People who've received a black bar on Hacker News

I always thought that HN occasionally bugged out

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

Hi everyone! Did not expect this much interest! Here&#x27;s a gist of the code I wrote last night: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;willmeyers&#x2F;6fdb4a502b8dffce758bde0842c23628" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;willmeyers&#x2F;6fdb4a502b8dffce758bde084...</a>. It&#x27;s slow, bad, etc... please go easy on me. Feel free to modify and share your findings as well.<p>As for missing names, since I only grab one timestamp at the end of the day it&#x27;s definitely likely names get missed as the bar is manually added by the HN team as any time. I&#x27;m not purposely omitting names.<p>As for why only 2016 my script stopped running after going through search results up to a certain page and I don&#x27;t really want to spend more time on this to fix it on Sunday.

Could HN record name+year+thread as <i>inmemoriam</i> HN list? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;lists">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;lists</a>

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: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=36803421">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=36803421</a>

I&#x27;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.<p>RIP<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Peter_Naur" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Peter_Naur</a>

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?

Chris Seaton should have got one

The original (unfiltered) source, ordered by the number of upvotes:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hn.algolia.com&#x2F;?dateRange=all&amp;page=0&amp;prefix=true&amp;query=has%20died&amp;sort=byPopularity&amp;type=story" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hn.algolia.com&#x2F;?dateRange=all&amp;page=0&amp;prefix=true&amp;que...</a>

Could you do this all the way back to 2006? Shouldn&#x27;t be that hard, just need to adjust some integers.

Small request. If there&#x27;s a black bar can the relevant post be placed at #1 on the front page?<p>That way, it&#x27;s immediately clear who the black bar is for, because seeing the bar without context info can really scare me.

Huh, I had no idea that&#x27;s what the black bar was about. I just assumed it was a bodged css rollout every now and then.

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

&gt; August 8, 2023: added Kevin Mitnick<p>Foresightful, as it&#x27;s currently August 6 in most of the World...

I wondered about this in a comment some time ago, good to see.<p>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&#x27;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&#x27;s passing.<p>Sad and wonderful. We should all aspire for the wonder to exceed the sadness.

In 5yrs of HN I didn&#x27;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&#x27;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??<p>Anyway, cool project, I’ve always wondered, thanks for making and thanks for sharing!

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

From memory, at least Steve Jobs and Kevin Mitnick are missing.<p>I believe the black bar started with Jobs?

I’ve always imagined that the decision to have a black bar or not was a curated decision by HN insiders.<p>Is this not the case? Does the black bar show for anyone with “.. has died” over a certain threshold of points?<p>Super curious as to how the bar is determined.

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!

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

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

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