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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
by jimmyswimmy 6y ago
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.
- aaomidi 6y agoCompletely agree with you
- dang 6y agoI'm on board with ceasing and desisting from screwing it up.
- merlinsbrain 6y agoThank 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.
- fermienrico 6y agoCan 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.
- Normal_gaussian 6y agoWe 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!
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- tlb 6y agoThe mother of all bike sheddings. A whole subcommittee to decide if the Braille version should have indents instead of bumps.
- fermienrico 6y agoHow 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?
- kristopolous 6y agomy favorite version of this is "man lsmod". About 70 words and supposedly maintained by multiple people.
- HeavyStorm 6y agoCouldn't agree more.
- samstave 6y agoI screw up ceasing and desisting all the time :-(
- edoceo 6y agoQ.E.D
- seph-reed 6y agoWhat browser support do you expect? https://caniuse.com/#search=css%20variables https://caniuse.com/#search=css%20variables https://stackoverflow.com/questions/44271920/css-variables-with-fallback-for-older-browsers https://stackoverflow.com/questions/44271920/css-variables-w...
- simonebrunozzi 6y agoThere 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!
- Forge36 6y agoI flipped a flag in chrome for mobile. HN Looks very good (The reply button is white on grey)
- jacoblambda 6y agoThere'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 https://userstyles.org/styles/113994/hacker-news-dark
- throwaway_pdp09 6y agoDoesn't work without JS.
- jacoblambda 6y agohmm. 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.
- dorgo 6y agoUpvote and downvote buttons become invisible. Edit: my fault. I have too many dark mode addons/stylesheets enabled at the same time.
- retpirato 6y agoThere are 2 HN dark themes available at https://github.com/UserStyles https://github.com/UserStyles. Midnight lizard (chrome) https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/midnight-lizard/pbnndmlekkboofhnbonilimejonapojg 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.
- csomar 6y agoPeople can edit HN CSS with extensions. There is actually an extension that inject CSS into websites. So you can do that.
- saagarjha 6y agoSuch extensions do not work everywhere.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- noisem4ker 6y agoThey work everywhere Firefox can run.
- giancarlostoro 6y agoAn 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.
- kristopolous 6y agoAlso, 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 http://i.9ol.es/dark.png)
- dgl 6y agoSadly few browsers support extensions on mobile, which is possibly where dark mode is most useful.
- CraneWorm 6y agofirefox does;it works great
- kristopolous 6y agochromium 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.
- setzer22 6y agoWhile 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.
- kristopolous 6y agobut 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 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.
- iscrewyou 6y agoI’m on land in a well populated city relatively near the Bay Area and I get about half a bar on my phone. So yes! Please don’t screw this up! Because not only I like reading HN but also because it’s the only thing I can do on my phone now and it’s really helping me kick all the bad habits of being on my phone! Thanks!
- umvi 6y agoWell, if we want HN to follow best modern web practices, I recommend rewriting the whole thing with React/Node.js using TypeScript. Then, we can get a proper CSS framework in place like Material that will really allow us to get everything looking really good. I can design a cool looking loading screen that says "HN" while the JS is loading in the background.
- noodlesUK 6y agoWell done... I nearly downvoted you from the rage I felt before realising it was sarcasm...
- vmception 6y agowithout your comment I wouldn't have detected the sarcasm, I was aghast
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- blhack 6y agoAw man that sounds really cool. I bet you’ll only need a team of 5 people to do it too. What’s the tool chain manager look like for managing the build process manager?
- geerlingguy 6y agoWe should probably redeploy it on Kubernetes so the backend can scale, one c5.xlarge instance per session to keep up with the requests.
- krapp 6y agoBlockchain. No one said blockchain yet. We have to blockchain it. Blockchain it with cryptos.
- brianush1 6y ago
- ochoseis 6y agoFor the sake of simplicity, could we just serve up a subdomain darknews.ycombinator.com, same content, just different stylesheet?
- PenguinCoder 6y agoThat's not simple at all..
- pjscott 6y agoWhen you click on a link to the news.ycombinator.com domain, what should happen if you prefer dark mode? And vice versa? In comparison, the pure-CSS ideas that some people are posting would work automatically if your browser supports dark mode, and would enlarge the (cached with long ttl) CSS file only very slightly.
- DenseComet 6y agoUnfortunately, there are some of us who also like the solarized type light mode in HN more than dark mode, but we use dark mode at the system level because the OS light mode is awful. Pure CSS would be quite cool, but we'd probably also need a snippet of JS to add a button allowing to switch between light and dark mode. (There's probably a way to do it without JS that someone will hopefully comment too.)
