Hacker News Dark

Dark mode for Hacker News. Only the colors change — same layout, same Verdana. Follows your system appearance.

A dark theme for news.ycombinator.com that changes the colors and nothing else. Hacker News is a table layout in 10pt Verdana with 5px between the stories, and that is exactly what you keep. No system font stack, no rounded corners, no extra padding, no restyled buttons, no "improved" spacing. Same page, dark. FOLLOWS YOUR SYSTEM Dark when your computer is in dark mode, light when it isn't. When macOS or Windows flips at sunset, Hacker News flips with it. If you'd rather have the opposite — dark HN on a light desktop, or the reverse — click the "theme" link that appears in HN's own top bar, right of login. The setting is stored relative to your system rather than as a fixed choice, so automatic switching keeps working in whichever direction you picked. It syncs across your signed-in Chrome profiles and updates every open HN tab at once. WHAT IT ACTUALLY DOES HN's page is three grays plus the orange bar: white behind the table, cream inside it, black for links and comment text, #828282 for everything secondary. The first three are inverted around the page background. #828282 is left alone, because it reads on either ground — and better on this one than on HN's cream. The orange top bar stays orange, the logo keeps its white border, and the nav keeps its black-on-orange. If you've set a custom topcolor in your HN profile, that comes through untouched too. Every page on the site is covered, including the ones that don't share HN's stylesheet — Guidelines, FAQ and Security are a separate template that needs its own handling, and poll options are painted by a color attribute that no amount of CSS on the surrounding cell can reach. NO FLASH OF LIGHT The stylesheet ships as a content script, so Chrome applies it before the first paint rather than after. You never see the white page appear and then correct itself. LIGHT MODE IS UNTOUCHED Every rule is gated behind a single attribute. Switch to light and you get byte-for-byte vanilla Hacker News back — the extension contributes nothing. NO DATA COLLECTION No servers, no accounts, no analytics, and no network requests of any kind. The extension stores exactly one true/false value: whether to match your system appearance or invert it. It runs on news.ycombinator.com and nowhere else, and it never reads the content of the page. The whole thing is one CSS file, one JavaScript file and four icons — around 350 lines, all of it readable at github.com/grinich/hn-dark. Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or associated with Hacker News or Y Combinator.