What color is it? | Hacker News Reader

What color is it?

whatcolorisit.sumbioun.com

130 pointsthither52 comments

Minor pedantry, but this copy is mixing two different time schemes:

> [peaking at 0AM] while during the day colors are lighter [peaking at 12AM]

0(0:00) is a 24 hour clock concept, and isn't used with a 12 hour clock. Further, 12AM typically refers to midnight. So you either want {peaking at 00:00; peaking at 12:00} or {peaking at 12AM; peaking at 12PM}.

See this brilliant thread by Foone:

https://mobile.twitter.com/foone/status/1572260363764400129

"Someday aliens are going to land their saucers in a field somewhere in New Jersey and everything is going to go just fine right up until we try to explain our calendar to them..."

I've seen this one before, but I highly recommend anyone in the lucky 10,000 to read this.

Hm, I wonder if that guy realizes that there are other languages than English in the world, and that there are different calendars in use.

That's addressed in the thread.

That'll be $50, sir

Relevant HN thread (989 comments, posted by, ahem, myself!) -

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32975173`|

New link, now more correct! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32975173

Someday aliens are going to land their saucers in a field somewhere in New Jersey and everything is going to go just fine, especially when they too admit they haven't figured out how to keep track of time consistently.

He makes the assumption that aliens wouldn't have their own seemingly-arbitrary date and time system. Honestly it's biased for a "everyone but humans are entirely logical and never deviated" viewpoint that cheap (bad) sci-fi goes for.

This clearly humorous twitter thread has really nothing to do with aliens, it’s shorthand for a viewpoint we can all understand enough to get the premise.

Eh, if I tweaked the story, it'd probably drive the point home more if the aliens did have a difficult-to-learn-from-scratch system to work with too.

Our scientific communities already have the homogenized forms that his hypothetical aliens would actually like.

Lazy sci-fi. Every civilization except humans is unified and monolithic, or has at most maybe 2 subgroups, because it’s hard to invent thousands of years of history.

And not just fiction, but science also: “Why haven’t aliens done X by now?”

Someday people are going to finally learn that Foone doesn't like when people link to their Twitter from HN.

The fact that it's 13 hours from 11AM to 12AM is probably the strangest thing in our already bizarre system of timekeeping

Like December is the twelfth month because decus is Latin for ten...

> Like December is the twelfth month because decus is Latin for ten

There also was a couple of dudes who wanted a month in their name that messed things up, IIRC..

If you mean Caesar and Augustus, they are actually the reason we don't have even more badly named months, like Quintilis (July) and Sextilis (August). December was the tenth month simply because each new year started in March. This likely changed long before Caesar was even born. They also, allegedly, had only ten months, but the second king of Rome changed that, but it could also be just a legend.

There is no 12 am. There’s 12 noon and 12 midnight. But no 12 am or pm.

Not true. They exist, but can be confusing to some people. Because 12:01 AM is just past midnight (and 12:01 PM just past noon), 12:00 AM is midnight and 12:00 PM is noon.

Yes true. Midnight is not AM nor PM because it's neither ante meridiem nor post meridiem. Noon has the same issue.

You're technically correct. Strictly speaking, yes, noon and midnight are not afternoon or after-midnight. However, that's what your digital clock will show. At 12:00:00 noon, it will say PM.

Digital clocks update at a frequency and are not continuous. The chance that an update happens at exactly noon or midnight is 0%. This is why AM and PM are always shown on a digital clock.

And that's how real life works too. The instant that is nether AM nor PM never physically exists. As the clock hits 12, it's already past.

Even more pedantic:

> In Japanese usage, midnight is written as 午前0時 (0:00 a.m.) and noon is written as 午後0時 (0:00 p.m.), making the hours numbered sequentially from 0 to 11 in both halves of the day.

(As per Wikipedia) Can be found in the Intl.DateFormat API as well.

Excuse me for shamelessly self-promoting on Christmas Eve but I’ve built just the tool for that! https://adriannier.de/colordoggy

Welp buying this immediately. I'm colorblind but dabble in some art and some design work and this will be super useful. I've found tools that will display rgb values, but translating that to a color mentally isn't particulary easily.

Thanks for the support! :)

Is Mac this ubiquitous nowadays on Hacker News?

This tool is Mac Only and that's mentioned neither here nor in the article. Only after reading the article, when you want to use the tool, and you scroll down to download it, you finally see that there's only one Mac only Download Button.

Now you know how I felt growing up in the 90s. Like… we were supposed to get Halo not you! :)

FWIW, we did get Halo 1, and I think the Mac version was the first to let you fly a banshee and shoot a fuel rod cannon. Maybe PC came out first with, but these didn’t make it into the Xbox version. Mac might have been the first online halo play as well

Nope - I am on Linux only and have been for years.

> This version implements a different algorithm to translate time into colors, covering the whole visible light spectrum in 24 hours. At night colors get darker [peaking at 0AM] while during the day colors are lighter [peaking at 12AM].

http://whatcolorisit.sumbioun.com/about.html

In case anyone is curious what they are looking at.

Also, if you'd rather not wait 24 hours, you can watch the full spectrum in a sped-up video here: https://vimeo.com/116576029

Here is an even quicker summary diagram: https://i7x7p5b7.stackpathcdn.com/codrops/wp-content/uploads...

My version from 2016 that lets you choose the color space and whether to cycle colors over a minute, hour, or day:

http://lumma.org/code/js/colortime/

85 lines of legible source right on the page.

I dont get it. All I see is the color flickering between various oranges/reds with every second with no pattern I can discern

What a coincidence. I just had an idea like this two days ago because we recently adopted a puppy and we’re trying to establish routines. I think he is struggling with the day/night cycle since our blinds are usually pulled. I wanted to use a screen or a color-changing bulb, so he knows yellow o’clock means daytime and blue o’clock means night. Maybe I can use this. Thanks for open sourcing it.

Linked to that, I'm wondering how epoch seeding could be used with RNG in general.

According to https://stackoverflow.com/questions/521295/seeding-the-rando... it's not possible.

But if you have 2 events with a variable time between them (ex: when the user get a document, when you the user click on submit) I think it should: the set of {start, end} would have some limited entropy.

The StackOverflow question you linked is specifically about JavaScript's Math.random function. As you said, in general it's possible, in fact most software PRNGs use the epoch to construct their seeds.

Staring at this for 30 seconds and then hitting back to hn was trippy.

Screensaver https://www.screensaversplanet.com/screensavers/what-colour-...

If I click Information and then go back, the time keeps updating but the color freezes.

It seems disingenuous to fade from one color to the next while displaying only two hexes for color. Either that or it’s not fading and my eyes are deceiving me, but as I’m on mobile I’ve not the time to look at the source code.

Not sure what is disingenouous about it... The website is showing the current time encoded as colour, with some animation to make it look good. Its not a colour guessing game :)

For me the animation momentarily turns it into pink, then back to red. I don't really see the point because it just makes an entirely different color to what it's supposed to be showing.

This is explained here:

> Since pure hue variations in RGB comprise less values than the total number of seconds in a day, colors are further modulated each second to show a distintive gamut of colors for every different moment in the day.

> Variations are based on phased sine functions that respond to each individual color, the fine modulation and luminosity.

I do something similar with my keyboard rgb leds.

Do you use an existing solution, or did you make one myself?

this is neat. It would be better with a monospace typeface so it doesn't jump around so much, though.

This is cool

Green.

Cool idea

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