A toddler and a blinding screen

herodoturtle posted the ask at night with a sleeping kid on his chest. HN's white background was the problem, and 31 replies arrived with fixes.

“My toddler is asleep on me, and this light is blinding.”

Block an ad, restyle a site

Bender pastes a set of rules into uBlock Origin's My Filters, using :style() to repaint body, tables, links and the karma span. No extra extension needed.

“news.ycombinator.com###hnmain:style(background: #24273a !important)”

Your browser already does this

farlight points to chrome://flags/#enable-force-dark, a Chromium force-dark toggle that works in Chrome, Brave, Vivaldi and Opera. Two people reported it did nothing on Android.

“Opera browser supports it natively”

Dark Reader is the default answer

Six separate commenters named it, across Chrome, Firefox desktop, Firefox mobile and Safari. It is the closest thing the thread has to consensus.

Its slowness has a cause

farlight called Dark Reader sluggish on old hardware. soniczentropy narrowed it to the auto-detection pass: turn that off, enable it per site, and the lag goes away.

“If you turn that off and manually enable it on pages that need it, it doesn't feel any slower”

One click, any website

WithinReason shares a bookmarklet that injects a style tag and toggles it off on a second click. The simple version inverts the whole page and re-inverts images so photos look normal.

“html{filter:invert(1) hue-rotate(180deg)!important;}”

Write the CSS yourself

accrual runs a Stylus theme that keeps the orange header bar and pushes text to #ccc. viccis links a ready-made userstyle for the same extension.

“body > center > table > tbody > tr:first-child > td { background-color: #ff6600 !important; }”

Ask an AI for the extension

robgough used the new describe-an-extension feature in the Apple OS betas to build an HN dark mode that syncs across devices. _fw tried it mid-thread and had one working in 20 seconds.

“20s later I had a working extension that does exactly this for HN”

Skip the styling entirely

hcker.news ships multiple dark themes, adhn.netlify.app is an early attempt, and Comments Owl and Octal are native clients. Firefox's Override Colors and iOS Smart Invert work below the page.

“iOS accessibility shortcut: 3 taps on sleep button inverts the colors of any website”

Do not wait for dang

Rendello dug up years of dang replies on the request. He is not against dark mode, it just stays on the list.

“It's possible your descendants may live to see dark-mode HN”