4 ms·

Too Much Color

143 points by maguay 7mo ago

cratermoon 7mo ago
What's My JND? 0.0089 Can you beat it? https://www.keithcirkel.co.uk/whats-my-jnd/?r=A30iKP__7_Hb https://www.keithcirkel.co.uk/whats-my-jnd/?r=A30iKP__7_Hb #WhatsMyJND
- cafebabbe 7mo ago
  Only with chrome devtools :)
- xiconfjs 7mo ago
  What's My JND? 0.0032 Can you beat it? https://www.keithcirkel.co.uk/whats-my-jnd/?r=AUEjKP___831 https://www.keithcirkel.co.uk/whats-my-jnd/?r=AUEjKP___831 #WhatsMyJND I need a better display for sure :)
- WalterGR 7mo ago
  Discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47321188 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47321188 “Show HN: What's my JND? – a colour guessing game” 54 points | 8 days ago | 62 comments
- tgv 7mo ago
  I'm color blind, and not even a little bit, but I scored 0.0084. I've noticed before that my perception of contrast is slightly better (than that of the people I ever compared it with; admitteldly, that's only a handful, but they weren't colorblind).
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- Jensson 7mo ago
  That mostly depends on the quality of your screen.
  - giraffe_lady 7mo ago
    It depends on something about your screen at least. I first did it on a low quality monitor and it made the line between the two obvious even if I couldn't tell the colors apart. The "hard mode" one was impossible on that screen however.
- footydude 7mo ago
  0.0042 apparently https://www.keithcirkel.co.uk/whats-my-jnd/?r=AaYkKP___-u- https://www.keithcirkel.co.uk/whats-my-jnd/?r=AaYkKP___-u- There's was 2 or 3 where i had no idea, guessed and was a way off. There's was 1 where i did a hail Mary and got it. It was interesting how some even towards the end were really obvious and others were really subtle - I'd say I did better with purple tones and worst with the blue / greys.
- halflife 7mo ago
  0.0021
- bee_rider 7mo ago
  .0037. IIRC it is possible to get a better score by looking around the screen, your peripheral vision might be somehow more sensitive. I can see what they mean about .02 though. If I weren’t specifically looking for difference that’s where the colors become less noticeable.
  - majormajor 7mo ago
    Looking around if you have an LCD also helps compensate for colors shifting off-axis.
    - cyanydeez 7mo ago
      What youre doing is seeing changes limited to one of the R, G, B so instwad of judging integral xolors, your doing 3 different. The article explains how errors propagate, and those RGB pixels will all shift errors because of matetial science.
  - abdullahkhalids 7mo ago
    I got 0.0039. Peripheral vision helps a lot. My eyes, at least, are very differently sensitive to different colors. It's really difficult to discriminate with bright and pink like colors. Easier with darker colors.
- rXwubXUGAm 7mo ago
  I got a 0.0035. I'm on a Dell U2724D monitor which is supposed to have decent color accuracy and I cranked up the brightness and contrast to a maximum so I'm sure that helped a somewhat. I also noticed squinting and closing my eyes for a bit sometimes helped when I felt stuck. "Genuinely remarkable. You sailed past the theoretical human limit like it owed you money. I'd accuse you of cheating but I don't actually know how you'd cheat at this."
  - esperent 7mo ago
    0.0032 I'm on a Vivo X300 pro in a dim room, max brightness. Some of these looked impossible but then suddenly I'd see the line. https://www.keithcirkel.co.uk/whats-my-jnd/ https://www.keithcirkel.co.uk/whats-my-jnd/ #WhatsMyJND
    - drcongo 7mo ago
      Same score here on my MBP with an absolutely filthy screen. Reckon I could top the leaderboard if I cleaned it.
      - krsw 7mo ago
        Same score and setup. Overhead lights were messing with me a bit as well as the vignetting in the browser. I wanna get sub 0.0030 now
  - rXwubXUGAm 7mo ago
    Replying to myself. I also tried this with both my Samsung S25+ phone and LG G5 TV and repeatedly scored in the 0.003-0.005 range on both so it doesn't seem like the display makes that much of a difference for me.
- e1ghtSpace 7mo ago
  0.0043, but to be honest, I could probably do better if I changed my monitor's settings. But I have it setup with low brightness for night time lights off viewing that won't wake me up.
- foobarian 7mo ago
  0.0021. I find it helps to bob your head around like when you are watching your food in the microwave
- kalaksi 7mo ago
