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Comment by mastazi | Hacker News Reader

I feel like me and the author of this piece have different opinions about where to put the line that separates orange from yellow.

If you showed me many of the posters shown here in isolation, and asked me to describe the palette, I would have said "that's a yellow poster": https://stephenfollows.com/i/171004131/orange-the-mvp-of-the... - with some exceptions such as Lorax and Unbelievers that I would have said are orange.

EDIT: I changed from "most of the posters" to "many of the posters" as there are some that feel to me decidedly orange.

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What we really need is an article "Which colours dominate bike sheds and why?".

I suppose from reading the article they are doing this programmatically, so it should be the code / algorithm / library used that is describing yellow as orange.

One interesting thing is - are these images encoded in the RGB color space or in a color space that allows all the colors human can see. If the latter and the code to analyze assumed RGB there may be things that look more yellow to us that would end up being interpreted as Orange. But that is a long shot.

You can go all the way through the data provenance:

- do you have all the posters for all movies? Probably not.

- do you have well-preserved examples of those posters? Many are going to be sun- or age- faded.

- do you have good scans of the posters that pre-date digital originals?

and so on.

To me it's the distinction between orange and brown (since they're the same colour).

Raises the question if the author could have or should have included grey in the analyses.

s/gray/saturation/

I think the author's line between pink and purple is also not very clear. For example, teen spirit appears in both.

That particular poster has pink on the left and purple on the right.

Obligatory xkcd (from 2010!) - https://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/

“ Basically, women were slightly more liberal with the modifiers, but otherwise they generally agreed (and some of the differences may be sampling noise). The results were similar across the survey—men and women tended on average to call colors the same names.”

On a tangent, “more liberal” in this context confounds an insight I had on reading it, that while more words are used to describe the range of colors in the one group, more colors are described by each word in the other. Which is the more conservative?

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