I most often read HN at night, in my phone, and it does really hurt my eyes. A dark mode would be my goto mode by default (like I always use dark modes whenever possible, even during the day).
Also it seems weird that a site promoting innovation doesn’t bring new comfortable solutions for its readers.
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23197966" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23197966</a> with almost 500 comments covers it, the top comment is a HN moderator. So the moderators are at least willing to work on CSS, you might want to email them for an update.
Android Chrome and Firefox (via add-ons) have dark mode options. I do not know about iOS Safari.<p>While a dark mode option made by the website itself may be able to handle certain edge cases that the browser dark modes may miss, for most part part the browser dark mode features handle most cases quite admirably.<p>I feel that rather than going behind individual website developers, making the need known to the platform browser developers is a more scalable approach. Even if HN gets a dark mode, what about the websites it links to? Do you also plan to ping the the Devs there for a dark mode option?<p>From my experience multiple independent dark mode toggles for each website I visit are a pain to manage. I never use them. Dark mode is purely and globally handled by browser extensions.
Setup a local UserContent.css file for yourself and you can style any website any way you like:<p><a href="http://kb.mozillazine.org/index.php?title=UserContent.css" rel="nofollow">http://kb.mozillazine.org/index.php?title=UserContent.css</a>