Thank you! But the only thing that really deserves credit is Jeremy Singer-Vine's https://github.com/jsvine/waybackpack library. Pretty much made this a very straightforward task
Longest running AB test ever, people keep seeing the black bar occasionally and we just can't figure out whether it improves engagement. How frustrating!
This list was compiled using a simple Python script that recursively requested HN's Algolia search API for posts containing "has died". For each relevant hit, I pulled in snapshots from the Wayback Machine to see if the HTML document contained the black bar element at the end of the day the post was created. It's possible there are names missing.
> Occasionally, there will be a thin black bar at the top of the top bar, in memoriam of a significant figure in the tech/science community dying. A Hacker News submission about the death will usually be on the front page at that time.
Thank you for explaining. The thin black bar looks like a bug with layout to be honest. I would rather get rid of orange for the sake of clearly indicating that something sad has happened.
Heh, I experienced exactly this in a very convincing dream I had once.
EDIT: I should elaborate, it went like this:
Went to HN in my dream. Saw the black band, scrolled down and the topcolor turned black on black writing. Thought immediately that Knuth had departed. Whole page turned black. Felt overwhelming gratitude and relief that HN was taking it so seriously.
I think it would be a worthy tribute, and the least we could do.
Worthy, perhaps, if you already knew he was dead, else you'd have to go somewhere else to find out, and if they too were giving a 'worthy tribute' you'd have issues.
I'm pretty sure Peter Naur was commemmorated back in 2016, too.
It was right at the begininng of the year, which would explain him being missing from this list.
Because it's definitely an incomplete list. You can't rely on the Wayback machine to find black bar, for some reason. I also recall that the Queen had a black bar, as someone else already pointed out.
It's incredible how for many people this had no meaning, while for me it was immediately clear. Semiotics is a complex art, and perhaps this signal was a bit too subtle for many.
but I guess it's also cultural... a black band for mourning it's a very eurocentric thing. I am not sure if it would make sense in other contexts. (but i really don't know)
A few years ago, I saw a social media prank of posting a photo of an author - say, George RR Martin - with the caption "Renowned American fantasy George RR Martin at age 74, at his home in New Mexico yesterday. Martin's best known series, A Song of Ice and Fire was adapted into the television series A Game of Thrones."
I've understood the meaning pretty quickly too, and I think it's a very nice gesture. If there isn't such a post (on the first 2-3 pages max) however, as has happened a few times, it's just a mystery death ribbon.
It could be confusing for some as it's selectively applied. There are only 15 names on the shown list but there are likely 2-3x that many which spent the better part of the day on the front page over the past 7 years.
It's just annoying to me. It looks like the website is broken. I'll be trying to add it to uBlock or something. If it had text then maybe I'd keep it. As it stands it's not actually communicating anything meaningful. Poor UX.
For sure. I'm not trying to say that we shouldn't have some form of communication toward that end, either. What I mean is that the black border appears as if there is something wrong with the webpage. That is not clear. I am not saying that the idea of what it is trying to communicate is bad or wrong in any way. I meant that it is unclear as presently implemented.
I meant no disrespect to the sentiment. I don't think a black border at the top of a webpage is clear enough communication. Perhaps if there were some additional graphic indication of what it is? As it stands it's a black bar that makes the page look broken. If someone had a ribbon or band on their person or an image of one I would likely have grasped the significance after a moment's thought.
I never would have guessed a black menu bar / banner on a website would be triggered by someone dying. Not saying it’s a bad thing in any way - I just wouldn’t have any reason to relate the two things without reason.
I wondered about this in a comment some time ago, good to see.
I assume the fastest way would be for dang to run a search of CSS changesets. That would get the dates, and if posted somewhere a collective effort could produce a definitive list.
This was essentially going to be my comment. If I can’t do something like click or hover over the bar for more information it’s not a very good feature.
Further evidence: The confusion in this thread of people who didn’t understand why it was there.
I’ve read a bunch of comments in this thread and I still don’t know who the current black bar is for.
Kevin Mitnick got commemorated this way. How do I know it? Because I asked about the black band, and the good people of HN explained that to me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36803421
Nice catch, my script only grabbed a few snapshots at the end of the day the post was created and I guess Kevin Mitnick's was added a few days after. I added his name to the list :)
I think that would be good. A bit thanatological maybe, and perhaps too "niche" for a hn list, but I think it would be classy if done in a good way, like you suggest. A wall of remembrance. I think we need that as a hn list indeed.
good thing to browse every now and then and remind yourself of the people who have big contributions, and how much you appreciate people, could even spark expressions of that appreciation to folks alive too.
Huh. I always use dark mode (natively where available, and through extensions elsewhere), so I suppose I never noticed it. I wonder if there's a way to make it more noticeable to dark mode users. Maybe pick a different shape and put it in the orange title?
I’m pretty sure I remember the queen got black banner on HN. Which I found to be slightly odd given this curtesy wasn’t offered to the C language Dennis Ritchie on the day he died!
Queen Victoria died in 1901. I bet there were people alive at Elizabeth II’s coronation half a century later who still referred to Victoria as “the” queen.
I still refer to 'the 20s' as the 1920s. And 'turn of the century' as 19th -> 20th century even though we're a quarter of the way into the next.
I guess it'll be a generational thing like knowing what your nans talking about when she mentions the 'tranny' (transistor radio), your dad the hi fi, etc, etc.
Overly logical. Then at your crossover point it's the other side who know it wasn't there having the Mandela effect. Either way you can't avoid it: you can't "out logic" the Mandela effect.
