[HN Gopher] Too Much Color
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Too Much Color
Author : maguay
Score : 132 points
Date : 2026-03-18 02:28 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.keithcirkel.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.keithcirkel.co.uk)
| cratermoon wrote:
| What's My JND? 0.0089 Can you beat it?
| https://www.keithcirkel.co.uk/whats-my-jnd/?r=A30iKP__7_Hb
| #WhatsMyJND
| cafebabbe wrote:
| Only with chrome devtools :)
| xiconfjs wrote:
| What's My JND? 0.0032 Can you beat it?
| https://www.keithcirkel.co.uk/whats-my-jnd/?r=AUEjKP___831
| #WhatsMyJND
|
| I need a better display for sure :)
| WalterGR wrote:
| Discussed here: 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 wrote:
| 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).
| footydude wrote:
| 0.0042 apparently 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.
| Jensson wrote:
| That mostly depends on the quality of your screen.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| 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.
| halflife wrote:
| 0.0021
| bee_rider wrote:
| .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 wrote:
| Looking around if you have an LCD also helps compensate for
| colors shifting off-axis.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| 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.
| rXwubXUGAm wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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/ #WhatsMyJND
| drcongo wrote:
| Same score here on my MBP with an absolutely filthy screen.
| Reckon I could top the leaderboard if I cleaned it.
| krsw wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 0.0021. I find it helps to bob your head around like when you
| are watching your food in the microwave
| kalaksi wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 0.00057 here - 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Was fun and kind of meditative locking in like that - I noticed
| that the anti-glare coating on my screen introduces a visibly
| larger D than the later stages of the game (kind of a dithered
| "cloud" noise), making it quite a challenge. _0.0021_ oneshot.
| Tempest1981 wrote:
| "At this rate, CIE will want your number" - the taunts are
| great!
|
| What's My JND? 0.0072 #WhatsMyJND
| jcelerier wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Computer screens have three-dimensional color spaces.
| Tetrachromacy doesn't change that.
| tgv wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| Zardoz84 wrote:
| And the eye cones not are sharp filter, they overlap ranges
| with mid-low sensibility. That must be nought to someone with
| Tetrachromacy to percibe something different on a RGB screen.
|
| > More precisely, she had an additional cone type L',
| intermediate between M and L in its responsivity, and showed
| 3 dimensional (M, L', and L components) color discrimination
| for wavelengths 546-670 nm (to which the fourth type, S, is
| insensitive). Source: Wikipedia
| xyzsparetimexyz wrote:
| > But they do exist
|
| Do they?
| IAmBroom wrote:
| Do you doubt genetic and microbiological science?
| rerdavies wrote:
| Sometimes.
| lucideer wrote:
| > _admittedly, hella rare. Apparently there are less than a few
| dozen confirmed world-wide_
|
| What's actually hella rare is _tests_ for tetrachromacy. Given
| the total number of people who have ever taken such a test, I
| think it 's reasonable to assume there are significantly more
| than a few dozen actual tetrachromats out there.
| mark-r wrote:
| It's theoretically related to color blindness, so you'd
| expect it to be as common. But the problem is even if your
| eye has the extra primary, your brain may not have developed
| the ability to "see" it. They had to test quite a few people
| with the proper genetic background before they finally found
| one.
| altairprime wrote:
| Thanks to a genetic variation I have a variation that may be
| similarly useful. I aced the JND test without contacts and with
| adaptive white balance enabled, and I already know from playing
| I Love Hue that my fidelity and velocity improves when I have
| stereo vision.
|
| It turns out that my left and right eyes are skewed apart along
| a magenta/cyan axis. Left is more cyan, right is more magenta.
| It's not as strong an effect as 3d glasses, maybe no more than
| a 1-2% light gel, and under normal circumstances I mostly don't
| notice it unless I'm doing color matching work.
|
| If I try to do color matching with one eye, it's boringly fine
| - 0.0022 JND, same as everyone else above. I'll get some things
| slightly wrong as usual, in patterns that make sense for the
| hue shift.
|
| But when I use both eyes, the binocular process that leads to
| 3d vision also locks on to color differentials as well as
| spatial, and synthesizes imaginary color gradients out of flat
| surfaces diagonally from contrasting corner edges. It's not a
| problem for writing on paper or anything, but if you give me a
| grid of flat paint chips I can order them by hue because their
| gradient depths are wrong -- like, the whole sort by hue in 2d
| grid thing is just "equalize the difference vector intensity
| across the vector field" and that's a nice relaxing thing to
| do, right? In essence, it's sort of like MIMO 3x2 vs. normal
| vision's 3x1 or tetrachromacy's 4x1.
|
| I know this isn't true 4x1 tetrachromacy because I discovered,
| through the video game Intake (in which I reached 10th place on
| the world leaderboard), that my ability to snap-differentiate
| color is considerably more error prone when the two colors are
| the exact hues of magenta-cyan that my eyes differ by. Which
| makes sense: those would be my _lowest_ fidelity colors,
| because they have the least distance from the differential
| centerline, so trying to figure out which eye to use causes
| little stutters in my color parsing and more frequent errors in
| outcome. If it was "the same tetrachromatic in both eyes" I
| wouldn't have trouble telling magenta and cyan apart, because
| I'd have a fourth receptor with which to detect R /B vs G/B
| shifts easily by their B/T difference.
|
| I'm not sure if this is a normal circumstance or not, but since
| my vision is extremely bizarre (-5 left, +2 right) and I can
| function and drive _without_ eye correction due to forming
| partial stereo depth out of blurry hue fields from the left eye
| and telescopic light fields from the right, I think that
| growing up without eye correction forced my brain to use hue
| matching to stabilize my visual field in the absence of the
| usual higher-fidelity "both eyes have the same focal plane"
| convenience that most people have. And my depth perception
| remains to this day extremely flawed; it works, enough that I
| can drive with absolute precision, but I can't catch a thrown
| object for crap and I occasionally parse 2d shapes with
| contrast interplay as 3d shapes and then realize a moment later
| that there is no 3d shape there -- painted lines on a
| particularly damaged bit of road might at first blink read as a
| curb -- b /c my depth perception was formed by prioritizing hue
| and contrast at a reflexive level.
|
| There's probably a formula somewhere that I could use to
| calculate the theoretical boost in hue SNR by modeling two
| towers, each with tri-frequency radio receivers with slightly
| offset frequencies, and then calculating the net boost effect
| of frequency trilateration across a spectrum for radio signals
| of different frequencies. Someday I hope learn enough about
| radio to document that and prove where my nodes of _worsened_
| acuity are! Not that it much matters, but what a fun test it
| would be.
| sophieraiin wrote:
| Am I pretty?? (story)
| jacknews wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| My impression is that they are a compression expert, not a
| color expert. Make sense they chose uniform flat colors :D
| chuckadams wrote:
| "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 wrote:
| interesting approach!
| bhaak wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| Theodores wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| taeric wrote:
| This reminds me of the amusing tendency of people to use the full
| double for recording lat/long of locations.
| xigoi wrote:
| https://xkcd.com/2170/
| skyberrys wrote:
| "You're pointing to waldo on a page" ... There's always an
| xkcd.
| pezezin wrote:
| 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_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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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_convers
| i...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincenty%27s_formulae
|
| https://gist.github.com/govert/1b373696c9a27ff4c72a
| quantummagic wrote:
| 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!
| cmovq wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
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