Changing the topcolor is more than a simple matter of aesthetics; the topcolor also serves as a signal for whether I am logged in.

I have to say that dfcdfc is a nice topcolor. But don't take my word for it, here is another HNer happy with the tranquil bar along the top:

  > thanks for  the recommendation on your  profile page to use  dfcdfc as
  > the topcolor; I stumbled  onto it over a year ago  and have been using
  > it ever since. [^1]

[^1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5891431

Changed mine to #dfcdfc and now my life is so much better, I don't know how I ever lived without it. Maybe this could be a new startup.

+1

I though you were kidding.

When you are not logged in? The cookies are valid for quite a few years, making it "log in once and forger it" kind of website. Similar to imdb for example.

Are you really having trouble coming up with situations where I might not be logged in?

  * cleared cache/cookies
  * set up new computer / using new VM 
  * using alternate browser for testing
  * something on server-side invalidated cookie

New convert here - thanks! Much better than my previous one.

That would have never occurred to me. Thank you. (And...wavender...um. never mind.)

For those with enough karma, I'm curious to see what custom logos you've chosen to replace the Y. And for users who've been here for more than 8600* days, how frequently do you use the direct messaging feature?

*Edit: 2500 days. Read the wrong stat on my profile. So much for pulling a quick one...

My favorite one is for those people who get enough karma to have pg's phone number in the top right corner of the header - pretty cool

I'm surprised there isn't a rumour about a secret HN board accessible by invitation only.

Those of us on the Board don't like to brag.

I thought HN was just a holding area for people not cool enough for lobste.rs anyway?

The first rule of about the Secret HN Board is: You do not talk about Secret HN Board.

The second rule of Secret HN Board is: You do not talk about secret HN Board.

I think you just started one.

I'll propagate it.

There is no HN cabal...

(Sorry for the other-other-other-site reference)

I thought this was a reference to the backbone cabal of the '80s: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backbone_cabal

Yes, but indirectly.

It was a relatively common theme on Kuro5hin (back when it had more than 2 stories per year...) that there was no K5 cabal (in reference to the backbone cabal)

I was never a heavy usenet-er, so the K5 reference is the one that stays in my mind.

There is a YC participants only board though, isn't there?

I think you have to have higher karma than pg. He doesn't qualify for his own number.

Wait, that number is "karma" ? I thought it was that Bitcoin thing...

Is that a thing? I don't seem to be able to do that with 18k+, so if it exists there are only a couple dozen people that can.

Can't tell if you're trolling or if I need to hurry up and get a lot more karma!

I have 10K+ and don't have either feature, so probably trolling.

The only milestone I remember hitting was downvoting, around 500.

(Then again, I also have never had flagging power either - I know people get this removed sometimes, but I don't remember ever having had it. Weird).

I have flagging, but nowadays to get it on a comment you need to click the permalink button on a post to get it.

And I'm glad of that, because up until now I've sent in 1 legitimate, intentional report and 10 or so cases of fat fingering the button on a mobile device (not catastrophic because of the unflag option, but still...)

Huh, I never noticed the flagging on comments before.

Are you able to downvote? I'm curious what the karma threshold is for that.

500 is often reported but is incorrect. As of today, it appears to be 501.

711 days ago, when there was a thread about karma levels and I just hit 500, I encountered the same phenomenon. I received a response saying that you don't get to downvote threads created prior to crossing 500. (Obviously, can't verify that, but here's the thread for context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3812967)

I just hit comment down voting within the past few karma. So around 775

It was 500 when I hit it, but occasionally goes up. Not sure what it is now.

I hit it at 500 a few weeks ago. Ok, not sure exactly but definitely not more than 510 :)

What algorithm are they using? Is the source open?

HN is in fact open source (an older version of it anyway): http://arclanguage.org/

However much of the "secret sauce" is, well, secret.

YC was founded in 2005, so if you do the math...

