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!
A more intelligent solution would be providing the information which was deemed important enough to make the effort in the first place.
This is a news site. Why would you expect the people arriving to already know the news they came to learn?
The reason being that I'm against oversimplification and I believe it dumbs the community down. The beauty of HN for me is how primitive and free from clutter it is so that I can focus on the content.
>This is a news site. Why would you expect the people arriving to already know the news they came to learn?
I'm not, you can simply find the answer by going through the first few pages, I just don't believe an effort needs to be made to make it easier than that.
I love the simplicity of hn. Giving us a way to know who the black bar is for is not some scope creep that will slow down the site nor visually clutter it.
Keeping something more difficult just for the sake of “smarter people” will never be a compelling argument to me. Consider those same smart people could be doing something meaningfully challenging in the new time they’ve saved by having a brute force problem automated.
This is obviously not as time consuming, but the criticism is not based on an effective ideology.
Otherwise the bar becomes a kind of unfriendly cryptic ingroup signal – "sheesh, don't you already know?".