  https://www.keithcirkel.co.uk/whats-my-jnd/?r=AG4mKP____6_ https://www.keithcirkel.co.uk/whats-my-jnd/?r=AG4mKP____6_ "This shouldn't be possible. I'm not saying that you cheated, but not not saying that." 0.0011. The quote seems a bit hyperbolic. There were maybe 2-3 that I didn't see and missed. 1-2 that I didn't hit perfectly but close enough. Display probably affects results (but didn't change any settings for this). I have a Dell IPS. I also moved my head around a bit, felt natural while trying to discern the colors. I do have a good vision (including color). Reminds me of the other color-game where you order some colored boxes to form a spectrum. Edit: just tried hard mode and got 0.0084. Missed maybe 3 that I couldn't see. Usually some magenta or blue colored. Grey and red / brown seem to be the easiest.
  - tstrimple 7mo ago
    I got the same results you did. I think this is testing our monitors more so than our eyes. Given the forum we're on, I expect far better than average display devices being used which could help explain why basically everyone is doing far, far better than "average" according to the site.
- kirillcool 7mo ago
  0.00057 here - https://www.keithcirkel.co.uk/whats-my-jnd/?r=ADonKP_____7 https://www.keithcirkel.co.uk/whats-my-jnd/?r=ADonKP_____7 I do work with colors pretty much every day as a UI engineer
- tracker1 7mo ago
  I'm afraid to find out at this point... retinal damage combined with cataracts that I'm waiting to have a job with medical insurance to take care of... I used to be in the top 0.001% for color detection, now I know I'm very far from it. Especially towards dark and light brightness. In the early 00's, I used two pro grade NEC flat panel monitors... they weighed a lot... my desk at that time had a permanent bow in the middle. It was around 2008 or so when I'd moved them a few times in a year and a half and decided to switch to flat panels... It became very clear to me around that time, that most people really didn't care about color accuracy in designs. Couldn't tell you how often I'd get "it doesn't look like our printed logo" only to adjust their monitor settings and voiala. Even then. LCD flat panels are much easier to move around without killing your back. OLED is pretty amazing, but I've got to turn my brighness down a bit to make it tolerable... and I just about have to use dark mode. But there aren't many options in the 45" 3440x1440 display range, which is where I'm most comfortable today.
- jaen 7mo ago
  Was fun and kind of meditative locking in like that – I noticed that the anti-glare coating on my screen introduces a visibly larger Δ than the later stages of the game (kind of a dithered "cloud" noise), making it quite a challenge. 0.0021 oneshot.
- Tempest1981 7mo ago
  "At this rate, CIE will want your number" - the taunts are great! What's My JND? 0.0072 #WhatsMyJND
- jcelerier 7mo ago
  so basically this thread confirms that we're all getting worse color that we can actually see because I guess of some terrible lab measurement that got carried over like gospel? (0.0021 here, on a semi-cheap acer IPS screen) > At its core this formula gives you a single number: how far apart two colours look. 0.0 means identical, 100.0 means you're comparing black and white. The magic number to remember is the "Just Noticeable Difference" (JND). For dE00, JND is around 2.0. Below that, people struggle to tell two colours apart. Below 1.0, basically no one can. So anything under 2.0 is "close enough" and anything under 1.0 is "you're kidding yourself."
rekabis 7mo ago
> The magic number to remember is the "Just Noticeable Difference" (JND). For dE00, JND is around 2.0. Below that, people struggle to tell two colours apart. Below 1.0, basically no one can. Except for a tetrachromat. Specifically, a strong tetrachromat that has both four colour channels in the brain and a different frequency on the fourth cone. Who are, admittedly, hella rare. Apparently there are less than a few dozen confirmed world-wide. But they do exist.
- snarkconjecture 7mo ago
  Computer screens have three-dimensional color spaces. Tetrachromacy doesn't change that.
  - tgv 7mo ago
    Is that so? Our color perception is weird. It's one dimension split in three overlapping sectors. Adding a fourth sector may add information that makes it easier to distinguish colors.
    - Jensson 7mo ago
      We do have four sectors, 3 color perception and then the brightness perception that is used in the dark. In mid darkness you get a mix of all of those, although the fourth is not really perceived as a color so it can be a bit hard to use.
