Rereading the thread, it's like a flag at half mast or an armband. HN does it to acknowledge tragic events. On a side note, I was quite stunned when I poked ar

Rereading the thread, it's like a flag at half mast or an armband. HN does it to acknowledge tragic events. On a side note, I was quite stunned when I poked around in the HTML recently and discovered that the site still uses spacer gifs. (I was poking around because the spacer gif had started 404ing and I was wondering why I kept seeing random image placeholders.)