The up–down orientation unquestionably comes from the near-universality of light sources being above you. You'll notice that intense up-lighting is almost never found in the natural or artificial world.

(It's true that upwards-firing lights are often used in interior decoration, but these are almost always to illuminate walls and ceilings above us which then bounce light down to the contents of a room. Also, some techniques in photographic and studio lighting do use some up-firing lights, but these act as shadow fill, never as the primary light source—except when an unusual look is intended.)

To the extent that we expect a certain left–right orientation, this will almost certainly be predominantly a matter of consistency with prior graphical user interfaces. The near-universal standard of a top/left lighting metaphor goes at least as far back as the original Apple Lisa/Macintosh which cast its 1-bit, 1 pixel shadows to the bottom/right.

The fact that people of near-identical cultures can natively integrate either left-hand driving or right-hand driving suggests to me that there's no inherent reason why it needed to be one way or the other. Had the first interfaces begun with a top/right lighting metaphor, we'd probably be all as native to that as British people are with right-hand-drive vehicles.

Our brains are hard-wired to assume light comes from above, and 3D "pop out" from shading even means we can identify the shapes faster. More info and references in this section from Mind Hacks (I was a co-author):

#20 Fool Yourself into Seeing 3D -https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=K6bjvFUcedgC&pg=PA57&dq=...

(It briefly mentions Susan Kare's work who designed the first 3D buttons in Windows 3.0 -- 1990!)

There's another effect going on here which is visual affordances: not only does the button "pop out" but we immediately see it as something we can push. That's from the psychologist James Gibson in 1977.

There are a ton of cognitive quirks that are useful to know when designing interfaces. The pop-out effect is one of my favourites.

It is an artefact of how we scan things visually. Most of us read top-to-bottom/left-to-right and habitually look at pictures with that bias, so when the brain fills in the missing height detail for a 2D display using the light/shadow indicators it defaults to assuming the light source is in the top left. The affect designed for us doesn't work as well for those whose primary written forms follow a right-to-left structure. Obviously, as you mention, the light source being assumed to be high comes from a much older source as our main natural lights are up high.

I agree it's bonkers. It's a direct corollary, but still a wild experience: turn your phone (/monitor/head) upside down.

The illusion of left/right is driven by which hemisphere you are on. On northern hemisphere the sun moves from left to right and the morning being brighter than afternoon. So top/left would be on average the brightest source.

Win98 did though.

Combined with consistency.

Function over form. I don't think this is a bad thing, HN doesn't need to be any more advanced, it does its job really well as is.

It's a joky insult. Hacker News and Windows 95 have in common that they look objectively old. But what they also have in common is that they are function over form in an atypically pure sense, especially compared to some modern UI design.

Although I prefer a more balanced approach on the spectrum of pure function and pure form, pure function beats pure form any day

I know this is unsolicited and I apologize for that, but check your Console logs immediately after you boot back up if you haven't already, there might be a hardware issue, and you ought to be able to get a good idea of what's going on by seeing what kext is affecting it.

My current and previous laptop have been fine, but I used to have issues all the time on a much older laptop, and the issue back then, I forgot exactly which piece of hardware it was, but there was a bug in one of the drivers that was patched in an update, I think it was 10.4.9 or 10.4.10 that had the issue, a known issue at the Apple Store; but they couldn't do anything about it from behind the Genius Bar. Generally if you're getting kernel panics though, there's either something wrong with a piece of hardware or with the driver for it, although it could be any kind of kext causing the issue if you have any 3rd party kexts installed.

Chrome removed that functionality a few years ago:

https://www.reddit.com/r/chrome/comments/1ymfgw/user_stylesh...

(The comment there that removing this "is going to help increase speed significantly in the future" is pure BS. If anything, user stylesheet functionality was handled in native code --- just adding another CSS to the page --- which makes it far more efficient than going through the whole JS/extensions route.)

Ironically, IE11 is the last MS browser to support user stylesheets (Tools->Options->Accessibility) but Edge doesn't.

Even in Firefox, the fact that it's named "toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets" is ominous.

The Internet is becoming more and more user-hostile, and it's not just websites who are responsible.

Surely one of those other 95% of users can contribute with instructions that apply them.

Maybe 5% total user share. Certainly the tech oriented crowd uses Firefox at a greater rate.

There are a few chrome extensions for adding custom CSS. Try "stylebot" or "User javascript and css", they both works ok.

Reminds me of those times when I built a website that doesn't have a functioning mobile view, put it on reddit, and it turns out that everybody is mobile

I think Chrome killed off that one popular extension for CSS insertion?

You could probably make a bookmarklet to pull the stylesheet from github and add it to the document stylesheets. Maybe using the new Stylesheet constructor?

You made fun of Firefox. That cracked me up

Use Stylish/Stylus.