HN Explorer

115 comments

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acangiano
I'm surprised to see that I'm not the only one using the, rather arbitrary, #ccffaa.
GuiA
Or, are you? There are no counts with the colors; it could well be that every color past the top 5/10 are used by a single person.

(#7fff00 reporting in- there's nothing arbitrary for me about it though)

mcpherrinm
Yep: My color #a4157a disappears from the list when I changed it. It's a 1337-ified "Arista", the name of the company I work for which I happen to think looks nice.

It appears about 1/4 of the way down the list, so I assume most of said list is unique entries then.

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coconutrandom
What's the karma threshold to choose a color?
8_hours_ago
250 according to this:

http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html#12jan08

pdq
Thanks, I never knew this existed.
adamcw
Neither did I.

Now to decide if I: a) Comment more b) Throw down some custom css and get the feature on my own.

pdq
Here, have a karma.
Fizzadar
Currently sitting @ 249!
Killswitch
Probably already had an upvote in the 2 hours since you posted this, but if not, I upvoted you anyway. :)
Fizzadar
Loads! Thank you everyone - enjoying a nice purple-topped HN :)
antjanus
I'm at 650 and got no access to it :/
kyro
For those with enough karma, I'm curious to see what custom logos you've chosen to replace the Y. And for users who've been here for more than 8600* days, how frequently do you use the direct messaging feature?

*Edit: 2500 days. Read the wrong stat on my profile. So much for pulling a quick one...

jlgreco
Is that a thing? I don't seem to be able to do that with 18k+, so if it exists there are only a couple dozen people that can.
sharkweek
My favorite one is for those people who get enough karma to have pg's phone number in the top right corner of the header - pretty cool
DanBC
I'm surprised there isn't a rumour about a secret HN board accessible by invitation only.
timv
There is no HN cabal...

(Sorry for the other-other-other-site reference)

InclinedPlane
I thought this was a reference to the backbone cabal of the '80s: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backbone_cabal
timv
Yes, but indirectly.

It was a relatively common theme on Kuro5hin (back when it had more than 2 stories per year...) that there was no K5 cabal (in reference to the backbone cabal)

I was never a heavy usenet-er, so the K5 reference is the one that stays in my mind.

krapp
I thought HN was just a holding area for people not cool enough for lobste.rs anyway?
eam
The first rule of about the Secret HN Board is: You do not talk about Secret HN Board.

The second rule of Secret HN Board is: You do not talk about secret HN Board.

gadders
There is a YC participants only board though, isn't there?
EGreg
I think you have to have higher karma than pg. He doesn't qualify for his own number.
arethuza
Wait, that number is "karma" ? I thought it was that Bitcoin thing...
habosa
Can't tell if you're trolling or if I need to hurry up and get a lot more karma!
covercash
YC was founded in 2005, so if you do the math...
jedberg
HN came in March of 2007.
jaredsohn
That's probably when it officially launched. Some accounts are older than that, though (such as pg's account which was created in October 2006.)
chimeracoder
I have 10K+ and don't have either feature, so probably trolling.

The only milestone I remember hitting was downvoting, around 500.

(Then again, I also have never had flagging power either - I know people get this removed sometimes, but I don't remember ever having had it. Weird).

Macha
I have flagging, but nowadays to get it on a comment you need to click the permalink button on a post to get it.

And I'm glad of that, because up until now I've sent in 1 legitimate, intentional report and 10 or so cases of fat fingering the button on a mobile device (not catastrophic because of the unflag option, but still...)

eli
Huh, I never noticed the flagging on comments before.
hpvic03
Are you able to downvote? I'm curious what the karma threshold is for that.
thedufer
It was 500 when I hit it, but occasionally goes up. Not sure what it is now.
alecsmart1
What algorithm are they using? Is the source open?
Crito
HN is in fact open source (an older version of it anyway): http://arclanguage.org/

However much of the "secret sauce" is, well, secret.

namenotrequired
I hit it at 500 a few weeks ago. Ok, not sure exactly but definitely not more than 510 :)
zoba
I just hit comment down voting within the past few karma. So around 775
berberous
500 is often reported but is incorrect. As of today, it appears to be 501.
jaredsohn
711 days ago, when there was a thread about karma levels and I just hit 500, I encountered the same phenomenon. I received a response saying that you don't get to downvote threads created prior to crossing 500. (Obviously, can't verify that, but here's the thread for context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3812967)
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bostonpete
Would be nice to see a count of how many people chose each color. I assume the vast majority of those colors are all equal (i.e. used by a single person).
nostromo
I'm 99% sure this follows a power law distribution.
dfc
Changing the topcolor is more than a simple matter of aesthetics; the topcolor also serves as a signal for whether I am logged in.

