Let's change the HN title bar to #663399
Learn more: http://www.zeldman.com/2014/06/10/the-color-purple/
In Memory of Rebecca Meyer, help fund childhood cancer research: https://www.stbaldricks.org/donate/fundraiser/539/2014
In Memory of Rebecca Meyer, help fund childhood cancer research: https://www.stbaldricks.org/donate/fundraiser/539/2014
48 comments
[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 81.6 ms ] threadI'm going to use #EED2EE which is thistle, close enough. ;)
The proposed color makes it unreadable, #aa99ff looks ok though
Edit: I was thinking page title. #663399 as the color for the header would be really nice too.
Can I get HN to put something in their banner every day for a different one?
A very young girl died of cancer. That's pretty sad, but I fail to see how it's anymore sad than the hundreds/thousands of people who die of cancer every day. Millions of people will have died of cancer by the end of this year.
So we have all these people tweeting this hashtag and coloring their Twitter avatar purple, because Rebecca's favorite color was purple (no non-sequitur there).
Why? Why are we mourning the death of this particular individual; what about her plight is so unique?
To me it just seems like bandwagoning.
Surely there's some aspect of this that I do not understand or of which I am unaware.
In the same way that I don't personally know Linus, Mark Andreesen, Tim Berners-Lee, et al, I remember the days on usenet when we all hung out and got shit done.
I'm a nobody in the grand scheme of things -- and I'm quite okay with that -- but there have been thousands of us who made all the stuff we use today happen. Eric is one of those who made a little more impact than the rest of us anonymous folk. And for many of us who shared the delights of his work, we share his pain.
If we only acknowledge the big names, the "celebrities" if you will, then we've lost our soul. The internet has been built by thousands, not a handful, and Eric is someone many of us associate with.
That's why we are all sad today and why we want to show solidarity. Burying a parent is hard. I cannot fathom burying a six year old child.
Now pay attention to this next part because it might be hard to follow. As humans, many of us empathize with this profound loss experienced by someone whose work has been so influential in our own careers. As humans, many of us have experienced similar loss. Many more of us, as parents, hope never to have to.
If that's unclear, perhaps someone who is a better programmer than I can translate it into code and put it in a Gist.
If you're the kind of person who prefers fairness over indulging feels, then token efforts like pinning ribbons to things look like an ostentatious display of hypocrisy to friends and family, to show that you care about something everyone still collectively agrees not to do anything about (i.e. a kid dying).
You can make an argument that HN must be 100 percent on-topic, at all times, and that it doesn't belong here. But you can also argue that we are all humans and we can just accept it once in a while, even here.
To jump to the conclusion that it's all just for show, and nobody will actually take any sort of real action is pure cynicism. People have actually been affected by this, in ways that are certainly small in comparison to the the way the Meyer family has been. The most visible gestures might not accomplish much, but many people are actually donating money to charities that have a very real impact.
The thoughts it raises, particularly for parents, are not the kind that can just be dismissed once the hashtag stops trending.
>To jump to the conclusion that it's all just for show, and nobody will actually take any sort of real action is pure cynicism. This is the conclusion to which you have jumped, not I. I fail to see where I even implied anything of this sort.
I don't believe that people are doing this as an empty gesture without any feeling behind it, at least not universally. I do, however, think that it's ridiculous.
For me, perhaps it's not the sorrow, or the condolences, that I find to be most ridiculous. On the contrary, it's these things prepackaged into something of a meme that I find to be most alarming and highly artificial.
Foremost, the hashtag #663399becca is a hideous contrivance and shits all over the poor girl's name. I guess #rebeccameyers would have been too pedestrian. I question, why purple at all? Most people have favorite colors (the blog post argues otherwise). Why make this the focal point? Why would you summarize or even emblematize her existence with her favorite color, of all things? First person to answer along the lines of "because CSS" should get metaphorically smacked upside the head.
It reminds me of when the students at my younger brother's high school collectively wore hoodies in "solidarity" regarding the death of Trayvon Martin. To me, this whole #663399becca is the same brand of stupidity. It's essentially wearing a digital t-shirt that proclaims "HEY EVERYONE, I'M MOURNING THE UNTIMELY LOSS OF REBECCA MEYERS." How about you? Oh, I see you have on the purple t-shirt on, and your accessible uniformity brings me comfort.