      - tgv 7mo ago
        Brightness is another dimension, not a "sector" (as I dubbed it) on the color spectrum. But it would be equal for all subjects in a test, so it can't add information.
    - giraffe_lady 7mo ago
      Something I think about often is an oliver sacks book about an ethnic group that has a particularly high rate of true monochromacy. And the people with no color perception at all are particularly adept at spotting certain plants based on some characteristic of their leaves that is obscured by color. So even removing information can change perception in surprising ways. OTOH sacks seems to have fabricated a lot of shit over the years so who knows if this is even real. Another thing I think about a lot now.
sophieraiin 7mo ago
Am I pretty?? (story)
jacknews 7mo ago
lol, the website reminds me of tropes like the professional cleaner whose house is messy, the chef who eats instant noodles at home, or the haut couture fashion designer who only wears jeans and tees. The colour expert whose website is monochrome.
- olejorgenb 7mo ago
  My impression is that they are a compression expert, not a color expert. Make sense they chose uniform flat colors :D
- chuckadams 7mo ago
  "The cobbler's children have no shoes." Maybe he understands the field so much that he prefers to exercise it minimally in his hobby. Or maybe he just can't decide. It also makes perfect sense for a study in colors to be against a neutral background.
termwatch 7mo ago
interesting approach!
bhaak 7mo ago
He’s talking about minifying CSS colors and I’m not sure if it is what I think it is. Do CSS minifier really adjust the colors in the CSS files to get better compression rates or to reduce the number of rules in the CSS?
- altairprime 7mo ago
  The author’s minifier now does so, yes. I think you’d have to research further to decide if they’re the first to do so or not.
- sheept 7mo ago
  It depends on the minifier (SVG optimizers do this too), but yes, they may reduce the precision of colors. I checked and esbuild will turn lab() into a hex color if possible.
s1mon 7mo ago
This is an amazing deep dive into color difference measurements and how sensitive the math is. The idea that we really need to save characters - bytes - in CSS when we have so many web sites chewing through 49 MB with the enshitification of the web is hard to reconcile. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47390945 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47390945
Theodores 7mo ago
Ahhh, NASA numbers! My favourite, particularly in SVG files, and more recently in colours. What is a NASA number? Allegedly, within NASA, there is only a need for so many decimal places. If I can remember correctly, nine digits would get a spacecraft to land within a metre on the rock formerly known as the planet Pluto. So no need for that, unless you are going to 'occupy Pluto', building a few AI datacentres there. In the context of SVG, usually it is icons that I encounter, where the artworker has exported something like a search icon, which is a circle and a line. These can be specified in SVG using integers, and single digit integers, if you really want, but let's make it two digits. However, does the SVG file from the artworker have a viewbox containing a circle and a line? Nope. Instead you get one circle for the outer part of the circle in black and another smaller circle in white. Oh, and a line. The circles will be written as polygons with about two hundred vertices, with all vertices specified with NASA numbers (as I call them), typically six decimal places. As a consequence, the file, which should be six lines of human readable code balloons to many kilobytes of nonsense. Yes, this can be put through SVGO but that will just remove some decimal places and make the file even less human readable. As a developer, the simple file is great as the inevitable adjustments can be applied easily, maybe to make the icon bold or to adjust alignment within the viewbox. However, when given artworker files with NASA numbers, I then have to raise a ticket so that I can get the corrected file two weeks later from the guy sat in front of a massive Apple monitor with headphones welded on. The reason for not using NASA numbers has nothing to do with bloat, as no optimisation will make up for the mountain of javascript the marketing guys have bundled into their Google Tag Manager, it has everything to do with efficient workflows. Generally the customer does not care about fonts, colours and much else that designers fret over. If we went back to the 216 'web safe' colours of yesteryear (for CSS, not images), would anyone notice? If we could not load custom fonts, would most people notice? They might, but this would not prevent them from surfing the web.
