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.

Here, have a karma.

Loads! Thank you everyone - enjoying a nice purple-topped HN :)

I'm at 650 and got no access to it :/

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.

I'll propagate it.

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.

Those of us on the Board don't like to brag.

I thought HN was just a holding area for people not cool enough for lobste.rs anyway?

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.

There is a YC participants only board though, isn't there?

I think you have to have higher karma than pg. He doesn't qualify for his own number.

Wait, that number is "karma" ? I thought it was that Bitcoin thing...

How much karma do you need for that?

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.)

Huh, I never noticed the flagging on comments before.

HN is in fact open source (an older version of it anyway): http://arclanguage.org/

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

I hit it at 500 a few weeks ago. Ok, not sure exactly but definitely not more than 510 :)

I just hit comment down voting within the past few karma. So around 775

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)

I'm 99% sure this follows a power law distribution.

New convert here - thanks! Much better than my previous one.

That would have never occurred to me. Thank you. (And...wavender...um. never mind.)

I though you were kidding.

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

The problem with #ffffff topcolor is active top nav links are invisible.

55b6f2 looks like beauty :)

What is .. oh per-profile topcolor option. Never took the time to use that.

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.

I like #123456 and #abcdef as colours; #123456 doesn't work here (black on #123456 is difficult to read) but #abcdef works well.

Yep, my choice as well!

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!"

you and me both...

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.

Yeah, I use #222222 to block out my karma score.

This stylesheet, with tweaks: http://userstyles.org/styles/16041/hacker-news-readability

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.

Is there a list organized by colorspace?

I'd like to see this too!

Also a #bada55 here, and thanks for the tip on HNES, checking it out now, looks great!

Issue opened: https://github.com/etcet/HNES/issues/52 :)

Oh, they have #0b00b5

PrototypeJS works that way.

No library, at least in Firefox it's defined by devtools and only works in the console (provided the page doesn't have it's own $ and $$ globals).

[0] http://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/toolkit/devtoo...

[1] http://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/toolkit/devtoo...

Edit: It works in the WebKit devtools too:

[0] https://mxr.mozilla.org/chromium/source/src/third_party/WebK...

It's shorthand for document.querySelectorAll: https://developers.google.com/chrome-developer-tools/docs/co...

#00dd00 4lyfe

I've been using a forked version of this Chrome extension. Looks really nice

https://github.com/imkevinxu/hacker-news-plus

Uniquely using #99AAFF at present.

I never noticed I had topcolor enabled. Is there a list that details what gets enabled when? I'm at 566 points and I've just recently been granted downvote access.

It would be. You could use something like Greasemonkey or Stylish.

As for automatically using the color of the bar... Simply have the icon with either a background color, or a black with the opacity at around 5%.

Allow me to plug #ddeeff. I think it very nicely complements the orange Y and the gray background, and it's easy to remember.

I'm mildly colorblind, however, so take my recommendation with a large grain of salt. But if you're also colorblind you're just going to love #ddeeff to death.

I have an extension in my GitHub for Safari 7 that is custom CSS (with one rule currently) and JavaScript :)

bbbbbb works best for me :)

I did the same thing, but with html/js: http://solidred.co.uk/topcolors/

I guess the clearly visible diagonal axis is because people just type the same distance for all the axes when they choose gray. So they would go like: dcdcdc or acacac etc.

If you get 1 million karma, PG will do your laundry once per week

Thanks for this. Very interesting!

When you consider that the dominant hue shown against is orange (the logo) it makes sense that the vast majority of choices are either complementary (blues) or supplementary (oranges). The fact that there are lots of greens and few purples is interesting however.

Er I meant #f3f5eb

Lovely, pretty misleading article for people who don't have this functionality unlocked.

I can't change my color on HN :( I didn't even know that this existed!

I use #222222 so that I can't see my karma score. That way I don't play HN like a points scoring game.

Quick and dirty 3d visualisation: http://solidred.co.uk/topcolors/

Why settle for a single color when you can have the HN topbar in literally every color of the rainbow?

  @-webkit-keyframes hue { 
      100% { -webkit-filter:hue-rotate(360deg); }  
  }
  body > center > table > tbody > tr:first-child > td,
  body > center > table > tbody > tr:last-child > td {
      -webkit-filter: hue-rotate(0deg);
      -webkit-animation: hue 20s linear infinite;
  }

Oh! When I saw Top Colour I thought it was referring to the order of the list as the most used colours first, in descending order.

Haha. I just realised it means the colour of the top bar the logo is on.