Turns out he's rocking the passed away list rather than the has died list. Find your niche and own it, fitting
It's 4.3k actually btw, would be second to Stephen Hawking unless Bram gets a few hundred more votes and takes second place. I'd never have guessed the vim author would get close to the apple founder. Probably the wrong morbid thing to speculate on, but this surprise makes me wonder what legends like Carmack or Gates will get
Hi everyone! Did not expect this much interest! Here's a gist of the code I wrote last night: https://gist.github.com/willmeyers/6fdb4a502b8dffce758bde084.... It's slow, bad, etc... please go easy on me. Feel free to modify and share your findings as well.
As for missing names, since I only grab one timestamp at the end of the day it's definitely likely names get missed as the bar is manually added by the HN team as any time. I'm not purposely omitting names.
As for why only 2016 my script stopped running after going through search results up to a certain page and I don't really want to spend more time on this to fix it on Sunday.
FWIW, one thing you might consider doing if you ever want to do more work on your script, is search for "black bar" in the search index. Two very common patterns we see are people asking "why is there a black bar" as a submission, and/or comments asking "can we get the black bar for <person>?" on the main story about a death. Of course the "can we get the black bar" thing is occasionally asked without the black bar actually being done, so it's not a perfect signal but it might help somewhat.
108 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 244 ms ] thread> ...but I compiled a list of people who've received it starting from 2016.
1. How do you track which day had a black bar? By web.archive?
2. How do you associate the day to a specific post? I guess this should be fairly easy, albeit kinda manual.
This list was compiled using a simple Python script that recursively requested HN's Algolia search API for posts containing "has died". For each relevant hit, I pulled in snapshots from the Wayback Machine to see if the HTML document contained the black bar element at the end of the day the post was created. It's possible there are names missing.
> Occasionally, there will be a thin black bar at the top of the top bar, in memoriam of a significant figure in the tech/science community dying. A Hacker News submission about the death will usually be on the front page at that time.
EDIT: I should elaborate, it went like this:
Went to HN in my dream. Saw the black band, scrolled down and the topcolor turned black on black writing. Thought immediately that Knuth had departed. Whole page turned black. Felt overwhelming gratitude and relief that HN was taking it so seriously.
I think it would be a worthy tribute, and the least we could do.
I believe the black bar started with Jobs?
Anyway, cool project, I’ve always wondered, thanks for making and thanks for sharing!
RIP
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Naur
It's a nice gesture to people who likely had some impact on lots of our lives
A ribbon [1] or armband [2] is a really common and subtle way of symbolising mourning, I'm quite surprised people aren't more aware of this practise.
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_ribbon
2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_armband
I think a HTML comment explaining why would have stopped me.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37011421
Is this not the case? Does the black bar show for anyone with “.. has died” over a certain threshold of points?
Super curious as to how the bar is determined.
good stories get put on a second chance pool and dang can pick them manually
moderators keep this place alive.
I assume the fastest way would be for dang to run a search of CSS changesets. That would get the dates, and if posted somewhere a collective effort could produce a definitive list.
That way, it's immediately clear who the black bar is for, because seeing the bar without context info can really scare me.
Further evidence: The confusion in this thread of people who didn’t understand why it was there.
I’ve read a bunch of comments in this thread and I still don’t know who the current black bar is for.
Dark mode doesn't.
ok. That is definitely new to me then.
good thing to browse every now and then and remind yourself of the people who have big contributions, and how much you appreciate people, could even spark expressions of that appreciation to folks alive too.
I was quite surprised because HN isn't UK focussed, and the Queen isn't (wasn't) a tech gal.
Off topic. How long can we refer to her as 'the queen' without qualification.
And how long before I remember the new lyrics to God save the qu.. king?
I still refer to 'the 20s' as the 1920s. And 'turn of the century' as 19th -> 20th century even though we're a quarter of the way into the next.
I guess it'll be a generational thing like knowing what your nans talking about when she mentions the 'tranny' (transistor radio), your dad the hi fi, etc, etc.
The more people that remember, the stronger the presumed Mandela effect, but also the higher the burden of proof to prove the Mandela effect.
At some point it becomes reasonable to assume it isn't the Mandela effect, and just the way back machine not capturing it.
https://web.archive.org/web/20111013093338/http://news.ycomb...
Not only was the black bar turned on, the top 11 stories were all about dmr, as were 17 of 30 stories on the front page.
p.s. No, we didn't turn it on for the queen. I just checked the logs.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Turns out he's rocking the passed away list rather than the has died list. Find your niche and own it, fitting
It's 4.3k actually btw, would be second to Stephen Hawking unless Bram gets a few hundred more votes and takes second place. I'd never have guessed the vim author would get close to the apple founder. Probably the wrong morbid thing to speculate on, but this surprise makes me wonder what legends like Carmack or Gates will get
We would need to see the "inflation adjusted" numbers here, because Hacker News has certainly had a lot of growth since 2011.
Foresightful, as it's currently August 6 in most of the World...
As for missing names, since I only grab one timestamp at the end of the day it's definitely likely names get missed as the bar is manually added by the HN team as any time. I'm not purposely omitting names.
As for why only 2016 my script stopped running after going through search results up to a certain page and I don't really want to spend more time on this to fix it on Sunday.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=644954
FWIW, one thing you might consider doing if you ever want to do more work on your script, is search for "black bar" in the search index. Two very common patterns we see are people asking "why is there a black bar" as a submission, and/or comments asking "can we get the black bar for <person>?" on the main story about a death. Of course the "can we get the black bar" thing is occasionally asked without the black bar actually being done, so it's not a perfect signal but it might help somewhat.