Ask HN: Can the black border atop the HN mourning header link to who died?
Every so often the site gets updated with a 5px black element above the header. I'm assuming because someone died. The site is currently in this state (Jan 19, 2024, ~6pm PT)
Can you make that a link to the post announcing the death?
71 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 156 ms ] threadhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39051246
(I support your suggestion for future black bars.)
Just as seeing underscores/asterisks is understood as "the author is emphasizing despite lack of formatting," seeing a leading at sign is understood as "the author is saying 'this word is a username' despite lack of ping."
Same with Outlook, now when you @-someone it highlights them and even adds their address "To".
Just because HN doesn't currently support this syntax, doesn't mean we must not use it. As with the other examples, if enough people do it, I wouldn't be surprised if support is added later.
Thankfully, my username is pretty unique (like yours), and I can easily search for references to me, but if my name was a common word it would be really frustrating trying to weed out references to me, compared to where people are actually referencing me.
People have been reinventing this syntax here for a long time. It has remained useless here for a long time. There is no groundswell of rebellion opportunity. You’ll just have to send an email.
Same as in you profile you can view your own comments (and others) , scanning the message for an @ symbol and checking for a valid username I wouldn't consider to be a major undertaking.
As I said in my comment, searching for @username vs username is much easier already.
But yes, a third party could do it. Perhaps @dangrossman (yes, I did that) may be interested.
<td bgcolor="#000000" align="center"><a href="#" style="color: #fff;" target="_blank">John Doe</a></td>
https://imgur.com/a/udpE1JN
Sure it's not correct according to W3, but then again, we have about >200 errors on the page already so it will just be another drop in the bucket (https://validator.w3.org/nu/?doc=https%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombina...).
These are names that should be known. If someone learn nothing else from a tradition here of doing them honor, then let him at least learn the names themselves. Everything else can follow from that, or I think would be wasted anyway.
-Show:
--------------------------------------
In memoriam:
John Hacker. April 1845 - May 2024
--------------------------------------
Simple HN style
Then again, I'm never very interested in reading obituary stories.
Technically it's very easy to add the black bar as it's already added manually and all that would be needed is to add a "data-id=" which would contain the news ID and a regular "id" to the black bar's "<td>" and once clicked it would send you to "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=[DATA-ID]" (perhaps also add "cursor: pointer" to the CSS as well to change the cursor when its hovered).
Again, this is trivial and can be done with minimal work, but it should not be needed at all.
the black bar could link to that page, or it could remain hidden
You're not wrong that seeing a local tradition play out that you don't feel part of can feel unwelcoming sometimes, like not being on the inside of an inside joke. But that's not the same as gatekeeping, and I need carry no brief for HN to say I really don't recall seeing that around this, at least.
It's a tradition of mourning that does no one any harm. I hope there should be charity enough to spare for that in almost any heart.
You seem to be responding to something like "mourning people not everyone knows is gatekeeping", but I don't see anybody saying that.
Or, you figure out the central website for reporting half-staff announcements and you check it on a regular basis: https://halfstaff.org/
Unfortunately, the answer to your question is very likely "No." There are a few subtle reasons why this is the case, and I'm going to attempt to explain them. I've seen this situation many times, and the outcome is almost always "HN doesn't change." This isn't due to laziness; adding the feature is two lines of Arc. The reason is social.
Social software is hard. In fact, it's one of the hardest types of software ever to be built. Things that might seem like small conveniences or improvements often have counterintuitive effects. These effects are not readily understood by people who aren't running the site, because only the people running the site can see them in detail.
For example, suppose we were to implement the black bar link. Firstly, this means that the black bar now becomes a "superslot", pinned at the very top of HN. It turns what was otherwise a subtle gesture into a feature. It will inevitably raise questions about whether the black bar is really warranted for so-and-so, or whether it's fair that they get the superslot. But criticisms like that can be ignored.
The bigger problem is one that Dan has pointed out many times: it's good to have readers dig a little for information. Only people who are motivated will end up showing up in the thread. And those are exactly the kinds of people who you want showing up in that thread, because the point is to honor whomever died, not to catapult the entire community (and then some) at the thread. After all, every single person who ever visits HN will immediately click the black bar if it was clickable. Are you sure this is the kind of effect that would be a Good Thing?
