Hard to imagine someone more black bar worthy for Hacker News, hope we have one up soon.
Edit: allow me to clarify - just having to choose whether or not someone is "black bar worthy" is distasteful. Ian Murdock didn't get a black bar that I can recall, and I don't remember seeing one since then, even though other people relevant to the community have died. Are we to expect someone to change the color of the bar every time a death in the tech community occurs, and how to we judge relevance in that regard?
No, it's an arbitrary gesture that doesn't really honor anything or anyone. It just gives people something to argue about. Why did someone get a black bar and someone else didn't? Why was this person deserving of it, and not that person? It's best to just remove it altogether.
In which case, it's a personal decision to honor someone they care about by placing a subtle notice on ther site, which happens to be popular. It's no different in spirit to the thousands of tribute blog posts being written as I type this.
I find it extremely distasteful to criticize how someone chooses to honor the dead. As long as they're not doing it by shooting guns into the air or hosting a destructive party next to your house or something like that, what do you care?
It certainly is within the site owners' right to do whatever they like, but for the community it's becoming a spectacle.
Although obviously, as the bar is up right now, my opinion on the matter isn't going to prevail.
(It's probably not comprehensive, but it's clearly composed of computing luminaries and members of the YC community)
Dan Haubert (1984 - 2009)
Robert Morris (1932 - 2011)
John McCarthy (1927 - 2011)
Dennis Ritchie (1941 - 2011)
Steve Jobs (1955 - 2011)
Doug Engelbart (1925 - 2013)
Aaron Swartz (1986 - 2013)
Gene Amdahl (1922 - 2015)
Marvin Minsky (1927 - 2016)
EDIT Civility is important but it should not be confused for everyone having the same point of view on a topic. And censorship by "civility" causes people to not join discussions. When I come to HN I want a intelligent but lively discussion. However, some issues have reached such a consensus such that even well thought out opposing views put politely get heavily downvoted.
Imagine you were the caretaker of a public establishment like a school or business, and news broke of the passing of an eminent person who was deeply respected and admired by many of the people who frequent that establishment.
So you went and lowered the flag to half-mast, because that is the customary and respectful thing to do. And whilst most people appreciated the gesture and felt comforted by the shared sense of mourning and respect for the deceased person, a small minority erupted into a noisy debate about how appropriate it was to lower the flag, and whether someone else was more worthy of having the flag lowered in their honour, etc.
If you can imagine this scenario in real life, you can understand how dang feels when this kind of argument erupts on a bereavement thread on a site he runs and cares so deeply about cultivating as a pleasant site to visit.
He can't be the one to call people out for being insensitive, but he can at least say "Thank you" to someone who does, and who in doing so, gives him some much-needed reassurance about the level of emotional intelligence around this place.
Discussions about the merits of customs and policies on the site are fair enough, but if we're to be as humane and compassionate online as we would try to be offline, the time and place of the mourning and honouring of a just-deceased person is not the right time and place.
Just reverse that situation and imagine that you are a member of a public establishment and that when certain people you particularly respect pass that public establishment does not follow its usual customs.
That isn't what's happened here.
Seriously, civil behaviour around a bereavement is just not that hard.
Respectfully, I won't be commenting further on this thread.
Meta-discussion of the black bar is intellectually uninteresting at best. Off topic in the middle. And disrespectful of people's grief at worst. The least of these is reason enough to downvote.
You don't have to have the same point of view on this topic, just don't take a discussion of a recently dead person being officially mourned by the site owner as an opportunity to criticize that.
If this "censorship" (which is far from it) causes people who are going to argue over mourning to not join the discussion, then mission accomplished.
If I squint, I guess I can see that use of the word "civilized" as a bit aggressive, but really I think Mike was being hyperbolic for effect in his later description.