- noisem4ker 6y agoThey could put a preference in the profile page. But I think that switching the theme would be the browser's job.
- dharmab 6y agoBy using CSS variables, only a few lines of JS are needed- small enough that they can be inlined in the HTML.
- IAmGraydon 6y agoI don’t think you’ve properly considered what a terrible idea this is.
- geerlingguy 6y agoHa, remember the first time they tried a mobile layout? That was quickly yanked (to much rejoicing). If the dark mode has some issues, we can always go back and try again. The main thing I care about is making sure it's still easy to read (good contrast).
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- panorama 6y agoHah, HN's load speed actually makes it my go-to bookmark to test if everything is working okay. Internet connectivity lagging? Check HN. My own web app loading slowly? Check HN.
- djjsjdjsjsjs 6y agoIf they screw it up then I'll personally host some service that scrapes all the text and only dumps a few kbs to you :)
- thanksforfish 6y agoHonestly theres a lot of other sites that would benefit from that too. A well written and maintained scraper for a bunch of popular sites may be worth a subscription for some bandwidth limited people.
- 0x38B 6y agoI've thought about this, too; some of my favorite sites are forums that are a pain to use on mobile (e.g. RuTracker). Seems like a fun project, so I may start planning it when I have time.
- williamdclt 6y agoBe careful with that: it very probably goes against all sorts of TOS and can get you in trouble
- cddotdotslash 6y agoA court recently ruled [1] that LinkedIn had to allow scraping, but it has to be public data (i.e. you can't log into your Facebook account and then scrape all your friends' pages). [1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/09/victory-ruling-hiq-v-linkedin-protects-scraping-public-data https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/09/victory-ruling-hiq-v-l...
- williamdclt 6y agoIt's not the scraping itself that I would be worried about, it's using this data to create what could be seen as a competitor (especially if you make it commercial). For a lot of these websites, traffic is essentially money: diverting users to another website using their own content would be very badly received
- mud_dauber 6y agoSeconded. I'm using a cellular hotspot due to lack of HS options, even here in the outskirts of Austin. KISS.
- mattigames 6y agoI think you guys overreact a bit, your reply alone occupies more bytes than the CSS needed to implement dark mode; it wouldn't affect anything related to scrolling with space-bar, or fonts, or JS functionality.
- sixstringtheory 6y agoTrue, serving it to you was negligible, but that little extra being served millions of times, once for every request, in aggregate slows down servers, eats up peoples’ data, raises costs and generally quickens the heat death of the universe.
- hoten 6y agoIt's a KB of css, if that, probably much less. Cached, in a stylesheet request, not a style element. It's nothing. It amortized, not more data for every request. It's nothing.
- Thiez 6y agoThe css doesn't need to be inlined in the page, so unless you disable caching it's not served for every request at all.
- cozzyd 6y agoIndeed, HN is one of the few sites that works well in Antarctica.
- pwdisswordfish2 6y ago"No fancy fonts, no javascript, no nothing." Truthfully, there is some Javascript. For example, onclick(). Voting without Javascript requires some extra effort.
- alpaca128 6y agoTrue, but doesn't this even save bandwidth because it doesn't need to reload the whole page just to update that detail? Either way it still works without JS, which can't be said about most modern websites.
- pwdisswordfish2 6y ago"... which can't be said about most modern websites." While I understand and agree with your point, I have personally found this quoted portion to be a false assumption. To me, "works" means I can retrieve the content of the page without using JS. If the websites we are discussing are ones where the primary purpose is reading, like HN, most will "work" for me without JS, so long as I do not rely on try using a "modern browser" to retrieve the content. In fact, I cannot even think of a single website meant for reading that I cannot read without a Javascript-enabled browser.
- agustif 6y agoAny newspaper website with a paywall or cookiewall or anti-adblock thingy maybe? That's not much readable without some trickery
- pwdisswordfish2 6y agoNot trickery, just avoid using "modern browser" to make the HTTP request. Name any newspaper website you think is "not much readable" without Javascript or cookies and I can prove that is a false assumption.
- noisem4ker 6y agoThis is JavaScript done right and worth keeping enabled.
- dkmar 6y ago> actually deploys new reddit design on HN like a boss
- balladeer 6y agoIt'd be like iOS giving us emojis back then when it instead needed innovation. Having said that HN can use some formatting.
- globular-toast 6y agoHow can you keep up with the news when HN only records the headlines and the articles are stored elsewhere, usually on extremely heavyweight news sites?
- m-p-3 6y agoIt even loads fast on my eReader web browser, which is quite rare these days.