@Panda Yes - based on last year's Winter Bash I expect they'll be awarded somewhere between 12-24 times by the end of it. But it's hard to predict! Helping Heart will be awarded with increasing frequency as WB passes, but Three Buried Pennies might not.
I made the hat myself this morning (using a retired hat from an old winterbash as a template). No more design time available for this year. Waddayathink? — Yaakov Ellis ♦Dec 22 '20 at 15:58
@Slate “earned by giving an answer scoring 5 or better to question that had a score of −3 or worse at the time of answering and later rose to a score of +3 or better”
It appeared for a few Winter Bashes under different names and it’s usually awarded to <30 users.
To be honest I would guess Helping Heart is the most complex WB hat trigger we've ever had. But that's only because it grossly outpaces everything else this year. It requires at least two people to obtain - and most commonly I'd expect three, four, or even possibly five participants.
It's also the most rigorous this year, I believe. It would be extremely difficult to game without extensive use of sockpuppets.
@12944qwerty Yea, but there was one year when the Show Off Your Hats post had a negative score at the beginning and those who posted an answer then all got the hat later.
@U12-F̉͋̅̾̇orward what do you think of this golfing challenge before i post it
You have a random string input which you then get the unicode code point of each character. Then, for each digit in each code point you get the binary number and take the sum of all of those binary numbers as if they were in base 10
Wolgwang guessed that Two Buried Pennies is One Buried Penny plus the post gets upvoted. That guess is missing a tiny stipulation (not "new post"), but is actually ridiculously close. Also, "One Buried Penny" doesn't seem to have been identified, yet, so identifying Two Buried Pennies first is extremely funny to me.
(You made a lot of progress with what you figured out but as a puzzle-setter you should know I try to avoid 'lucky guess' kinds of situations. Don't let that discourage you - you've gotten a lot closer.)
The puzzles are fun but I mostly focused on making these Winter Bash secret hat triggers award consistent, helpful, positive participation in ways that others in the community can validate. (With a few exceptions that are just for fun.) That makes the triggers a bit less obvious by default, because misuse prevention is built in.
(It was a bit of a careful balancing act. I suspect there will be 2-3 undiscovered hats this year, and I'm ok with that. But I'll be extremely excited if the triggers to those are found.)
@nobody Eight have been discovered. Five, I've seen someone almost say the trigger to the hat, or even sometimes outright say it (but not ask for confirmation). Eight more hats remain past those, many of which will be awarded with increasing frequency. So, I'm hopeful.
@nobody Eight have been discovered. Five, I've seen someone almost say the trigger to the hat, or even sometimes outright say it (but not ask for confirmation). Eight more hats remain past those, many of which will be awarded with increasing frequency. So, I'm hopeful.
@CinCout They used to have something of the sort in the past. But turns out things tend to get a bit ugly when it comes to deciding who figured out the trigger. Because often, it's more than one person involved in determining the trigger.
@Wolgwang Believe it or not, that's actually a bit too restrictive. You're very, very close, but the hat has been awarded in cases that haven't gone as far as you've listed.
(All of the question hats, I believe, require other factors outside of your control, including confirmation that it's a good question, in order to obtain them, specifically to discourage folks from just asking random non-useful questions.)
(Or if you feel like you'd want the hat, I'm sure you can come up with something you know that would benefit from being written down and shared with the world.)
(But realizing that would require finding a question with four positive answers and one nonpositive answer, which is. Really, beyond unlikely to happen.)
I ask if it was a random guess because no one was even close to guessing that one.
You just kinda pulled that out of the blue, at least to my knowledge, which is pretty impressive luck. (Or skill, if it was deliberate.)
...and that makes the current split 9/5/7 (discovered/close/unknown).
(Harmony, Rapport, and Consensus are all rather difficult hats to obtain because of the consecutive agreement requirement. But that's what they're for - they reward consistency.)
@Wolgwang Believe it or not, that's actually a bit too restrictive. You're very, very close, but the hat has been awarded in cases that haven't gone as far as you've listed.
I think I got the hat for a single first question where I posted a comment, the OP replied, I posted another comment and the OP replied and edited the question. And only one of the comments was upvoted.
Winter Bash 2021