[Invertigrate]

>Why disparage a useful feature by saying people should just settle for an inconvenient solution and search pages of HN titles?

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.

[chfalck]

This is the same train of thought as saying we shouldn’t use debuggers because programmers will get lazy and stop thinking through the code, or that we shouldn’t have any programming layers higher than assembly because they’re less efficient and everyone should just write everything in assembly.

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.

[sethammons]

i did exactly as you suggested and could not find a death announcement in the first couple of pages after seeing the black bar. I was unable to discover who died.

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.