Ask HN: Why have post numbers become green and red? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why have post numbers become green and red?

32 pointseimrine12 comments

Dear HN, I appreciate you for the minimalistic interface that just does not contain anything unnecessary. For what purpose did you start using colors in post number?

Does this mean the beginning of the end of the HN I know and love? Maybe now you will make a mobile app? Hang a banner warning that you store cookies? Forbid to use adblock?

I could not understand for a while what this differentiation means. My first thought was that green posts - being voted positively and vice versa. Now I realized that they are simply alternating. It reminds me Mark Miller's "Tragedy of Common Lisp" story, and maybe the theory of broken windows a little bit.

Thank you for all the wonderful that I discovered because of you.

Fear not. It's pg's old "Christmas ornaments, kept in the basement" code that we uncomment-out every year for a bit.

Here it is in 2007:

https://web.archive.org/web/20071225140214/http://news.ycomb...

wow... that goes back

Uncomment? Could it use the current utc time instead?

It could, but it hooks into the code in a few places and it feels a bit too complex to leave them there all year.

"Uncomment" isn't the whole story—you have to uncomment and then move a few code snippets to the right places. I have this in a git comment which can be cherry-picked and then reverted. Since the relevant aspects of HN rarely change, this mostly goes off without a hitch.

It is Christmas time, green-red combo is the way to go.

Is this being upvoted ironically?

Hope so

Not everyone on HN lives in places where Christianity is the dominant religious tradition.

As others mentions this is the Christmas theme.

Another theme change you might notice from time to time is a black bar at the top of the page, which is displayed when mourning for a recently deceased person of particular IT or hard science prominence.

It's just reminding you to pause every other submit and reflect.

In this season of using billion-gate superscalar CPUs to buy socks, we are being encouraged to brush up on EE fundamentals like flip-flops.

Half of all Hackers are Red hot, the rest go green with envy 'twas ever thus....

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