The whole thing is cheap and mass-produced like a Wendy's value meal. It's a 9/11 bumper sticker. It's a Che Guevara t-shirt.
It's a gimmick, and it actually does a disservice to her memory, because now it's not really about her, it's about the color purple and your hexcode-hashtag and your purple avatar and maybe we should make the header of this website purple. The name of the blog post is "The Color Purple".
I fully understand that people are sooner moved by tragedies "near" to them more than the comparatively distant deaths of countless people. Nothing is surprising about that. But how about these people be about it rather than wear it?
It's ironic, the desire to make the hashtag a trending topic on Twitter, because the very nature of trends is that they're transient, which are exactly the things that death and loss are not.
So I see my colleagues hop on this bandwagon and I think, yeah, go ahead and wear your purple avatar for a day, or two days, or a week. Eventually you will change your avatar to something "normal". In fact, after an arbitrary amount of time, that purple avatar will be passé and everyone will have moved on to newer gimmicks.
And yet I'm allegedly the robot here? Do robots typically question their programming or try to see past their own bullshit? One commenter even described me as "disgusting", but if anything that's precisely what I seek to not be.
I'm not sure if you were assuming everyone should recognize his name. Because, without that context, it is clear there are many many people, every day, who suffer things that many of us have sympathy for, but would not make a lot of sense to probably anyone to alter HN, every day, in sympathy for.
I guess my problem is that I'm less specific in my sorrow. If anything I dwell on the overall strife of the human race, rather than latching onto the death of someone related to someone that I've never met. I suspect many of these individuals in less than a week will have moved past this hip trend of transient grief. Meanwhile, children of lesser known parents will die of cancer, with no one to change their avatars for them.
What's ironic to me is the notion that I'm a robot because my opinion actually differs from that which some might find acceptable. If being human means being a thoughtless conformist, then I am clearly something else. And I don't know that I have a problem with that.
I think almost everybody understands human loss and can empathize. It's a bit rude to assume that someone doesn't, just because they don't want to support this rather tasteless memorial.
A child's life ended and now there is a color named after her (or some site changed a color band). What exactly is that doing for anyone other than adding a bit of trivia to the CSS spec so that people can read about it and say "Oh, that's horrible!" and then move on with their lives? What is that doing for the parents? Is the perception of this named color supposed to invoke some kind of warm feeling? Is it to let the parents know that "we support you"? If so - don't you think providing some actual support in the form of something useful would be much better?
While I agree with you (I don't know him; I didn't know her; I don't care that she's dead; I see zero point in concentrating more on her death than on any of the many thousands of other deaths; etc etc) I do know that posting questions like your will just annoy or distress people and also will not serve any point.
So I tend to bite my tongue when things like this suggestion come up. People want to tinker with a CSS value? Sure, go ahead. People want to attach special meaning to that? Yep, fine. People want to link to and discuss best modern research for the illness that she died from, with links to funding for research or Watsi funding for other existing patients? Brilliant, I might even donate.
But I've learnt to hide my real feelings - the neuro-typicals have kicked them out of me over the years.
For the record, I'm 28.
However I am inclined to agree, just let it go, if people want to mourn let them mourn, even if it just bandwagon jumping. If you asked Nietzsche, he would probably say they are just mourning their own mortality, ie there is no such thing as a selfless act, they are just doing to feel good about themselves.
And surely it won't be as bad as the Steve Jobs fiasco.
Rebecca Meyer is the daughter of Eric Meyer who you may know through through his two decades of work on behalf of web development and web standards. He is the author of Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide and the widely used Reset CSS (http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/css/reset/).
I would assume that many (if not most) users of Hacker News have benefited from Eric's work.
Rebecca died from cancer on Saturday on her 6th birthday. As per the link from Jeffrey Zeldman's blog, there is an effort to get #663399Becca trending today, (June 12th) in a show of solidarity.
I honestly do not know where to go anymore to try to talk to people and work on anything. This isn't intended at all as dickish. If people have so much compassion, why not try to support efforts to improve things?
Since you're being so rude here, I will note that it is probably because you are an unreliable narrator who "cures" herself with blogsourced finds and people have little need for advice that is not based in reality. You post about being shunned by multiple CF communities, I would be willing to guess that it is not because they are afraid of any stunning discoveries you have made.
It's true that the GP's complaints about downvotes also break the HN guidelines, but being mean is much worse. Please don't.
I'm in favor of changing the title bar color temporarily.