LeetCode but You Can Force People to Code in Light Mode (opens in new tab)

For me my preference toward dark themes increased through the 2000s along with my need for syntax highlighting as I started writing more complex code. With light themes, syntax colors don’t “pop” nearly as well, giving me fewer visual anchors and making my eyes get lost in the code a lot more easily.

That said, I’m not fond of super dark or pure black-based themes and prefer those with a 75% gray background (with 100% being black) or thereabouts. With pure black themes the code pops too much and it feels like it’s all vying for my eyes’ attention at once.

I changed my home office to my “luminarium” where I’m using about 700W of LED bulbs to get my lux to around 10,000. It’s a necessity that I use light mode, it’s impossible to see dark mode.

Also it effectively cured my SAD.

We're in the same boat, my eyes actually start hurting when I look at a light-on-dark screen for more than a couple of seconds.

I'm just really glad that my web browser has a reader mode, or else there would be quite a few web sites (blogs etc.) that I could not read.

I get horrified looks from my dev team when they look at my screen, but I typically use light mode for work, and I find it easier to read by a long shot.

For dev work at home, I use darkmode, but I usually work in a less well-lit environment and for less time.

Yeah, I remember back when I was a cringy teenager and bought into all the propaganda about why darkmode was better for eyes and whatnot, so much stuff.. So I spent 15 years or so with darkmode, untile one day, i read somewhere that the evidence of darkmode being better was not just lacking, but that people read dark letters on a bright background faster and more accurately than the other way around.. Now this is the Internet, with a capital I so I won't back up that claim with any references, and it's not important whether anyone believes that or not, fact is, that day, I thought "hm" and I switched my editor back to light mode and thought "hm, this is fine too" and I kept it long enough that I discovered that I prefer it.. Now, my xterm, I do want white on black, but that's just something about how that bitmap font looks to my eyes, that makes me want it that way.

But honestly, I don't get what the big deal is with either preference, it's not a big deal really.. black or white.. it's fine!

I suffer from astigmatism and dark themes fatigue me a lot.

WIIIIIIIITCH!

Just kidding ;D

I'm actually studying my students' color theme preferences for lecture slides and I'm seeing that while a majority do prefer dark mode, there is noticeable chunk that still prefer light mode. I think some of it may involve time of viewing, but that is another research question I haven't explored quite yet.

Same here. I work in an office with lots of daylight and dark mode makes it actually very hard to see.

Also, light theme allows for more distinguishable colors.

I’m actually moving to an extreme because of the busy colors on the screen attracting distractions, high contrast white on windows with Color Filters on grayscale. It’s like reading a newspaper. Now I just need to increase the window frame borders for the touch screen and it looks like eink

In my opinion, dark themes are for when your monitor's brightness is set too high.

I love how this went viral because of this thread lol. I do know some friends who prefer light mode too, so maybe an opposite effect of forcing your light-mode-fan opponent to code in dark mode? Dunno lol

You’re not alone. I do the same, but often I keep the text editor in dark mode but the rest of the system on light mode to help provide contrast.

Dark mode is difficult to read for me.

In case it's your own project, I believe the convention is to prefix the title with "Show HN:".

Neetcode uses/used judge0 for code execution but it might be overkill

https://github.com/judge0/judge0

What were the challenges you encountered / tackled with creating a code runner?

Cool project!

have a look at this "https://github.com/INGInious/containers" - open-source platform for secure and automated code assessment

More and more I find code like this. When you dig into an interesting aspect it's just an llm call. I haven't decided yet if it's good or bad. But it does seem to work a most of the time.

The problem is that we're used to code that works all the time or none of the time. With LLMs you can't know if it's right for sure and it's really hard to check.

Lmao. They need to call that out so the users know not to believe it

Yeah sorry :) At first I tried to do a stress test, then plot a curve and try to find the closest runtime curve to that curve but it didn't work most of the time ;-;

lmao, halting problem solved with one weird trick!

He was actually going through a depression and drug addiction, and then he started making YouTube videos where he solved leetcode problems and eventually he got a job at Google and then he quit that job.

I'm actually planning to put all neetcode videos in my practice mode. Awesome stuff ;D

This became obvious to me when switching between my dark editor and the bright website I was developing. It was pointless to have to adjust the screen brightness at every switch.

Once theme switching became part of the OS, I rejoiced.

It still pisses me off when I reach a website that doesn't follow my scheme setting but offers a manual toggle.

Imma add an ability that flashes rgb in your editor then. Thanks for the suggestion :D

I may be evil but I have my standards sir... (Why not just random rgb flashes?)

In my universe, the only permitted background is pitch terminal black

It might mitigate some of your issues by using themes that are anthracite / charcoal / deep gray instead of pure OLED black. Due to the way screen technology and bad eyes work you often get slight halo-ing or double vision with white text on pure blacks.

Also definitely stay away from Solarized. The contrasts on Solarized get muddled really quickly if you run your screen at low backlight intensity and especially if you use a night light blue filter / orange overlay.

Hope it helps!

Hmm there're a lot of light mode fans here. I'll probably need to pivot to some color inverse scheme instead

Yea true not sure how to prevent that so ig this is just a project for now

You're very welcome :)

Also there is an issue where string comparison doesn't seem to work.

Unfortunately the site is unplayable currently. But it has a lot of potential, it's similar to binarysearch.io which all my friends loved: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22164212

Thanks for the report, I just fixed it!

That'll be awesome. I'm also planning a relay style team mode where each person can code for 5 minutes or so and the next will jump in :D

Lmao true

It's just an ability to annoy people. I also had another one where you can rick roll them in the background :)

Huh interesting I'll try to fix that. Thanks lots!

Thanks!

Just changing the white background into pale yellowish and leaving black text as it is for better contrast works much better to me.

Same here, spent many years in dark mode but solarized light is perfect and have been happily using it for the last five years. Thank goodness my current companies custom IDE supports it.