Hacker News Reader

Comment by numberwan9 | Hacker News Reader

2 pointsnumberwan98 comments

It's only going to get worse. It's a cohort moving through. I give myself 20 years max (not that I expect to be memorialised here I might add) based on actuarial tables and I'm the tail edge of the "before CS degrees existed" people (they made it a single degree major while I was still in uni, I had to start joint honours with another subject at York, a 1960s redbrick expansion university)

Not a single day without "X has died" post. Can we at least create a category and place all of those in there?

I understand, but I disagree.

Dan Kaminsky was my best friend. We lived together multiple times, and were working on finding a new place where we could hack together and help others do the impossible.

Losing him shattered my future for reasons I am not going to get into right now.

The fact that he got a black bar the next day really meant something to me as I was dealing with the aftermath.

Hacker news isn't a technology news site.

It's a community of brilliant who change the world with technology. A celebration of intellectual curiosity.

At least that's how I see it.

I agree that persons like Dan Kaminski and their accomplishments should be celebrated. My point is that the endless stream of posts about death make Hacker News sound more like Hacker Obituaries. My proposed solution is to add another category, perhaps "In Memoriam".

If we hide these articles under a separate category, everyone who wants to read them (I'd estimate thousands of people, based on the number of upvotes some of them get) would have the extra work of checking that category. It's much simpler for you to just skip over them. And where does it stop? Should HN create a separate subcategory each time someone complains they don't like a particular type of article?

Why?

I come here to get my tech news fix. Instead, I am getting thanatophobia reading about how so and so died.

So you're essentially saying: Stop posting these articles because I don't like them? Just skip those articles then. Nobody is forcing you to read them.

But by reading these articles, we can learn about people who shaped our field (some of whom I learn about for the first time when I read their obituaries), what their contributions were, how they overcame difficulties in their careers, and sometimes how they changed the world.

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