[xorglorb]

Today is a sad day. A great man died, and we should honor that. This may sound cold hearted, but I come to Hacker News to read interesting discussions about tech and startups, not to see 30 articles about the same issue. Several articles discussing the event would be perfectly fine, but this has become absurd.

[ordinary]

I'm inclined to agree.

I don't think there's anything wrong with the death of someone like Steve Jobs taking up room on the front page of HackerNews. Look at the the current top 5 stories:

Steve Jobs has passed away. (apple.com): 2393 points, 282 comments

Apple RIP Logo design (jmak.tumblr.com): 265 points, 16 comments

Steve Jobs has died (marketwatch.com): 776 points, 59 comments

The Steve Jobs I Knew (allthingsd.com): 343 points, 8 comments

President Obama on Steve Jobs (whitehouse.gov): 361 points, 38 comments

Completely reasonable. Such attention for someone who was important to the tech industry as he was is precisely what I'd expect from a place like HN. A bit high on the points : comments ratio, but this isn't exactly a story that will lead to long drawn-out flame war (at least I'd hope not), so that too is understandable.

But it steadily declines from there: at the time of writing, the remaining 25 Jobs stories on the front page have 116 comments combined. If no one has anything interesting to say about these stories, then it doesn't seem like a far-fetched interpretation that there's nothing interesting in them, either, so why are they being upvoted?

[InclinedPlane]

Give people a moment. Steve Jobs has been a very prominent figure in the high-tech industry for 4 decades, since the dawn of the personal computer. He has not only watched but in many cases husbanded the transformation of the computer from an industrial device to a personal computer to sci-fi worthy pocket and tablet computers. His passing is worth a few hours of minor inconvenience in discussing other topics on HN (just advance to the next page or two, it's not exactly a chore).

[John212]

The majority of projects created by people here on HN have been impacted in some way by the work of Steve Jobs.

Give us all a few hours.

[pbreit]

I disagree. I had no interest reading other tech news that day and actually found such stories strangely out of place, like they were pre-scheduled and an editor forgot to pull them.

[tspiteri]

If you want different articles, just click More.

[burgerbrain]

Exactly. One is relevant to my career and chosen hobby, the other is not.