- rerdavies 7mo ago
  Good design speaks to credibility, with some justification. If somebody doesn't care about whether their webpages look good, it suggests that they also didn't care about whether their content was accurate.
Sharlin 7mo ago
Eight bits of precision should be enough for everybody. (It both is and isn't, depending on the use case, but I'm pretty sure nobody's design needs to make a difference between #123456 and #123457.)
- kg 7mo ago
  For gradients it definitely isn't unless you have the ability to do FRC dithering where the dither pattern changes every frame. The banding is very noticeable on a large enough screen.
- marcosdumay 7mo ago
  Yes. The claim that you don't need more than 3 decimal places is laughable. Your artificial design doesn't need decimal points. At all. You probably can do even better by ignoring the last 4 bits completely. That said, the article is very interesting, and that claim applies on different contexts. It's just aimed at the wrong one.
- hdjrudni 7mo ago
  LG just introduced a new 13 bit color TV... https://youtu.be/82InNlCqxlU https://youtu.be/82InNlCqxlU it makes a difference in dark colors apparently. I can often still see banding on high end monitors. Do I need that kind of precision in my CSS? Probably not. But for gradients, it seems helpful.
taeric 7mo ago
This reminds me of the amusing tendency of people to use the full double for recording lat/long of locations.
- xigoi 7mo ago
  https://xkcd.com/2170/ https://xkcd.com/2170/
  - skyberrys 7mo ago
    "You're pointing to waldo on a page" ... There's always an xkcd.
- pezezin 7mo ago
  It depends on your use case. Storing WGS84 coordinates as 32-bit floats can incur on errors of several meters. It might be good for your fitness tracking application, but not for serious GIS usage. Case in point: many years ago I was working on some software to generate 3D models from drone pictures. The first step of the pipeline was to convert from WGS84 to ECEF (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth-centered,_Earth-fixed_coordinate_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth-centered,_Earth-fixed_co...), an absolute Cartesian coordinate system. Well, it turns out that at the scales involved, 6.371 million meters, 32-bit floats have a precision of half a meter, so the resulting models were totally broken. Moving to 64-bit floats fixed this issue.
  - taeric 7mo ago
    Isn't that more of using a float to represent the number? Would be akin to trying to represent .5. Which, if your goal is to represent decimals, you are best off not using floats. Granted, just storing it as a 32 bit integer is probably difficult for most uses. BCD just isn't common for most programmers. (Or fixed point, in general.)
    - pezezin 7mo ago
      If your goal is just to store the coordinates in a database, sure, use fixed point or whatever. But any kind of calculation will involve a great deal of trigonometry, square roots, and the like. It is just easier to use floating point. Examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographic_coordinate_conversion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographic_coordinate_conversi... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincenty%27s_formulae https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincenty%27s_formulae https://gist.github.com/govert/1b373696c9a27ff4c72a https://gist.github.com/govert/1b373696c9a27ff4c72a
quantummagic 7mo ago
Very interesting article, and the color picker is exceptionally revealing. As for the challenge, it stopped working in Firefox after the first half dozen examples; but on Chromium I got a decent .0042 Fun!
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
cmovq 7mo ago
I've always assumed minifiers were a kind of lossless compression. I guess this optimization makes it lossy? Even if we can't tell the difference between oklch(0.659432 0.304219 234.75238) and oklch(.659 .304 234.752) they're still different colors.
- cyanydeez 7mo ago
  Tge whole contexr of the article is answering your question: a "different color" is a specification laden structure and the answer is no according to spec.
Bishop197 7mo ago
[dead]