I have to say that dfcdfc is a nice topcolor. But don't take my word for it, here is another HNer happy with the tranquil bar along the top:

  > thanks for  the recommendation on your  profile page to use  dfcdfc as
  > the topcolor; I stumbled  onto it over a year ago  and have been using
  > it ever since. [^1]
[^1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5891431
quickpost
New convert here - thanks! Much better than my previous one.
Mz
That would have never occurred to me. Thank you. (And...wavender...um. never mind.)
WildUtah
Changed mine to #dfcdfc and now my life is so much better, I don't know how I ever lived without it. Maybe this could be a new startup.

+1

Trufa
I though you were kidding.
rplnt
When you are not logged in? The cookies are valid for quite a few years, making it "log in once and forger it" kind of website. Similar to imdb for example.
dfc
Are you really having trouble coming up with situations where I might not be logged in?

  * cleared cache/cookies
  * set up new computer / using new VM 
  * using alternate browser for testing
  * something on server-side invalidated cookie
FiloSottile
Feeling banal with my white bar now
elwell
The problem with #ffffff topcolor is active top nav links are invisible.
sgold515
55b6f2 looks like beauty :)
agumonkey
What is .. oh per-profile topcolor option. Never took the time to use that.
rdl
I wonder if the gray people use (I use aaaaaa) says something about individual monitor choices. I'd probably go lighter if I used a windows machine more.
chrismorgan
I like #123456 and #abcdef as colours; #123456 doesn't work here (black on #123456 is difficult to read) but #abcdef works well.
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TazeTSchnitzel
So I wasn't the only one to use #f6f6ef so the bar would dissolve into the background! :)
spicyj
Yep, my choice as well!
markwakeford
lol @ me hunting around the profile page for the last 5 minutes trying to work out if its a hidden menu or something.
rschmitty
Well that beats me trying to click on a color in that list... I'm like: "What an odd UI to select a color and this crap is broke anyways, nothing changes!"
ltray
you and me both...
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sachinag
Ha! My topcolor is pretty much the only thing left of my startup. It's also weirdly surprisingly close to my current employer's corporate color.
codezero
For some fun, grep your local dictionary for qualified colors :) cat words |grep -i "^[a-f]\{6\}$"

or use 4 and add be, or ed etc...

I went with beefed, and it looks like that page is updated in real time.

ChuckMcM
Is there a list organized by colorspace?
51Cards
I'd like to see a count, or percentage, beside each of popularity.
habosa
I use #bada55, I saw it in a comment on HN and thought it was funny. Pretty ugly, but I use HNES on my laptop anyway which negates my topcolor.

Also plug for HNES while we're talking about Hacker News aesthetics, it makes HN way better (collapsible comments, inline reply, new stylesheet) and is open source. I've contributed and the repo owner (etcet) is very welcoming.

adlpz
Also a #bada55 here, and thanks for the tip on HNES, checking it out now, looks great!
amaks
Oh, they have #0b00b5
dmnd
Paste this snippet into your dev console, then mouseover the colours to get a preview.

  Array.prototype.forEach.call($$("td[bgcolor]"), function(td) {
      td.parentNode.addEventListener('mouseenter', function() {
          $("td[bgcolor]").setAttribute("bgcolor", td.parentNode.children[1].getAttribute("bgcolor")); 
      });
  });
hamxiaoz
What does the $$ mean?
thedufer
Looking at it in the console, it looks like $ returns a single DOM element and $$ returns a NodeList (array-like object) of DOM elements. Not sure what library that is.
scrabble
PrototypeJS works that way.