HN came in March of 2007.

That's probably when it officially launched. Some accounts are older than that, though (such as pg's account which was created in October 2006.)

How much karma do you need for that?

Paste this snippet into your dev console, then mouseover the colours to get a preview.

  Array.prototype.forEach.call($$("td[bgcolor]"), function(td) {
      td.parentNode.addEventListener('mouseenter', function() {
          $("td[bgcolor]").setAttribute("bgcolor", td.parentNode.children[1].getAttribute("bgcolor")); 
      });
  });

What does the $$ mean?

Looking at it in the console, it looks like $ returns a single DOM element and $$ returns a NodeList (array-like object) of DOM elements. Not sure what library that is.

No library, at least in Firefox it's defined by devtools and only works in the console (provided the page doesn't have it's own $ and $$ globals).

[0] http://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/toolkit/devtoo...

[1] http://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/toolkit/devtoo...

Edit: It works in the WebKit devtools too:

[0] https://mxr.mozilla.org/chromium/source/src/third_party/WebK...

PrototypeJS works that way.

It's shorthand for document.querySelectorAll: https://developers.google.com/chrome-developer-tools/docs/co...

I use #bada55, I saw it in a comment on HN and thought it was funny. Pretty ugly, but I use HNES on my laptop anyway which negates my topcolor.

Also plug for HNES while we're talking about Hacker News aesthetics, it makes HN way better (collapsible comments, inline reply, new stylesheet) and is open source. I've contributed and the repo owner (etcet) is very welcoming.

Also a #bada55 here, and thanks for the tip on HNES, checking it out now, looks great!

coincidentally, HNES makes /topcolors invisble : (

Issue opened: https://github.com/etcet/HNES/issues/52 :)

Here's a quick and dirty script for parsing the site and rendering the colors in an RGB scatter plot.

https://gist.github.com/ginkgo/9656285

edit:

There's a couple of interesting things to see here:

* There's a clearly visible diagonal axis of the shades of grey.

* There's a cluster of colors around the default orange value.

* The "pink corner" of the color cube is very sparsely populated compared to the other ones.

I guess the clearly visible diagonal axis is because people just type the same distance for all the axes when they choose gray. So they would go like: dcdcdc or acacac etc.

I did the same thing, but with html/js: http://solidred.co.uk/topcolors/

I wish this included the number of users that use each color, to see if anyone else uses the (harmonious) #f1e9d9.

http://cl.ly/image/040u3a1R342q

What extension are you using?

This stylesheet, with tweaks: http://userstyles.org/styles/16041/hacker-news-readability

I'd like to see a count, or percentage, beside each of popularity.

I'd like to see this too!

What's the karma threshold to choose a color?

250 according to this:

http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html#12jan08

Currently sitting @ 249!

Probably already had an upvote in the 2 hours since you posted this, but if not, I upvoted you anyway. :)

Loads! Thank you everyone - enjoying a nice purple-topped HN :)

Thanks, I never knew this existed.

Neither did I.

Now to decide if I: a) Comment more b) Throw down some custom css and get the feature on my own.

Here, have a karma.

I'm at 650 and got no access to it :/

So I wasn't the only one to use #f6f6ef so the bar would dissolve into the background! :)

Yep, my choice as well!

I'm surprised to see that I'm not the only one using the, rather arbitrary, #ccffaa.

Or, are you? There are no counts with the colors; it could well be that every color past the top 5/10 are used by a single person.

(#7fff00 reporting in- there's nothing arbitrary for me about it though)

Yep: My color #a4157a disappears from the list when I changed it. It's a 1337-ified "Arista", the name of the company I work for which I happen to think looks nice.

It appears about 1/4 of the way down the list, so I assume most of said list is unique entries then.

Ha! My topcolor is pretty much the only thing left of my startup. It's also weirdly surprisingly close to my current employer's corporate color.