143 points by maguay 7mo ago

What's My JND? 0.0089 Can you beat it? https://www.keithcirkel.co.uk/whats-my-jnd/?r=A30iKP__7_Hb https://www.keithcirkel.co.uk/whats-my-jnd/?r=A30iKP__7_Hb #WhatsMyJND

cafebabbe 7mo ago
Only with chrome devtools :)
xiconfjs 7mo ago
What's My JND? 0.0032 Can you beat it? https://www.keithcirkel.co.uk/whats-my-jnd/?r=AUEjKP___831 https://www.keithcirkel.co.uk/whats-my-jnd/?r=AUEjKP___831 #WhatsMyJND I need a better display for sure :)
WalterGR 7mo ago
Discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47321188 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47321188 “Show HN: What's my JND? – a colour guessing game” 54 points | 8 days ago | 62 comments
tgv 7mo ago
I'm color blind, and not even a little bit, but I scored 0.0084. I've noticed before that my perception of contrast is slightly better (than that of the people I ever compared it with; admitteldly, that's only a handful, but they weren't colorblind).
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
Jensson 7mo ago
That mostly depends on the quality of your screen.
- giraffe_lady 7mo ago
  It depends on something about your screen at least. I first did it on a low quality monitor and it made the line between the two obvious even if I couldn't tell the colors apart. The "hard mode" one was impossible on that screen however.
footydude 7mo ago
0.0042 apparently https://www.keithcirkel.co.uk/whats-my-jnd/?r=AaYkKP___-u- https://www.keithcirkel.co.uk/whats-my-jnd/?r=AaYkKP___-u- There's was 2 or 3 where i had no idea, guessed and was a way off. There's was 1 where i did a hail Mary and got it. It was interesting how some even towards the end were really obvious and others were really subtle - I'd say I did better with purple tones and worst with the blue / greys.
halflife 7mo ago
0.0021
bee_rider 7mo ago
.0037. IIRC it is possible to get a better score by looking around the screen, your peripheral vision might be somehow more sensitive. I can see what they mean about .02 though. If I weren’t specifically looking for difference that’s where the colors become less noticeable.
- majormajor 7mo ago
  Looking around if you have an LCD also helps compensate for colors shifting off-axis.
  - cyanydeez 7mo ago
    What youre doing is seeing changes limited to one of the R, G, B so instwad of judging integral xolors, your doing 3 different. The article explains how errors propagate, and those RGB pixels will all shift errors because of matetial science.
- abdullahkhalids 7mo ago
  I got 0.0039. Peripheral vision helps a lot. My eyes, at least, are very differently sensitive to different colors. It's really difficult to discriminate with bright and pink like colors. Easier with darker colors.
rXwubXUGAm 7mo ago
I got a 0.0035. I'm on a Dell U2724D monitor which is supposed to have decent color accuracy and I cranked up the brightness and contrast to a maximum so I'm sure that helped a somewhat. I also noticed squinting and closing my eyes for a bit sometimes helped when I felt stuck. "Genuinely remarkable. You sailed past the theoretical human limit like it owed you money. I'd accuse you of cheating but I don't actually know how you'd cheat at this."
- esperent 7mo ago
  0.0032 I'm on a Vivo X300 pro in a dim room, max brightness. Some of these looked impossible but then suddenly I'd see the line. https://www.keithcirkel.co.uk/whats-my-jnd/ https://www.keithcirkel.co.uk/whats-my-jnd/ #WhatsMyJND
  - drcongo 7mo ago
    Same score here on my MBP with an absolutely filthy screen. Reckon I could top the leaderboard if I cleaned it.
    - krsw 7mo ago
      Same score and setup. Overhead lights were messing with me a bit as well as the vignetting in the browser. I wanna get sub 0.0030 now
- rXwubXUGAm 7mo ago
  Replying to myself. I also tried this with both my Samsung S25+ phone and LG G5 TV and repeatedly scored in the 0.003-0.005 range on both so it doesn't seem like the display makes that much of a difference for me.
