
Let's change the HN title bar to #663399 - tylerrooney
Learn more: http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zeldman.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;06&#x2F;10&#x2F;the-color-purple&#x2F;<p>In Memory of Rebecca Meyer, help fund childhood cancer research: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.stbaldricks.org&#x2F;donate&#x2F;fundraiser&#x2F;539&#x2F;2014
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cwyers
For those who didn't click the link, it's not a proposal to make the site more
readable, it's part of a memorial effort.

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opendais
Yes, but I'd like to be able to still use the site and do the memorial bit at
the same time, so I went with a lighter shade. ;)

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freshyill
Did nobody actually read the Zeldman post linked above? This was not intended
to be a discussion of a redesign.

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tylerrooney
Perhaps I should have added more context to the title and text as the purpose
of the post seems lost to most commenters.

Rebecca Meyer is the daughter of Eric Meyer who you may know through through
his two decades of work on behalf of web development and web standards. He is
the author of Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide and the widely used
Reset CSS
([http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/css/reset/](http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/css/reset/)).

I would assume that many (if not most) users of Hacker News have benefited
from Eric's work.

Rebecca died from cancer on Saturday on her 6th birthday. As per the link from
Jeffrey Zeldman's blog, there is an effort to get #663399Becca trending today,
(June 12th) in a show of solidarity.

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owenversteeg
For those that don't know, Eric Meyer is an extremely influential programmer,
who dedicated a ton of time to improving CSS. Right now my laptop's resting on
one of his books. He is as _why was to ruby or dmr was to C. Half of the CSS
I've ever written wouldn't work without his contributions.

I'm in favor of changing the title bar color temporarily.

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jrochkind1
I know lots of great people who have died, lots of good charitable efforts,
and a few good charitable efforts connected to good people who have died.

Can I get HN to put something in their banner every day for a different one?

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DanBC
A nice idea. I would prefer a link to donate to Watsi (any people with the
same or similar illnesses?) or to some page covering latest best quality
research (and some explanation of that research).

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Mz
And I can't help but wonder why this gets support but I am routinely downvoted
and generally crapped for attempting to talk about what I have done to beat my
medical death sentence. It is not intended to piss on this effort. I just
honestly do not understand this. If you have genuine concern for other people,
why say nice things only after they are dead? Why be so awful to the living?
Why shout down someone trying to figure out how to help people with deadly
conditions?

I honestly do not know where to go anymore to try to talk to people and work
on anything. This isn't intended at all as dickish. If people have so much
compassion, why not try to support efforts to improve things?

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illuminate
"And I can't help but wonder why this gets support but I am routinely
downvoted and generally crapped for attempting to talk about what I have done
to beat my medical death sentence"

Since you're being so rude here, I will note that it is probably because you
are an unreliable narrator who "cures" herself with blogsourced finds and
people have little need for advice that is not based in reality. You post
about being shunned by multiple CF communities, I would be willing to guess
that it is not because they are afraid of any stunning discoveries you have
made.

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dang
Personal attacks are not allowed on HN, regardless of how strongly you
disagree with someone.

It's true that the GP's complaints about downvotes also break the HN
guidelines, but being mean is much worse. Please don't.

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illuminate
You're right. The insincere "wondering why" shouldn't have baited my response.

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adamman
#663399Becca would be even better.

Edit: I was thinking page title. #663399 as the color for the header would be
really nice too.

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theboss
414141\. I know I'm not alone out there =]

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follyfalls
I feel like I'm missing something here.

A very young girl died of cancer. That's pretty sad, but I fail to see how
it's anymore sad than the hundreds/thousands of people who die of cancer every
day. Millions of people will have died of cancer by the end of this year.

So we have all these people tweeting this hashtag and coloring their Twitter
avatar purple, because Rebecca's favorite color was purple (no non-sequitur
there).

Why? Why are we mourning the death of this particular individual; what about
her plight is so unique?

