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Comment by sammorrowdrums | Hacker News Reader

> If a user has 251 Karma, they can set the color of the top bar in their profile settings. The default is #ff6600. Here's the complete set of colors users have set.

It's so close, why isn't the required karma 256?

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I've always wondered why this feature exists and I'm still not sure, nonetheless I've set a custom color (currently a fetching shade of purple - 8185E2), and change it about once a year, previously 00FF91 and FFF200.

If nothing else, I can tell at a glance if I'm logged in or not.

I tried 8185E2 and liked it.

I used a color palette generator with the black text and orange logo and it spit out: CFDBD5, which gives the site a bit of a high desert brush look.

So that each of your sock puppet accounts can have a unique top color. It helps to remind you of which facade to present.

Shoot I do that at work for admin vs non-admin logins, or different gmail accounts (personal vs side-biz). Reddit, too -- leave one permanently on night-mode.

IMO should be an SOP for anywhere that you might log in with different accounts.

How many times have you been logged in as root and didn't realize it?

Now that you mention it, I do the same for my dev installation of HN.

It’s a great visual indicator to remind of your active environment. I use it in just about every app that supports it with custom colors aligned with the environment (e.g. blood red for prod or canary yellow for dev). Gmail supports it as well. If you have multiple accounts with an “official” corporate color, it makes it easy to realize which you’re acting upon.

Same with me, I can tell immediately if I am logged in or not.

I use D8D8C0, a slighly darker shade of the background. I find it aesthetically more pleasing than the bright orange bar. Also makes the logo pop.

So that I can again drop the link that busts the "8 bits per byte"-myth ;) http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Body/f_by_b...

I've been around long enough to have had to roll my eyes and say "fine, octet" in conversation.

But I'm grateful that it's mostly stopped happening, let's not revive it!

for fellow dumbells who can't even the their laces may i ask; eh?

Can you elaborate? My older relative who studied computers thought byte= 8 bits. I also thought so. My ego is taking a hit tonight.

A byte is a collection of bits - now almost universally standardized on 8 bits because of network protocols and encodings - but older computers the byte wasn’t as important as THE WORD which was the bit width the machine could process at once. We now refer to 128bit instructions but those are more properly an instruction with a 128bit word.

Lisp provides the ability for arbitrarily defined bytes.

so i wasn't totally wrong. It's mainly semantics.

Since i'm here, why do most storage mediums i.e usb, phones sd ostensibly follow this method (1gb 2,4,8!,16,32 etc) and why are they almost always a few hundreds mb off?

A kilobyte can be defined as either 1024 bytes or 1000 bytes. Similarly, a megabyte could be 1024 kilobytes or 1000 kilobytes, and so forth. Really, 1024 is the number that makes more sense, but hard drive manufacturers promoted the “1000 bytes” interpretation so they could advertise their hard drives as having more megabytes.

Some standards organizations tried to “solve” the issue by defining a “kibibyte” as 1024 bytes and so forth, but you only ever see those in abbreviated forms (ie KiB). I personally hate that convention; the words are aesthetically atrocious and were only invented to please pedants (who annoy me) and dishonest marketing people (whom I detest even more).

Isn't this the difference between speed notation and size notation?

Some older machines had different byte lengths. I believe Burroughs had 7-bit bytes. PDP-10s had 36-bit words which could be divided into any byte size that you liked; 7 bits was common, but if you needed them you could get 1-bit bytes, 6 bit (which was used to encode filenames), 8 bits, whatever.

True, however as you are no doubt aware, one more digit or one less would double / half the karma requirement which is somewhat extreme, and it would no longer be representable by two hex digits.

The CSS colours are specifically 3 octets written as 2 digit hex, so you so while I like the broader idea that "it's a byte of karma" is sufficient, knowledge of 2 digit hex codes also applies to the privilege directly.

Plus, non-standard byte lengths would be a much more niche reference, and I don't think people would get it.

    if user.karma > 250:
      css.topbar.bgcolor = (
        user.prefs.topbar.bgcolor
        or “#ff6600”
      )

CSS only:

    [bgcolor="#ff6600"] {
        background-color: transparent;
    }

Error correcting karma

This is my favorite feature of HN. Many, many years ago there was an article posted about how the colors teal and orange go so well together. So I set my topcolor to #00cdcd, and love it.

You don't need karma to set some color, you just need to inject custom CSS.

It should be 0.

It started here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=97573. I don't think that's so bad.

Here's pg talking about how he wrote the code for it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=98265.

frankly it's ridiculous that there's a karma limit on a client-side cosmetic feature. I understand one can write a custom CSS rule for this, but if it's already built into the website....

Unless you have to earn it, you won’t appreciate it.

I appreciate my custom CSS just fine, thanks.

It's added flavour, I think. Not every website has to be intuitive or hand people things on a silver platter.

Ridiculous that it's so low.

    [bgcolor="#ff6600"] {
      background: #008 !important;    
    }

    body > center > table > tbody > tr:first-child > td {
      background: #008 !important;
    }

Here's some CSS rules if you want to change it yourself instead of relying on an obviously poor design choice.

Nice things shouldn't be available for throwaways or sock puppet accounts.

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