e1ghtSpace 7mo ago
0.0043, but to be honest, I could probably do better if I changed my monitor's settings. But I have it setup with low brightness for night time lights off viewing that won't wake me up.
foobarian 7mo ago
0.0021. I find it helps to bob your head around like when you are watching your food in the microwave
kalaksi 7mo ago
https://www.keithcirkel.co.uk/whats-my-jnd/?r=AG4mKP____6_ https://www.keithcirkel.co.uk/whats-my-jnd/?r=AG4mKP____6_ "This shouldn't be possible. I'm not saying that you cheated, but not not saying that." 0.0011. The quote seems a bit hyperbolic. There were maybe 2-3 that I didn't see and missed. 1-2 that I didn't hit perfectly but close enough. Display probably affects results (but didn't change any settings for this). I have a Dell IPS. I also moved my head around a bit, felt natural while trying to discern the colors. I do have a good vision (including color). Reminds me of the other color-game where you order some colored boxes to form a spectrum. Edit: just tried hard mode and got 0.0084. Missed maybe 3 that I couldn't see. Usually some magenta or blue colored. Grey and red / brown seem to be the easiest.
- tstrimple 7mo ago
  I got the same results you did. I think this is testing our monitors more so than our eyes. Given the forum we're on, I expect far better than average display devices being used which could help explain why basically everyone is doing far, far better than "average" according to the site.
kirillcool 7mo ago
0.00057 here - https://www.keithcirkel.co.uk/whats-my-jnd/?r=ADonKP_____7 https://www.keithcirkel.co.uk/whats-my-jnd/?r=ADonKP_____7 I do work with colors pretty much every day as a UI engineer
tracker1 7mo ago
I'm afraid to find out at this point... retinal damage combined with cataracts that I'm waiting to have a job with medical insurance to take care of... I used to be in the top 0.001% for color detection, now I know I'm very far from it. Especially towards dark and light brightness. In the early 00's, I used two pro grade NEC flat panel monitors... they weighed a lot... my desk at that time had a permanent bow in the middle. It was around 2008 or so when I'd moved them a few times in a year and a half and decided to switch to flat panels... It became very clear to me around that time, that most people really didn't care about color accuracy in designs. Couldn't tell you how often I'd get "it doesn't look like our printed logo" only to adjust their monitor settings and voiala. Even then. LCD flat panels are much easier to move around without killing your back. OLED is pretty amazing, but I've got to turn my brighness down a bit to make it tolerable... and I just about have to use dark mode. But there aren't many options in the 45" 3440x1440 display range, which is where I'm most comfortable today.
jaen 7mo ago
Was fun and kind of meditative locking in like that – I noticed that the anti-glare coating on my screen introduces a visibly larger Δ than the later stages of the game (kind of a dithered "cloud" noise), making it quite a challenge. 0.0021 oneshot.
Tempest1981 7mo ago
"At this rate, CIE will want your number" - the taunts are great! What's My JND? 0.0072 #WhatsMyJND
jcelerier 7mo ago
so basically this thread confirms that we're all getting worse color that we can actually see because I guess of some terrible lab measurement that got carried over like gospel? (0.0021 here, on a semi-cheap acer IPS screen) > At its core this formula gives you a single number: how far apart two colours look. 0.0 means identical, 100.0 means you're comparing black and white. The magic number to remember is the "Just Noticeable Difference" (JND). For dE00, JND is around 2.0. Below that, people struggle to tell two colours apart. Below 1.0, basically no one can. So anything under 2.0 is "close enough" and anything under 1.0 is "you're kidding yourself."

