I'm sort of afraid to ask since everyone seems to know, but... what is he known for? Usually black bar means a tech giant has died, but absent a wiki page I'm having a hard time finding anything on google about him except the news of his death...
Jake joined HN in 2008, and has (had?) 80000 karma and change.
He was one of us. I'm sure if you refresh this thread a few times you'll learn more about him, as it happens I hadn't heard of the man until the thread about him entering hospice, so I'm looking forward to that.
But the first part of this post is enough for a black bar imho. It means that a lot of the community will recognize and know who he is, and miss him now that he's gone. That's enough.
You and the GGP author joined in 2018, so maybe you haven't noticed yet, but the black bar has always very much been an "at the whims of the site operator" thing. If you try to apply any other metric (like "tech giant"), you'll be scratching your head at who gets one and who gets left out. (I don't think you're missing anything, the only thing I know about this person is that according to my browser history I visited his July 2023 post, but I had no recollection of that as to me it was just another in the long line of sad posts about cancer and terrible government barriers in attempts to treat it.)
> You and the GGP author joined in 2018, so maybe you haven't noticed yet, but the black bar has always very much been an "at the whims of the site operator" thing.
I'm not questioning that at all. I'm just trying to understand who this person was and why they're getting this attention.
I had the same question and it mostly looks like rationalist/libertarian space posting like you saw a lot of on the internet in the 2000s in particular. His wife seems to be active in similar areas (went on a far right think tank podcast run by one of the 2010s alt-right crowd guys last month to talk about deregulating the FDA) so I'd imagine if you are of that bent, they're known pretty well.
