It's a Christmas theme. I think they leave it up only 24 hours? I'm not sure.<p>You can change your top bar color. Mine is not the standard, so I forgot they did something to the top bar. I only have the alternating colored numbers.
This seems to be a bigger problem than just HN. Several of my neighbors put distracting lights on their houses without considering color theory. I noticed some green and red decorations at the grocery store too, clashing with the usual white/blue theme.<p>I had planned to spend Friday catching up on HN but after two minutes with these colors my eyes starting watering. Who decides to make these arbitrary changes?<p>I'm developing a hypothesis (which I will eventually describe in a Medium post) that these color changes and attempts at decoration coincide with certain days of the year, but I haven't quite worked out the pattern yet.
The contrast is too small in the navigation bar now, very hard to read the black on dark red unless I turn the brightness up very high. And the coloring of the numbers doesn't really do much good either, I agree.