Hacker News Reader

Comment by abeppu | Hacker News Reader

There's an optometry place in my neighborhood with a back-lit sign with big, blue block letters. And every time I walk by at night I note how fuzzy it looks.

I'm convinced this is an intentional troll. This optometrist knowingly picked a sign to make people momentarily question their vision.

View on HN

This happens every wintertime for me as blue string lights are put up, and they always appear “fuzzy” compared to other colors.

I got dry eyes some time ago. Dryness gone but now I see starburst at night in headlights, neon signs and stars. Being unable to see stars as flickering dots anymore hurts me the most. Neon signs in particular if blue are totally whacky and unreadable until I go too close. I went to optometrist recently and they didn't understand why blue in particular and recommended a color blindness test which I obviously passed.

Now I understand why blue in particular. Damage is done, I wish I could take it back.

Wait, stars are flickering dots for most people?

From atmospheric distortion they can appear to flicker, or “twinkle” as the song goes.

Yes, stars typically twinkle slightly.

Stars are unimaginably small point lights in the sky. They look like larger dots because of imperfect focus in our eyes [1]. But since they are in fact so tiny, it means very small atmospheric variation and obstruction—heat shimmer, floating dust, etc.—can significantly momentarily occlude the star. That causes its perceived brightness to vary over time.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airy_disk

What are they for you?

May I ask how exactly your dry eyes led to degradation in vision? I've recently been struggling with mild corneal abrasions that leave me with something resembling a "starburst" in my night vision, and I'm suspecting it may be caused by dry eyes.

I think dryness did some damage on cornea. It's better some rare days (which feels like a beautiful dream) but mostly I see lights, moon, stars any bright light with dark background as starburst or multiples. Even moon :(

Do you also find that this effect is way more pronounced in recent years with LED string lights than colored lights many years ago? I think b/c LEDs are more monochromatic, I will notice a difference between my parent's extremely old string lights and newer sets.

Technology Connections did some videos on "Making Holiday Lights Less Garish", where instead of using narrowband colored LEDs he filtered white ones: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBFPJ3_6ZWs

Epic! Trolling or genius marketing while a bit misleading. At the same time if people can't clearly read the sign how do they know it's an optometry and that they need to go there?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com