a reply with the same thing that improves the formatting, something needs fixin'.

Changing the monitor twice a day is quite a pain. Perhaps you're thinking of laptops and phones where this isn't a big deal, but external screens' brightness can't be controlled that way. And I'm not sure I'd want my main driver to adjust: at brightness levels where I can read HN without feeling like a vampire, I wouldn't be able to read some of the lower contrast syntax-highlit text in my terminal anymore.

It's not just you. I don't have any sources to link to, but 15 years ago a website was frowned upon for having light text on an (almost) black background because it was bad for readability and made your eyes strain.

I tended to agree and find this dark mode craze quite curious because of how the industry has completely flipped its opinion.

Maybe someone has sources/studies that contradict this, but that's my memory of the situation.

I also prefer light themes, and what I hate the most is the switching between light and dark. Even if I preferred dark themes, I would keep it light to avoid the flashes and the text burn-in effect on my retina. I weep when I see my colleagues, who always cheer when an application finally implements dark mode, not realizing they're getting blinded by the brightness of their displays set to the maximum, and not by the white backgrounds.

Yes, exactly. When I need HN in dark mode, I open a pre-configured Terminal profile with w3m launched by default, and have a nice greenish font on a dark background.

It looks like this: https://imgur.com/a/FqLB0g8

Yes, exactly. The OP shouldn't probably be using it. There are many other fancy, trendy, modern websites with dark themes like Twitter or Reddit which would be better fit. Leave HN alone, please! It is a fragile environment.

I've added

    ycombinator.com##a:visited:style(color: #666 !important)

This is great! Thanks.

Some people use it because they have migraines and bright lights trigger their headaches.

Some people use it for "stealth" reasons when they want to be online without giving off a lot of light for some reason.

Some people are photophobic -- aka light sensitive -- and just favor darker websites generally.

There's myriad reasons to want to use dark mode. It's not any one thing.

"Nothing" on an additive medium, the screen, is black. With absorptive color (paper) it is white. I just find everything to look better if you stick to this. I find light mode apps and sites uncomfortable and ugly, much like a white-on-black print book.

That said, I've heard from many people that they struggle to read light-on-dark. So it's best to have both options, especially for a site like HN where it doesn't require a huge design effort.

It's nice at night.

The total light output from a dark mode app or website is still way lower than a light mode site with flux or similar light dimmer running. Dark mode is better for a lot of people in a lot of situations.

So like: open display menu -> push some crappy buttons to get to the brightness control -> enter brightness control -> dim brightness -> exit exit -> alt+tab -> use site -> alt+tab back to a dark application -> up screen brightness using the same process -> repeat? Most things I use are set to dark except HN and MDN; dark works day and night (perhaps not in bright sunlight, but I don't code on a beach).

Which is not to say that I'm suggesting we need to have only dark mode, or dark mode by default, or any such thing that you might not be happy with. I'm glad you don't experience the blast of lumens at night, but it seems you're the lucky minority so I'd be happy with an option to set a dark mode.

Also 'Hews' and other mobile apps have dark mode.

Dark Reader adds a good 5 seconds of lag to interacting with the web (including: website loading, website interaction, tab switching) for me.

Most of those extensions work by just inverting the colors of the entire page. Pretty unideal, compared to an intelligently-written dark theme.

NOOOO! Why not a check box in the profile page? There is already a place for changing the colors. Can we please not add any javascript? The server remembers my topbar color. It can remember a boolean flag too.

I have been using this for a while. Works great except on some pages. I wish there was a quick 'disable for this site' button.

An open entry field for custom CSS would be a clunky but still welcome solution to this problem. It would also be extremely low-risk and low-effort on the maintainers' parts.

Web designers are horrified at the thought that the shade of black you see your browser render the background in isn't the same as what's in the sketch document. They must control that. The browser is not an user agent anymore.

The thing is that this is a CSS change, which makes it declarative, which means it would almost certainly not "break" anything. Also, if it were made optional via a personal setting or by hooking into the user's system-level setting (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/pref...), it wouldn't even be a "change" for anyone who doesn't want it to be.

I understand and respect the general philosophy, but I fail to see how this particular request could be anything but a strict improvement.

And how. How I wish there were a browser that were designed around the principle of returning control to the user.

I think that’s just a consequence of the fact that it’s easier to make it one, static style

+ I like the visual indentation, would be nice if whatever design we pick could include that

- The upvote button is huge and a little obnoxious, and the downvote button is missing in comments

I would also recommend HACK FOR HACKERNEWS. It has a lot of useful features + dark mode.

https://apps.apple.com/in/app/hack-for-hacker-news-developer...

