
Ask HN: Why have post numbers become green and red? - eimrine
Dear HN, I appreciate you for the minimalistic interface that just does not contain anything unnecessary. For what purpose did you start using colors in post number?<p>Does this mean the beginning of the end of the HN I know and love? Maybe now you will make a mobile app? Hang a banner warning that you store cookies? Forbid to use adblock?<p>I could not understand for a while what this differentiation means. My first thought was that green posts - being voted positively and vice versa. Now I realized that they are simply alternating. It reminds me Mark Miller&#x27;s &quot;Tragedy of Common Lisp&quot; story, and maybe the theory of broken windows a little bit.<p>Thank you for all the wonderful that I discovered because of you.
======
dang
Fear not. It's pg's old "Christmas ornaments, kept in the basement" code that
we uncomment-out every year for a bit.

Here it is in 2007:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20071225140214/http://news.ycomb...](https://web.archive.org/web/20071225140214/http://news.ycombinator.com/)

~~~
quickthrower2
Uncomment? Could it use the current utc time instead?

~~~
dang
It could, but it hooks into the code in a few places and it feels a bit too
complex to leave them there all year.

"Uncomment" isn't the whole story—you have to uncomment and then move a few
code snippets to the right places. I have this in a git comment which can be
cherry-picked and then reverted. Since the relevant aspects of HN rarely
change, this mostly goes off without a hitch.

------
RayMan1
It is Christmas time, green-red combo is the way to go.

------
rozab
Is this being upvoted ironically?

~~~
gshdg
Not everyone on HN lives in places where Christianity is the dominant
religious tradition.

------
wodenokoto
As others mentions this is the Christmas theme.

Another theme change you might notice from time to time is a black bar at the
top of the page, which is displayed when mourning for a recently deceased
person of particular IT or hard science prominence.

------
masonic
It's just reminding you to pause every other submit and reflect.

------
erik_seaberg
In this season of using billion-gate superscalar CPUs to buy socks, we are
being encouraged to brush up on EE fundamentals like flip-flops.

------
aurizon
Half of all Hackers are Red hot, the rest go green with envy 'twas ever
thus....

