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People who've received a black bar on Hacker News
- martypitt 3y agoLooks like this was pulled together with a degree of manual heavy lifting, for which the OP deserves our thanks.
- GhostWhisperer 3y ago[flagged]
- ShroudedNight 3y agoIn re Steve Jobs: > ...but I compiled a list of people who've received it starting from 2016.
- GhostWhisperer 3y agoah, you're right
- xxs 3y agoSince 2016
- kzrdude 3y agoSteve Jobs was a different day. HN at various points had every single story on the front page related to him.
- lsb 3y agoI know Aaron Swartz got a black bar as well. RIP
- midasuni 3y agoCombination of the search function and the wayback machine
- willmeyers 3y agoThank you! But the only thing that really deserves credit is Jeremy Singer-Vine's https://github.com/jsvine/waybackpack https://github.com/jsvine/waybackpack library. Pretty much made this a very straightforward task
- midenginedcoupe 3y agoHuh, I had no idea that's what the black bar was about. I just assumed it was a bodged css rollout every now and then.
- zensayyy 3y agoWhat? I have the black bar on every HN Page... Dont think this is what he thinks
- thaumasiotes 3y agoThat's how it works. It's exactly what he says it is.
- thrdbndndn 3y agoI still don't get how it is done. 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.
- mikequinlan 3y agoThe page itself says 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.
- jenadine 3y agohttps://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented#thin-black-bar https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented#thin-b... > 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.
- eimrine 3y agoThank 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.
- ThalesX 3y agoMr. Knuth should make the whole website black for an entire day. :(
- sambapa 3y agoAt this point I feel that I will go first
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- raverbashing 3y agoWith Serif lettering and generously spaced text
- tigerlily 3y agoHeh, 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.
- benj111 3y agoWorthy, 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.
- geertj 3y agoFrom memory, at least Steve Jobs and Kevin Mitnick are missing. I believe the black bar started with Jobs?
- GhostWhisperer 3y agoi thought the same, this is only people who passed away since 2016, so steve jobs passing in october 2011 didn't make the list
- aaron695 3y ago[dead]
- Typhon 3y agoYes, and Dennis Ritchie who died seven days later
- meitham 3y agoI don’t remember Dennis getting one, do you?
- voz_ 3y agoThis thread is a train wreck. What’s up with these comments?? Anyway, cool project, I’ve always wondered, thanks for making and thanks for sharing!
- Ensorceled 3y agoEspecially the chain talking about Knuth, my superstition grandmother would have come after us with a flyswatter for “wishing death on someone”.
- jashmatthews 3y agoChris Seaton should have got one
- ksec 3y agoYes. Considering he was pretty active on HN as well. Sigh.
- skibz 3y agoI'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. RIP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Naur https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Naur
- sgt 3y agoBecause 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.
- IndigoIncognito 3y agoI always thought that HN occasionally bugged out
- isodev 3y agoMe too. Or that they're A/B testing or a new layout or something.
- kome 3y agoIt'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.
- mike_hock 3y agoIt was clear to me, but only because the first time I saw it, the top post was "XYZ has died."
- kome 3y agobut 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)
- vlabakje90 3y agoIn India, China and Japan the color associated with death is white, so it's pretty eurocentric indeed.
- rzzzt 3y agoPosts where the title starts with "<name>, <occupation>" gives me a sense of unease each time I see one.
- michaelt 3y agoA 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."
- CrzyLngPwd 3y agoI had no idea what it meant.
- evolve2k 3y agoI’ve always imagined that the decision to have a black bar or not was a curated decision by HN insiders. 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.
- taejavu 3y agoDefinitely curated. Seems to be based on significant contributions to computing as a field.
- tough 3y agoMost of HN is -manually- curated good stories get put on a second chance pool and dang can pick them manually moderators keep this place alive.
- rzzzt 3y agoSomeone in the comments section usually asks for it to be put up: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=black%20bar&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
- tough 3y agoCommunity-curated then settles it
- RGBCube 3y agoCould you do this all the way back to 2006? Shouldn't be that hard, just need to adjust some integers.
