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