Title: The HN homepage has five ranks colored black rather than gray. Currently this is &quot;Learning how to ride a bike&quot;, &quot;Log4j: Between a rock and a hard place&quot;, &quot;How to train your decision-making AIs&quot;, &quot;Carolina Gold was once the most popular rice grown in America (2019)&quot;, and &quot;Packaging for instant coffee made out of seaweed&quot;. It seems to follow the story, e.g. the bike story was #12 before and now it&#x27;s #13: the color moved with it. They do not have in common a recent&#x2F;old submission time, high&#x2F;low score, or high&#x2F;low comments.<p>The HTML difference is `&lt;font color=&quot;black&quot;&gt;$rank&lt;&#x2F;font&gt;` being inserted around the rank.<p>It also shows up in incognito mode with the same ones colored black, so I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s account-related.<p>(Some rambling follows, I&#x27;m not actually serious about a secret hidden meaning, just a toy idea. Most likely it&#x27;s something like low comment downvotes to attract attention to the story.)<p>My first thought was that the numbers had a hidden meaning as a puzzle or respect, maybe someone died who invented the equivalent of a Fibonacci sequence. Looking in the OEIS, 1,4,6,12,18 did not mean anything obvious (http:&#x2F;&#x2F;oeis.org&#x2F;search?q=1%2C4%2C6%2C12%2C18). Then I noticed the numbers changed... but not pseudorandomly, but with the stories, so it seems that the numbers are irrelevant. Is it about the title? If you read the first title character of each, you get LCHPL. If you read the 1st character of the first, the 2nd character of the 2nd, etc., you get LAWKN. Not yet seeing that hidden meaning.<p>Edit: To everyone saying a hot indicator, I thought of that and it doesn&#x27;t seem to make sense. E.g. go to page 3 and observe this one being black:<p>&gt; 4 points by [user] 7 hours ago<p>There are currently (22:47 UTC) actually 3 black on the third page, which seems a bit inconsistent with what I saw earlier (earlier: first page had 4, next page had 1, next page had 0).
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