You might find this interesting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22788526

Since I started coming here I've seen several changes, but they've always been tasteful, minimal, and well thought out. I trust the team behind this site to only make changes that are appropriate.

Using the OS to invert the whole screen can easily be put within easy reach by keystroke or notification-area-button on Android, iOS, Windows, Mac, and Ubuntu. It doesn't require installing any new software (it's usually somewhere in "accessibility"), and, most importantly, it's consistent. When you have a "dark mode" for one site or app, it fights with the surrounding browser chrome bring light, and switching to other apps is jarring. And when you try to enable a dark UI theme in the OS, inevitably there will be elements that missed the restyling, and so retain black-on-white, or even worse, are now black-on-black.

I get that a "dark mode", done properly, requires more than just inverting colors, but this consistency is really nice.

The quick-and-dirty light/dark mode flip is to invert and rotate hue by 180deg. However, putting that on <body> taxes most browsers, as they will use an additional buffer to filter pixel data.

I do need it, on an iPhone there is no way to apply userstyles :/.

However, if we want to keep HN clean, but help users with closed mobile browsers, how about we add an option to add own css url in HN profile?

This way I could even create my own dark theme and have it available on all of my devices.

The problem is most browsers don't have an easy way to add custom styles any more.

Desktop Safari does, surprisingly, and I use it there.

Firefox removed that feature.

There are extensions, but browser extensions are a massive security hole so I don't use any that aren't too-big-to-be-corrupted.

2.29 EUR

The amount is insignificant, but I’m still not feeling like buying something just to change the theme.

I think there's already plenty consensus in the thread about not making it the default.

You're getting downvoted but there's probably a network hook you could add.

Maybe if we had plan9 machines or lisp machines, we would be able to do that very easily.

I wonder how different computing would look.

You could, as a quick hack on desktop, use Local Overrides: https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2018/01/devtools#o...

It's definitely not going to be dark by default. That would start a civil war!

I missed that in the OP, probably because it's so far beyond what we'd do that I didn't even notice that bit.

I've edited https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23199062 to make this clearer.

I recently changed the "expand" part to say "[N more]" when N is the number of hidden comments. Since that's much longer than "[+N]", I assume that helps?

If so, we can change "[-]" to put some text in between the square brackets. In addition to being longer, that would also be nicely symmetrical. But what should the text be? "[collapse]" seems a bit too long, and also doesn't look right to me.

Edit: I'm all in favor of this question because I was just thinking about it this afternoon—but I've also detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23199062 since it's not the same topic as dark modes.

Edit 2: ok, I made it use an n-dash ("[–]") instead of a hyphen ("[-]"), which expands it a tiny bit. I tried an m-dash but it looks too long.

There are indeed lots of little things like that, but I don't see them as huge issues, whereas the lack of a dark mode is. So I'm personally going to respect the move-slow approach and only advocate the changes that I feel are truly essential :)

I would love a way to collapse the parent of a comment (or all it's children) without having to scroll up and find it by carefully tracking indentation. Some sites do this by drawing the tree of comments directly with vertical lines going down beside siblings, which can be clicked to collapse. That's a much bigger target.

pg told me that he wanted HN to look like the output of `top`. The older it gets, the more we approach that goal.

More seriously: I've never seen a proposed "spruce-up" that didn't either add too much whitespace or too little (well, always the former), which makes me think that the current design is in the ballpark of optimal, despite its being unfashionable. Also, HN is very much a text site, a fact that goes much deeper than look-and-feel. The first thing most "spruce-ups" do is toss this quality, which compromises the site at its essence and indicates a misunderstanding of what HN is. I'm reminded of Steve Jobs' famous line about how design is not how-it-looks but how-it-works.

If someone did a redesign of HN that preserved both its information density and its textiness, I'd be stoked to see it as an experiment. We probably wouldn't change the site much, because if there's one force stronger than user complaints about design, it's user complaints about design changes. Also, I think it's an advantage for HN to have an unfashionable design, and a huge advantage to have a stable design. Still, I'd be fascinated to see it, and there might be ideas we could use.

I think one of the appeals about this site is that it is simple and isn't another one of those Bootstrap websites.

Dark mode would be nice though.

No. NO! Stick it in the profile settings. We don't want to ruin the HN UI one iota. I will rage. If you don't have a profile, tough luck.