Your comment illustrates perfectly why the black bar is a bad idea... unless it gets used for every death posted here someone will feel discriminated against and offended that it was omitted for someone they like. And if it is used for everyone, people will feel that its meaning has been degraded, because the black bar has become a status symbol - something to be "earned" or "deserved". And inevitably there will be tedious arguments over who deserves the black bar, and who doesn't, and what precedent is set by this person getting it and not that, and whether it means the moderators are biased, on and on.
All of this sad nonsense over a stylesheet tweak that in the end means nothing and honors no one and whose application has always been entirely arbitrary. It's a distraction which is best done away with IMHO.
Someones death should 100% be a distraction over our daily lives to remind us all on the impeding doom. People getting hurt and distracted over who gets a black bar or not is better than nothing at all IMO.
>Someones death should 100% be a distraction over our daily lives to remind us all on the impeding doom.
People die all the time ... according to Wikipedia, about 105,000 per day, every day... yet I would bet those deaths don't distract you at all, if they did, you would be spending your life in a corner paralyzed with fear.
Life is for the living, life is not for the dead.
>People getting hurt and distracted over who gets a black bar or not is better than nothing at all IMO.
Better at what? At reminding people of their own mortality? Better than the thread itself, or the posted obituary, or the experience of merely living as a human being? Nonsense.
This post has just disrupted the previous HN top post of all time.
I would have used the black bar this time around.
However, as it's such a source of contention, I can see not using it on this post, to set precedent for not using it.
Incidentally my last account (https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=i336_) ended up closed on this issue (you'll need showdead turned on to see its last comments). By "closed" I mean I said "okay I need a break" and set noprocrast to a high number due to there being no documentation about what the number represented (I thought it meant seconds, learned the hard way it meant hours!).
All of this sad nonsense over a stylesheet tweak that in the end means nothing and honors no one and whose application has always been entirely arbitrary. It's a distraction which is best done away with IMHO.