People who've received a black bar on Hacker News | Hacker News Reader

People who've received a black bar on Hacker News

bear.willmeyers.net

209 pointswillmeyers103 comments

I always thought that HN occasionally bugged out

Me too. Or that they're A/B testing or a new layout or something.

It'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.

It was clear to me, but only because the first time I saw it, the top post was "XYZ has died."

but 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)

In India, China and Japan the color associated with death is white, so it's pretty eurocentric indeed.

Posts where the title starts with "<name>, <occupation>" gives me a sense of unease each time I see one.

A 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."

I've understood the meaning pretty quickly too, and I think it's a very nice gesture. If there isn't such a post (on the first 2-3 pages max) however, as has happened a few times, it's just a mystery death ribbon.

It could be confusing for some as it's selectively applied. There are only 15 names on the shown list but there are likely 2-3x that many which spent the better part of the day on the front page over the past 7 years.

It's just annoying to me. It looks like the website is broken. I'll be trying to add it to uBlock or something. If it had text then maybe I'd keep it. As it stands it's not actually communicating anything meaningful. Poor UX.

> As it stands it's not actually communicating anything meaningful

It's a nice gesture to people who likely had some impact on lots of our lives

For sure. I'm not trying to say that we shouldn't have some form of communication toward that end, either. What I mean is that the black border appears as if there is something wrong with the webpage. That is not clear. I am not saying that the idea of what it is trying to communicate is bad or wrong in any way. I meant that it is unclear as presently implemented.

> As it stands it's not actually communicating anything meaningful.

A ribbon [1] or armband [2] is a really common and subtle way of symbolising mourning, I'm quite surprised people aren't more aware of this practise.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_ribbon

2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_armband

I meant no disrespect to the sentiment. I don't think a black border at the top of a webpage is clear enough communication. Perhaps if there were some additional graphic indication of what it is? As it stands it's a black bar that makes the page look broken. If someone had a ribbon or band on their person or an image of one I would likely have grasped the significance after a moment's thought.

Agree. Tried to uBlock it too.

I think a HTML comment explaining why would have stopped me.

I also tried uBlocking it, but I ended up removing the whole webpage so I left it alone

It was immediately clear to me.

I never would have guessed a black menu bar / banner on a website would be triggered by someone dying. Not saying it’s a bad thing in any way - I just wouldn’t have any reason to relate the two things without reason.

It actually was asked to dang to create the black bar this time [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37011421

Whether dang would have done that without that comment is unknown.

Looks like this was pulled together with a degree of manual heavy lifting, for which the OP deserves our thanks.

I know Aaron Swartz got a black bar as well. RIP

Combination of the search function and the wayback machine

Thank you! But the only thing that really deserves credit is Jeremy Singer-Vine's https://github.com/jsvine/waybackpack library. Pretty much made this a very straightforward task

Hi everyone! Did not expect this much interest! Here's a gist of the code I wrote last night: 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.

It's okay to write bad code, etc. Every one does it. Thanks for this!

It's not bad code it's a prototype

hey, 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?

Once in production always in production.

Looks like "black bar" instances go back to at least 2009 which is fairly close to the beginning.

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.

Could HN record name+year+thread as inmemoriam HN list? https://news.ycombinator.com/lists

I 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.

Kevin 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

Ironically, Kevin Mitnick is missing from the list.

How is it ironic?

The site is named Hacker News

http://www.paulgraham.com/gba.html

Nice 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 :)

I'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

Because 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.

I 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?

It does show up on mobile; but only at the top and it’s easy to miss

Chris Seaton should have got one

Yes. Considering he was pretty active on HN as well. Sigh.

The original (unfiltered) source, ordered by the number of upvotes:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Was surprised Steve Jobs wasn't in there, I thought that was like 6k votes

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

> 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.

Could you do this all the way back to 2006? Shouldn't be that hard, just need to adjust some integers.

Small 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.

This 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.

Huh, 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.

I thought “oh, they’ve subtly changed the design of HN for some reason, that’s interesting”.

Longest running AB test ever, people keep seeing the black bar occasionally and we just can't figure out whether it improves engagement. How frustrating!

I noticed right after I messing with my user styles, thought I accidentally broke it somewhere.

> August 8, 2023: added Kevin Mitnick

Foresightful, as it's currently August 6 in most of the World...

I 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.

Suggestion: 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.

Thank 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.

In 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.

It would be nice if the black bar was a link to the relevant HN post.

I had no idea what it meant.

Huh. 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?

This 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!

Especially the chain talking about Knuth, my superstition grandmother would have come after us with a flyswatter for “wishing death on someone”.

ah. just assumed it had to do with my chameleon profile being janky.

From memory, at least Steve Jobs and Kevin Mitnick are missing.

I believe the black bar started with Jobs?

i thought the same, this is only people who passed away since 2016, so steve jobs passing in october 2011 didn't make the list

Yes, and Dennis Ritchie who died seven days later

I don’t remember Dennis getting one, do you?

I’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.

Definitely curated. Seems to be based on significant contributions to computing as a field.

Most 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.

Someone in the comments section usually asks for it to be put up: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Community-curated then settles it

I’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!

There isn't one for Queen Elizabeth on archive.org (I looked at all nearby captures): https://web.archive.org/web/20220908183522/https://news.ycom...

It 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?

Queen 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.

True.

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.

Mandela effect definitely! I also remember the Queen having this, and people commenting that it was weird as HN wasn't UK focussed!

Is your comment a data point for or against the mandela effect?

The more people that remember, the stronger the presumed Mandela effect, but also the higher the burden of proof to prove the Mandela effect.

At some point it becomes reasonable to assume it isn't the Mandela effect, and just the way back machine not capturing it.

Overly logical. Then at your crossover point it's the other side who know it wasn't there having the Mandela effect. Either way you can't avoid it: you can't "out logic" the Mandela effect.

Here is the first archive page I looked at for that day:

https://web.archive.org/web/20111013093338/http://news.ycomb...

Not only was the black bar turned on, the top 11 stories were all about dmr, as were 17 of 30 stories on the front page.

p.s. No, we didn't turn it on for the queen. I just checked the logs.

Mr. Knuth should make the whole website black for an entire day. :(

At this point I feel that I will go first

With Serif lettering and generously spaced text

Heh, 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.

Worthy, 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.

Wondering. How about instead of having black bar on HN when someone died, they have Dark Mode instead.

A black bar has a specific meaning.

Dark mode doesn't.

>A black bar has a specific meaning.

ok. That is definitely new to me then.

In some places on Earth it is customary to wear a black armband above the bicep to signify the same.

What? I have the black bar on every HN Page... Dont think this is what he thinks

That's how it works. It's exactly what he says it is.

I 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.

The 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.

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.

Thank 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.

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