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Is my blue your blue?

533 pointsby theogravityyesterday at 8:24 PM368 commentsview on HN

Comments

thepratoday at 7:02 AM

hue 174, "true median" .-.

stephenlfyesterday at 10:25 PM

Fun. Are you accepting PRs? I would love to add a “share” button that shares the color I landed on

softbuilderyesterday at 10:20 PM

I want this but for blue vs. purple.

mncharitytoday at 2:31 AM

The xkcd color survey[1] was 16 years ago now. With the data available, there were various follow-ups. Many, including xkcd's own "take it for fun here" link there in [1], are now 404. But the strata[2] and word cloud[3] are still up, and relevant here.

The data remains available. It was a TidyTuesday ("social data project") for 2025-07-08.[4] This response[5] looked at TFA. (This week's TT is ag tariffs.[9])

I just did a quick and sloppy search, so there's likely more out there. Curiously, I found AIMode and Bing/chat less immediately helpful than I'd have guessed.

Years ago I used the xkcd data for a prototype web interactive for kids, which shader filtered video to selected colors... but it was overlapping rather than a partition, and I'd never leave out cyan. Hmm, maybe a vibe coding target.

[1] https://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/ [2] https://www.datapointed.net/2010/06/xkcd-color-name-strata/ [3] https://luminoso.com/the-color-cloud-an-interactive-visualiz... [4] https://github.com/rfordatascience/tidytuesday/blob/main/dat... [5] https://jofrhwld.github.io/blog/posts/2025/07/2025-07-09_col... Off topic: [9] https://github.com/rfordatascience/tidytuesday/blob/main/dat...

celerydtoday at 7:18 AM

This is stupid without color calibration, or even contrast/brightness levels on your monitor, which can turn these turquoise shades into other colors entirely.

nektroyesterday at 9:42 PM

> Your boundary is at hue 174, just like the population median. You're a true neutral.

metalmantoday at 8:29 AM

people are getting more stupid debate without evidence and logic is rampant the title is the clasic example of word salad, pretending to be valid conjecture , but only exists to cause distraction through "subjectification" or foucault off, already

reassess_blindyesterday at 11:32 PM

Tried it on two displays, one I’m 82% green, the other I’m 75% blue.

cwilluyesterday at 11:31 PM

For some reason, dragging the window makes the chart re-animate.

LocalHyesterday at 11:16 PM

Also needs a button "this is both" for colors like cyan

debpalashtoday at 3:47 AM

almost got fooled by blue being green or vice versa. nice experiment!

d--btoday at 3:21 AM

In France turquoise is historically called “bleu turquoise”, so French people would definitely categorize the in-between as blue.

OwlGoesHootyesterday at 11:48 PM

Man doesn’t understand teal the website

w-lltoday at 6:28 AM

turquoise is green.

anyfooyesterday at 10:19 PM

Wow. Did anyone else have some serious trouble with this?

The first color was obvious to me, as it was designed to be (it even tells you if you intentionally misclick). But at the very next color, the first "test color", I literally face palmed and said "oh my god" out loudly.

It was so, so hard for me to decide. I really just wanted to pick a non-existent "teal" option. Both "blue" or "green" felt wrong and equally right at the same time.

It just got harder from there. At the end, it told me that my threshold is "bluer than 80% of the population", but honestly, I don't think that's really true in my case. I was so ambivalent, my choices really felt random to me very quickly.

gunalxtoday at 5:54 AM

Can we get this with more different colors.

Like forest green olive green. navy blue.

Also maybe the full color spectrum. And a select set of colors to pick from.

FpUsertoday at 4:57 AM

>"Your boundary is at hue 187, bluer than 97% of the population. For you, turquoise is green"

Problem is that it asks to categorize colors that to me are neither blue nor green

freecodyxyesterday at 10:29 PM

cyan is neither blue nor green

wat10000yesterday at 9:39 PM

I wonder how much of this is testing people's eyes/brains, and how much is testing their screens.

Uptrendatoday at 6:42 AM

crowd sourced perception research. Love it, OP.

zuminatoryesterday at 9:55 PM

When the final threshold image was displayed, I felt that the boundary was too far over to the left and I had a fair amount of green on the blue side.

I think this would work better if the hues jumped around a bit instead of blatantly triangulating, so that you wouldn't be biased by your prior semection.

user3939382today at 1:52 AM

I think things are green that other people think are grey. Never heard of that with anyone else.

andaiyesterday at 11:44 PM

Pro tip, I had my device's blue light filter enabled.

I want to say that shifted my score a lot. But every time I play I get a pretty different score, even on the same screen calibration. So, uh...

foxesyesterday at 11:03 PM

I just took it to mean is this more blue or green rather than literally blue or green. Correct answer is then 180, anything else is clearly a fail :)

eceyesterday at 11:01 PM

I got hue 175 twice, but bluer than 66% of the population once and 59% the second time.

u8080yesterday at 10:25 PM

Midori

antisthenesyesterday at 10:14 PM

This assumes that the person you're testing isn't aware of the whole category of colors that sit between green and blue?

There's teal, cyan, aquamarine, etc...It's such a uniquely american notion to force someone to categorize something (incorrectly) into one of 2 things. Almost a comical parallel to the political system.

moffkalastyesterday at 9:48 PM

This is cyan!

heavymemorytoday at 3:20 AM

always blue

nicebyteyesterday at 9:38 PM

it's a neat experiment but I think it's ultimately flawed because color is usually perceived in context, and depending on context I could easily see anyone reinterpreting the hues they labeled "green" in this test as blue, and vice versa.

EDIT: in general, blue is a pretty fascinating color. yes, many cultures have a somewhat blurry distinction between blue and green. Some others seem to differentiate shades of blue that others don't (i.e. in Russian "голубой" and "синий" refer to distinct colors but in English those would be just shades of blue). I guess there's something about photons in that energy band that messes with perception. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-photo_blue

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salehsotoday at 4:11 AM

I enjoyed this more than I should lol