Ask HN: Can the black border atop the HN mourning header link to who died?

It's oddly similar to seeing a flag at half-mast in real life. Sometimes you know who it's for, sometimes you don't.

In this case it's Dave Mills, inventor of the Network Time Protocol (among other things).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39051246

(I support your suggestion for future black bars.)

I would like to see this, and I would like the link text to always be the name of the person so honored, and nothing else. Horizontally centered, for preference, because nothing else nearby is.

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.

Love that I’d never previously noticed it. It’s a nice subtle gesture by HN, rather than an overly overt one.

A hover alt-text would also be a neat and clean option.

Or maybe the mods could ensure that the HN article about the person remains on the front page as long as the bar is there.

Am against this.

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.

Wow. Been reading HN a very long time and never noticed.

Then again, I'm never very interested in reading obituary stories.

I think such ""user friendly"" features are alien to HN's attitude. You can find out with very little effort. Ask it even! And then write and publicise a userscript that does the above.

I think a little footer link titled

  Black

down the bottom when Black is active that links to the relevant post is good

I think linking to Wikipedia would be a good touch.

I don't think this is needed as it's very obvious who it's dedicated to. If you don't know about the event, then all you need to do is to literally just go through the first two pages (probably just as you would when you're visiting the site which is why you cam in the first place) and you will see it mentioned.

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!

It's a mourning [arm]band. Usually these doesn't bear the name/href/QR of the deceased.

Semi-related (and hopefully if a link is added to the border, this could be implemented as well): some of us hate light mode so much that we set our browsers to force dark mode everywhere. However, in my experience, this makes the black bar nearly invisible. I'm not sure how this would be best handled, but is there any way that the black bar could be made more visible for dark mode users?

a different, related idea could be a hidden page (like https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights ) that lists all the people that have been honored with a black bar.

the black bar could link to that page, or it could remain hidden

@dang could help here

+1 for this feature

I thought it was for Microsoft executive emails getting hacked by Russia.

making a 5px black bar clickable or hover-able might be hard or not super discoverable. but maybe link the Y image to the HN link that's usually at the top of the page, accompanying the black bar. in this case, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39051246

The black bar has intentionally been kept obscure over the decades. (HN is almost two decades old now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1)

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.

I'd rather the black death bar be removed entirely.

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