- markx2 3y agoI 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.
- ksec 3y agoWondering. How about instead of having black bar on HN when someone died, they have Dark Mode instead.
- purerandomness 3y agoA black bar has a specific meaning. Dark mode doesn't.
- ksec 3y ago>A black bar has a specific meaning. ok. That is definitely new to me then.
- keepamovin 3y agoIn some places on Earth it is customary to wear a black armband above the bicep to signify the same.
- amelius 3y agoSmall request. If there's a black bar can the relevant post be placed at #1 on the front page? That way, it's immediately clear who the black bar is for, because seeing the bar without context info can really scare me.
- dangus 3y agoThis 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.
- ilya_m 3y agoKevin 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36803421
- mlry 3y agoIronically, Kevin Mitnick is missing from the list.
- willmeyers 3y agoNice 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 :)
- _8j50 3y agoIn 5yrs of HN I didn't know this was a thing. This post made me pull down the page to refresh it but then I saw the bar blending with the nav bar.
- walterbell 3y agoCould HN record name+year+thread as inmemoriam HN list? https://news.ycombinator.com/lists https://news.ycombinator.com/lists
- keepamovin 3y agoI 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.
- magic_hamster 3y agoHuh. 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?
- meitham 3y agoI’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!
- mkl 3y agoThere isn't one for Queen Elizabeth on archive.org (I looked at all nearby captures): https://web.archive.org/web/20220908183522/https://news.ycombinator.com/news https://web.archive.org/web/20220908183522/https://news.ycom...
- benj111 3y agoIt could be the Mandela effect, but I remember this. 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?
- pavlov 3y agoQueen 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.
- benj111 3y agoTrue. 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.
- keepamovin 3y agoMandela effect definitely! I also remember the Queen having this, and people commenting that it was weird as HN wasn't UK focussed!
- krn 3y agoThe original (unfiltered) source, ordered by the number of upvotes: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=has%20died&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
- Aachen 3y agoWas surprised Steve Jobs wasn't in there, I thought that was like 6k votes https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=Passed%20away&sort=byPopularity&type=story 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
- krn 3y ago> I'd never have guessed the vim author would get close to the apple founder. We would need to see the "inflation adjusted" numbers here, because Hacker News has certainly had a lot of growth since 2011.
- anotherevan 3y agoIt would be nice if the black bar was a link to the relevant HN post.
- nightfeather 3y agoI noticed right after I messing with my user styles, thought I accidentally broke it somewhere.
- etiam 3y ago> August 8, 2023: added Kevin Mitnick Foresightful, as it's currently August 6 in most of the World...
- willmeyers 3y agoHi everyone! Did not expect this much interest! Here's a gist of the code I wrote last night: https://gist.github.com/willmeyers/6fdb4a502b8dffce758bde0842c23628 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.
- lawgimenez 3y agoIt's okay to write bad code, etc. Every one does it. Thanks for this!
- vorticalbox 3y agoIt's not bad code it's a prototype
- TrueGeek 3y agohey, this is Bill in sales. I’ve shared your prototype with a few of our customers. They love it! Can you add the follow features by EOW?
- vorticalbox 3y agoOnce in production always in production.
- mindcrime 3y agoLooks like "black bar" instances go back to at least 2009 which is fairly close to the beginning. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=644954 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.
- _sys49152 3y agoah. just assumed it had to do with my chameleon profile being janky.
- keepamovin 3y agoSuggestion: get blackbars.com or something like that? Scratch that, it's 4K USD. Order of the Black Navbar. I think Knights of Hacker News is taking it a bit too far.
- mikhailfranco 3y agoThank you for this post. It led me to reread the comments on Joe Armstrong's passing. Sad and wonderful. We should all aspire for the wonder to exceed the sadness.
- saberience 3y agoI look at Hackernews every day and I swear I have never seen this. Is it somehow only visible on certain browsers? Does it show up on mobile?
- mhlakhani 3y agoIt does show up on mobile; but only at the top and it’s easy to miss
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]