Then there is the truth that doing nothing leads to the optimal outcome. Suppose the black bar was changed, and it was a mistake. This mistake costs time, because now the moderator has to deal with the consequences. It's not just a matter of reverting the change; when stuff like that gets reverted, people get curious why. So it'd be natural to have to write an explanation, which ends up sparking discussion about very tricky subjects. Again, community software is hard, and explaining subtle reasons for doing X is a delicate process. All of this translates to the potential of wasting some unknown quantity of time; time you won't get back, and time that you won't be doing your duties of running HN.
Then there's the most subtle point: it would break tradition. pg was the originator of the black bar, along with the christmas colors. It might seem cheesy to people who haven't been here since 2006, but there's something magical about seeing HN behave exactly as it was originally written, even when that behavior is sometimes arguably less optimal than it otherwise could be. Because, again, every change has social effects, and these are very hard to predict.
Lastly, the person who died might not want all of the attention. Are you sure you really want to be spotlighted by the entire (tech) world when you pass? It wasn't till I had some uncomfortable moments in the spotlight that I realized that fame is sometimes something that people choose to avoid.
For all of those reasons and then some, the black bar is likely going to stay as it is. If only as a hat tip to the person who originally created the tradition.
But remaining mysterious kinda works against the "memorial" aspect, and making the editorial decision "this passing is worth noting". It creates an "in-the-know"/"not-in-the-know" division that's somewhat against the ethos of being fair & open with those who don't yet know something.
A simple, "RIP, [name] [YYYY]-[YYYY]" would be a kindness to readers, and enhance the respect paid the deceased, while avoiding the thread clickthroughs you're concerned about.
And otherwise, we'll keep having these threads every time the honoree's identity is sufficiently obscure, and any associated stories/remembrances scroll off the front page.
One (rather cold) way of viewing the situation is that if they spend their time adding this feature, it's at the expense of something else they could be doing. There are technical reasons it's not quite as straightforward as just setting a title attribute.
Here's precisely how the black bar works:
https://github.com/wting/hackernews/blob/5a3296417d23d1ecc90...
They uncomment that line of code by removing the semicolon, then deploy it. ("Deploy" is also known as "copy-pasting that function into a REPL," but devs like to overcomplicate it in other languages.)If it were as simple as writing "Dave Mills [YYYY]-[YYYY]", they might actually do that. But Arc doesn't have keyword arguments, and tdcolor has no way of passing along a "title:" keyword in order to set the html attribute.
It's partly why I updated Arc with keyword arguments.
But, there's still that other aspect: figuring out [YYYY]-[YYYY] takes some amount of time, so it increases the activation energy of the black bar considerably. Right now it's a one-character deletion followed by a deploy. Honoring legendary hackers is a good thing, but the black bar already does that.
Looking at the precedents in code near what you've linked, for how possibly-arbitrary STYLE and CLASS and COLSPAN and CELLPADDING and WIDTH attributes are set, it's hard to see why it shouldn't be as easy as something like:
Of course, it might not yet be that easy.But if that's hard to support, with a couple low-risk broadly-beneficial lines elsewhere, then rumors of Arc's concise expressive power seem exaggerated.
Over time not only will more people die, but we will, as a community, split over and over . . . over what/who should be celebrated.
Regardless, at some future point, assume HN still exists, there will be a point where the symbol is constantly black. Thus meaningless.
And I would rather not have death be meaningless. HN-approved death or otherwise.
I personally don't think there's a need for this as this is not Reddit and the average user should be able to figure this out on their own.
RIP Dave Mills!
Otherwise the bar becomes a kind of unfriendly cryptic ingroup signal – "sheesh, don't you already know?".
A more intelligent solution would be providing the information which was deemed important enough to make the effort in the first place.
This is a news site. Why would you expect the people arriving to already know the news they came to learn?
The reason being that I'm against oversimplification and I believe it dumbs the community down. The beauty of HN for me is how primitive and free from clutter it is so that I can focus on the content.
>This is a news site. Why would you expect the people arriving to already know the news they came to learn?
I'm not, you can simply find the answer by going through the first few pages, I just don't believe an effort needs to be made to make it easier than that.
I love the simplicity of hn. Giving us a way to know who the black bar is for is not some scope creep that will slow down the site nor visually clutter it.
Keeping something more difficult just for the sake of “smarter people” will never be a compelling argument to me. Consider those same smart people could be doing something meaningfully challenging in the new time they’ve saved by having a brute force problem automated.
This is obviously not as time consuming, but the criticism is not based on an effective ideology.