rekabis 7mo ago

> The magic number to remember is the "Just Noticeable Difference" (JND). For dE00, JND is around 2.0. Below that, people struggle to tell two colours apart. Below 1.0, basically no one can. Except for a tetrachromat. Specifically, a strong tetrachromat that has both four colour channels in the brain and a different frequency on the fourth cone. Who are, admittedly, hella rare. Apparently there are less than a few dozen confirmed world-wide. But they do exist.

snarkconjecture 7mo ago
Computer screens have three-dimensional color spaces. Tetrachromacy doesn't change that.
- tgv 7mo ago
  Is that so? Our color perception is weird. It's one dimension split in three overlapping sectors. Adding a fourth sector may add information that makes it easier to distinguish colors.
  - Jensson 7mo ago
    We do have four sectors, 3 color perception and then the brightness perception that is used in the dark. In mid darkness you get a mix of all of those, although the fourth is not really perceived as a color so it can be a bit hard to use.
    - tgv 7mo ago
      Brightness is another dimension, not a "sector" (as I dubbed it) on the color spectrum. But it would be equal for all subjects in a test, so it can't add information.
  - giraffe_lady 7mo ago
    Something I think about often is an oliver sacks book about an ethnic group that has a particularly high rate of true monochromacy. And the people with no color perception at all are particularly adept at spotting certain plants based on some characteristic of their leaves that is obscured by color. So even removing information can change perception in surprising ways. OTOH sacks seems to have fabricated a lot of shit over the years so who knows if this is even real. Another thing I think about a lot now.

sophieraiin 7mo ago

Am I pretty?? (story)

jacknews 7mo ago

lol, the website reminds me of tropes like the professional cleaner whose house is messy, the chef who eats instant noodles at home, or the haut couture fashion designer who only wears jeans and tees. The colour expert whose website is monochrome.

olejorgenb 7mo ago
My impression is that they are a compression expert, not a color expert. Make sense they chose uniform flat colors :D
chuckadams 7mo ago
"The cobbler's children have no shoes." Maybe he understands the field so much that he prefers to exercise it minimally in his hobby. Or maybe he just can't decide. It also makes perfect sense for a study in colors to be against a neutral background.

termwatch 7mo ago

interesting approach!

bhaak 7mo ago

He’s talking about minifying CSS colors and I’m not sure if it is what I think it is. Do CSS minifier really adjust the colors in the CSS files to get better compression rates or to reduce the number of rules in the CSS?

altairprime 7mo ago
The author’s minifier now does so, yes. I think you’d have to research further to decide if they’re the first to do so or not.
sheept 7mo ago
It depends on the minifier (SVG optimizers do this too), but yes, they may reduce the precision of colors. I checked and esbuild will turn lab() into a hex color if possible.

s1mon 7mo ago

This is an amazing deep dive into color difference measurements and how sensitive the math is. The idea that we really need to save characters - bytes - in CSS when we have so many web sites chewing through 49 MB with the enshitification of the web is hard to reconcile. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47390945 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47390945

Theodores 7mo ago

Ahhh, NASA numbers! My favourite, particularly in SVG files, and more recently in colours. What is a NASA number? Allegedly, within NASA, there is only a need for so many decimal places. If I can remember correctly, nine digits would get a spacecraft to land within a metre on the rock formerly known as the planet Pluto. So no need for that, unless you are going to 'occupy Pluto', building a few AI datacentres there. In the context of SVG, usually it is icons that I encounter, where the artworker has exported something like a search icon, which is a circle and a line. These can be specified in SVG using integers, and single digit integers, if you really want, but let's make it two digits. However, does the SVG file from the artworker have a viewbox containing a circle and a line? Nope. Instead you get one circle for the outer part of the circle in black and another smaller circle in white. Oh, and a line. The circles will be written as polygons with about two hundred vertices, with all vertices specified with NASA numbers (as I call them), typically six decimal places. As a consequence, the file, which should be six lines of human readable code balloons to many kilobytes of nonsense. Yes, this can be put through SVGO but that will just remove some decimal places and make the file even less human readable. As a developer, the simple file is great as the inevitable adjustments can be applied easily, maybe to make the icon bold or to adjust alignment within the viewbox. However, when given artworker files with NASA numbers, I then have to raise a ticket so that I can get the corrected file two weeks later from the guy sat in front of a massive Apple monitor with headphones welded on. The reason for not using NASA numbers has nothing to do with bloat, as no optimisation will make up for the mountain of javascript the marketing guys have bundled into their Google Tag Manager, it has everything to do with efficient workflows. Generally the customer does not care about fonts, colours and much else that designers fret over. If we went back to the 216 'web safe' colours of yesteryear (for CSS, not images), would anyone notice? If we could not load custom fonts, would most people notice? They might, but this would not prevent them from surfing the web.

