Ask HN: Why is the top bar red? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why is the top bar red?

14 pointstabakd17 comments

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This year's thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13254232

TL;DR: Christmas

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8796932

Christmas. They're being festive!

The ranking numbers also alternate red and green.

Probably for the holidays.

Red represents the blood of a famous man who was supposedly killed many years ago for spreading some controversial ideas.

Jesus? :P

That'd be more fitting for Easter though

Actually,

>this friendly, fat Santa in these bright red robes, which, I don't think is a coincidence, match the color of the Coke logo — this really took hold in American culture."

http://www.npr.org/2016/12/20/506215632/how-red-and-green-be...

Because it's the day that we celebrate the birth of a man who was nailed to a tree over 2000 years ago for saying how wonderful it would be if we could be nice to people for a change. Even though today isn't his birthday.

No love for H2G2 here, evidently...

Is this really a mystery to you? It is clearly a Christmas thing along with the red/green alternating colors for posts.

ay lmao

I'm kind of curious about the code for alternating red/green. Could anyone share the Lisp/Arc snippet?

Alternating styling for even/odd elements is doable in CSS.

https://www.w3.org/Style/Examples/007/evenodd.en.html

There are large parts of the world where Christmas isn't celebrated, so it's entirely plausible that not everyone recognizes these cultural references.

Of course.

Given where HN is based, and that the holiday is fairly well known even among those that don't celebrate it, I assumed it was obvious - my mistake.

Not all parts of the world observe Christmas, and even then, the traditions vary regionally.

The question may even be referring to the rationale of having HN decorated for Christmas at all, given that it's not universally observed.

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