Would be nice to see a count of how many people chose each color. I assume the vast majority of those colors are all equal (i.e. used by a single person).

I'm 99% sure this follows a power law distribution.

#000000 is surprisingly high up there.

Lookin' good: http://i.imgur.com/oMBwQma.png

Yeah, I use #222222 to block out my karma score.

If you get 1 million karma, PG will do your laundry once per week

Here they are arranged by hue / saturation: http://jsfiddle.net/LtnS3/1/embedded/result/

Thanks for this. Very interesting!

When you consider that the dominant hue shown against is orange (the logo) it makes sense that the vast majority of choices are either complementary (blues) or supplementary (oranges). The fact that there are lots of greens and few purples is interesting however.

For some fun, grep your local dictionary for qualified colors :) cat words |grep -i "^[a-f]\{6\}$"

or use 4 and add be, or ed etc...

I went with beefed, and it looks like that page is updated in real time.

Why settle for a single color when you can have the HN topbar in literally every color of the rainbow?

  @-webkit-keyframes hue { 
      100% { -webkit-filter:hue-rotate(360deg); }  
  }
  body > center > table > tbody > tr:first-child > td,
  body > center > table > tbody > tr:last-child > td {
      -webkit-filter: hue-rotate(0deg);
      -webkit-animation: hue 20s linear infinite;
  }

Quick and dirty 3d visualisation: http://solidred.co.uk/topcolors/

I like #123456 and #abcdef as colours; #123456 doesn't work here (black on #123456 is difficult to read) but #abcdef works well.

I use #222222 so that I can't see my karma score. That way I don't play HN like a points scoring game.

Allow me to plug #ddeeff. I think it very nicely complements the orange Y and the gray background, and it's easy to remember.

I'm mildly colorblind, however, so take my recommendation with a large grain of salt. But if you're also colorblind you're just going to love #ddeeff to death.

Does anyone know if it is possible to change the color of the 'Y' logo gif by using custom CSS or Javascript? I'm wondering if it is possible to make an extension that automatically changes the color of the logo to match the color of the top boar.

It would be. You could use something like Greasemonkey or Stylish.

As for automatically using the color of the bar... Simply have the icon with either a background color, or a black with the opacity at around 5%.

Feeling banal with my white bar now

The problem with #ffffff topcolor is active top nav links are invisible.

I can't change my color on HN :( I didn't even know that this existed!

I've been using a forked version of this Chrome extension. Looks really nice

https://github.com/imkevinxu/hacker-news-plus

Oh! When I saw Top Colour I thought it was referring to the order of the list as the most used colours first, in descending order.

Haha. I just realised it means the colour of the top bar the logo is on.

I never noticed I had topcolor enabled. Is there a list that details what gets enabled when? I'm at 566 points and I've just recently been granted downvote access.

I wonder if the gray people use (I use aaaaaa) says something about individual monitor choices. I'd probably go lighter if I used a windows machine more.

Personally, I like to use #50b1db. It clashes a bit, but it's a nice blue and I like it next to the orange of the logo.

I should write a custom CSS for HN...

I have an extension in my GitHub for Safari 7 that is custom CSS (with one rule currently) and JavaScript :)

lol @ me hunting around the profile page for the last 5 minutes trying to work out if its a hidden menu or something.

Well that beats me trying to click on a color in that list... I'm like: "What an odd UI to select a color and this crap is broke anyways, nothing changes!"

you and me both...

What is .. oh per-profile topcolor option. Never took the time to use that.

Using the the background-color #f6f6f9 works well.

Er I meant #f3f5eb

Is there a list organized by colorspace?

Uniquely using #99AAFF at present.

55b6f2 looks like beauty :)

Oh, they have #0b00b5

Correct. That's why you can in fact, input your own hex value which is where these come from.

Lovely, pretty misleading article for people who don't have this functionality unlocked.

#00dd00 4lyfe

bbbbbb works best for me :)