Comment by jimmyswimmy

5 years 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.

111 comments

jimmyswimmy

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dang  5 years ago

I'm on board with ceasing and desisting from screwing it up.

  • merlinsbrain  5 years ago

    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.

  • fermienrico  5 years ago

    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.

  • simonebrunozzi  5 years ago

    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!

    • alpaca128  5 years ago

      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.

      3 replies →

    • Forge36  5 years ago

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

  • giancarlostoro  5 years ago

    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.

  • kristopolous  5 years ago

    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)

umvi  5 years ago

Well, 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.

panorama  5 years ago

Hah, 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.

iscrewyou  5 years ago

I’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!

pwdisswordfish2  5 years ago

"No fancy fonts, no javascript, no nothing."

Truthfully, there is some Javascript. For example, onclick(). Voting without Javascript requires some extra effort.

  • alpaca128  5 years ago

    True, 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  5 years 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.

      2 replies →

  • im3w1l  5 years ago

    > without some extra effort

    Thanks for the riddle! I guess you could use iframes?

    Edit: Ohhh and you could use data-urls as iframe src, so as not to make a large number of requests.

mattigames  5 years ago

I 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  5 years ago

    True, 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  5 years ago

      It'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  5 years ago

      The css doesn't need to be inlined in the page, so unless you disable caching it's not served for every request at all.

geerlingguy  5 years ago

Ha, 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).

djjsjdjsjsjs  5 years ago

If 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  5 years ago

    Honestly 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  5 years ago

      I'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.

      4 replies →

ochoseis  5 years ago

For the sake of simplicity, could we just serve up a subdomain darknews.ycombinator.com, same content, just different stylesheet?

  • pjscott  5 years ago

    When 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  5 years ago

      Unfortunately, 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.)

      2 replies →

globular-toast  5 years ago

How 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?

balladeer  5 years ago

It'd be like iOS giving us emojis back then when it instead needed innovation. Having said that HN can use some formatting.

mud_dauber  5 years ago

Seconded. I'm using a cellular hotspot due to lack of HS options, even here in the outskirts of Austin. KISS.

m-p-3  5 years ago

It even loads fast on my eReader web browser, which is quite rare these days.