To me it just seems like bandwagoning.

Surely there's some aspect of this that I do not understand or of which I am
unaware.

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freshyill
People are doing this because Eric helped to take CSS from its infancy into
the modern usage we have today. He wrote CSS: The Definitive Guide and many
other books on the topics. He co-founded the An Event Apart conferences.
Nearly every site on the internet has been directly or indirectly influenced
by his work. Over the past year, he has documented, with great clarity,
everything his family has experienced since his daughter fell ill on a family
vacation last summer. I've met him at An Event Apart, and I can also say that
he's a really nice guy.

Now pay attention to this next part because it might be hard to follow. As
humans, many of us empathize with this profound loss experienced by someone
whose work has been so influential in our own careers. As humans, many of us
have experienced similar loss. Many more of us, as parents, hope never to have
to.

If that's unclear, perhaps someone who is a better programmer than I can
translate it into code and put it in a Gist.

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joaren
Try being a bit less condescending. Just because someone thinks displays like
this are hypocritical doesn't mean they are heartless. It could mean they are
acutely aware that the only reason people care about this is incidental
circumstance, and that equally sad events pass by without scrutiny because it
didn't happen to someone who's milked it out for attention. Because that's
what blogging about your daughter's cancer is.

If you're the kind of person who prefers fairness over indulging feels, then
token efforts like pinning ribbons to things look like an ostentatious display
of hypocrisy to friends and family, to show that you care about something
everyone still collectively agrees not to do anything about (i.e. a kid
dying).

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freshyill
Either he's feigning ignorance over why anybody would be the slightest bit
empathetic toward the death of Eric Meyer's daughter or he's too much of a
robot to actually understand.

You can make an argument that HN must be 100 percent on-topic, at all times,
and that it doesn't belong here. But you can also argue that we are all humans
and we can just accept it once in a while, even here.

To jump to the conclusion that it's all just for show, and nobody will
actually take any sort of real action is pure cynicism. People _have_ actually
been affected by this, in ways that are certainly small in comparison to the
the way the Meyer family has been. The most visible gestures might not
accomplish much, but many people are actually donating money to charities that
have a very real impact.

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joaren
A year from now the people who turned their avatars purple today won't
remember the hash tag or what it was for. This isn't about one kid dying, or
many kids dying. It's about a bunch of people frantically acting to hide their
sense of impotence.

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freshyill
I disagree. Eric Meyer has been writing about Rebecca's cancer since they
found out on their vacation last summer, and many have been following. This
isn't something that just happened today. It's been happening for nearly a
year.

The thoughts it raises, particularly for parents, are not the kind that can
just be dismissed once the hashtag stops trending.

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drhouse_md
It was actually counterproductive to leave out the context of this guy
developing CSS and a link to whatever blog documented the cancer's story. The
given explanation was simply adults don't have favorite colors, children do.
You're perfectly welcome to have fewer people interested and make the whole
thing seem like a pretentious non-sequitur to 99.99% of the world's
population, but I guess you didn't think Rebecca deserved better and were
simply being incompetent.

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fsiefken
colour is like a mini brand, a sense of identity. the old freshmeat was orange
too.

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TazeTSchnitzel
#f6f6ef forever, baby. I like my seamless page.

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zitterbewegung
Uh, that can be set by users as a perk for having enough karma. I think we
usually do black bars on the top.

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opendais
Its unreadable with that shade. I use #cccccc.

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TazeTSchnitzel
The topbar text colour should change automatically to the one with the best
contrast.

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opendais
Really? It doesn't for me, never has.

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TazeTSchnitzel
I'm saying it _should_ i.e. it ought to, not that it does, but I can see how
you'd be confused.

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opendais
My mistake. I'm confused easily :)

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raverbashing
I use #ffaa33 as my default as it's a lighter shade

The proposed color makes it unreadable, #aa99ff looks ok though