rerdavies 7mo ago
Good design speaks to credibility, with some justification. If somebody doesn't care about whether their webpages look good, it suggests that they also didn't care about whether their content was accurate.

Sharlin 7mo ago

Eight bits of precision should be enough for everybody. (It both is and isn't, depending on the use case, but I'm pretty sure nobody's design needs to make a difference between #123456 and #123457.)

kg 7mo ago
For gradients it definitely isn't unless you have the ability to do FRC dithering where the dither pattern changes every frame. The banding is very noticeable on a large enough screen.
marcosdumay 7mo ago
Yes. The claim that you don't need more than 3 decimal places is laughable. Your artificial design doesn't need decimal points. At all. You probably can do even better by ignoring the last 4 bits completely. That said, the article is very interesting, and that claim applies on different contexts. It's just aimed at the wrong one.
hdjrudni 7mo ago
LG just introduced a new 13 bit color TV... https://youtu.be/82InNlCqxlU https://youtu.be/82InNlCqxlU it makes a difference in dark colors apparently. I can often still see banding on high end monitors. Do I need that kind of precision in my CSS? Probably not. But for gradients, it seems helpful.

taeric 7mo ago

This reminds me of the amusing tendency of people to use the full double for recording lat/long of locations.

xigoi 7mo ago
https://xkcd.com/2170/ https://xkcd.com/2170/
- skyberrys 7mo ago
  "You're pointing to waldo on a page" ... There's always an xkcd.
pezezin 7mo ago
It depends on your use case. Storing WGS84 coordinates as 32-bit floats can incur on errors of several meters. It might be good for your fitness tracking application, but not for serious GIS usage. Case in point: many years ago I was working on some software to generate 3D models from drone pictures. The first step of the pipeline was to convert from WGS84 to ECEF (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth-centered,_Earth-fixed_coordinate_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth-centered,_Earth-fixed_co...), an absolute Cartesian coordinate system. Well, it turns out that at the scales involved, 6.371 million meters, 32-bit floats have a precision of half a meter, so the resulting models were totally broken. Moving to 64-bit floats fixed this issue.
- taeric 7mo ago
  Isn't that more of using a float to represent the number? Would be akin to trying to represent .5. Which, if your goal is to represent decimals, you are best off not using floats. Granted, just storing it as a 32 bit integer is probably difficult for most uses. BCD just isn't common for most programmers. (Or fixed point, in general.)
  - pezezin 7mo ago
    If your goal is just to store the coordinates in a database, sure, use fixed point or whatever. But any kind of calculation will involve a great deal of trigonometry, square roots, and the like. It is just easier to use floating point. Examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographic_coordinate_conversion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographic_coordinate_conversi... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincenty%27s_formulae https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincenty%27s_formulae https://gist.github.com/govert/1b373696c9a27ff4c72a https://gist.github.com/govert/1b373696c9a27ff4c72a

quantummagic 7mo ago

Very interesting article, and the color picker is exceptionally revealing. As for the challenge, it stopped working in Firefox after the first half dozen examples; but on Chromium I got a decent .0042 Fun!

deleted 7mo ago

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cmovq 7mo ago

I've always assumed minifiers were a kind of lossless compression. I guess this optimization makes it lossy? Even if we can't tell the difference between oklch(0.659432 0.304219 234.75238) and oklch(.659 .304 234.752) they're still different colors.

cyanydeez 7mo ago
Tge whole contexr of the article is answering your question: a "different color" is a specification laden structure and the answer is no according to spec.

Bishop197 7mo ago

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