Don't read too much into that - "Twitter spammers" are already keeping an eye on trending searches and posting unrelated spam content with high-ranking keywords. Your data will be skewed by spammers trying to ride the popularity wave.
Twitter has now disabled search altogether which is the first time I recall that happening. I'm sure that's one of the reasons for the decline in the graph.
I'm not sure I understand what you mean. Even now, 8 hours after the news broke, 6% of all tweets are still mentioning Michael Jackson. That's comparable to the peak mentions for the Lakers when they won the NBA title and Facebook during the name rush.
Oh, I was referring to the "Trending Topics" and search box on Twitter itself. They were removed and I suspect that would reduce overall Twitter activity (b/c it's more difficult for people to see what other people are saying).
That's just so...shocking. It always seemed like these type of people stay around forever to be made fun off and prodded - and then when you read about their death.
It brings things into perspective - we're all just blobs of flesh, here by chance, and we will all be gone, washed away and forgotten before very long.
It's not a happy story (and not for the reasons you assume; for instance, search the latter story for "South Korea"). Bill Wyman tells it better than I think anyone else can, as an expert and well-regarded music journalist writing outside the confines of any mainstream music publication.
Should be "RIP Your Posting Rights" for even considering putting that here. I'm having a good laugh over the fact that it's #1 though. I love hearing how people explain how something is relevant to hacker news when they post stuff like this.
I don't even care that you posted it, but I'd love to hear what your rationale for doing so was... if for nothing else than to get another laugh.
Thanks, that's actually quite a bit more useful than search.twitter.com good job scoopler :)
search.twitter.com - "25,415 more results since you started searching. Refresh to see them." - Refreshing to show 25,000 new results at once doesn't seem the best way...
I think it's a pretty sure thing at this point, but for what it's worth, CNN still hasn't confirmed it, they're just reporting that others (LA Times and AP) are reporting it:
"CNN has not confirmed his death."
edit: they're now reporting on the broadcast that they have just confirmed it.
The last tweet about it is 14 minutes ago. The search page was refreshing with 1000 new tweets/5 seconds when I first heard the news. This is such a hot topic that Twitter can't keep up!
As much as I like to distance myself and really not care about the deaths of people I don't know, I do feel myself saddened by this. He contributed a great deal to a huge number of lives and completely changed what people thought of pop and pop stars. Hacker news or not, I feel having this space as a place for discussion is worthwhile imho.
Obviously only pg can decide for sure and to be honest I personally wouldn’t have submitted this. That said...
There are events in this world that permeate the public consciousness. They are so big that they make all other topics seem irrelevant. Michael Jackson, whose prime was before my birth by the way, is the Icon of icons. His exit from the world is a once in a life time event that affects everyone.
I choose to make Hacker news my community of choice because it’s a community that holds rationality above all else. It is not rational to stick to strict rules no matter what. The corner stone of a community is shared experience and an event that has a profound effect on almost everyone should surely justify a rare exception to the "Tech only" rule.
So, if we assume it is rational to occasionally put the rules aside, the question becomes "is this event big enough to justify such an exception?" As has been pointed out several times here this story is the lead on every news based web site in existence. It’s being covered on every news station and even radio stations built around aloofness (JackFM) have dedicated commercial free hours to play only Michael Jackson music.
To me that signals an event that justifies a rational exception to the rules.
I upvoted you for upvoting him, even though I'll get downvoted for saying this.
It's a testament to the worth of Hacker News that after literally an entire day of the vocal community calling an MJ article on HN blasphemy, the truth rings out with 100 karma.
There are events in this world that permeate the public consciousness.
No there are some events for which Mass Media swarms like piranhas. It's some sort of demonic combination of cheap to cover and lowest common denominator.
The result is a absolutely horrifying. It's death gawking.
Since yesterday the MSM has been all about this admittedly tragic event. And not just the TV, the radio too.
My alarm in the morning is the radio news summary. Except today with all that's going on the world, all that's happening with Iran, the ENTIRE news block was about this.
The reporters were throwing to each other each reporting some detail of the death, with the last sentence being: "Preliminary autopsy results are expected as early as tonight!"
How fucked up is that?
And the radio during my morning commute, yep wall to wall coverage.
Michael Jackson's tragic death makes all other topics seem irrelevant? WTF!
As you yourself say, this is thoroughly covered in every other media outlet. This is not a signal to gawk at this tragedy here as well.
This is sad, but it is NOT important. And it certainly isn't in need of extra attention.
That's Morning Edition's rundown today/yesterday/the morning after his death. In 2 hours (more? not sure how long Morning Edition is, but it's long), they had 4 stories, totaling under 15 minutes. And that's probably double what they've had about any celebrity in 1 show this year.
> the question becomes "is this event big enough to justify such an exception?"
If that's the question, what's the added value of putting it here as well. If it's already big enough to justify an exception, it's big enough to be mentioned everywhere.
Surely the question should be: "Will the discussion on HN be interesting?" Since the discussion is mostly meta-commentary, I'm inclined to say it isn't.
I think the comments on HackerNews are still a whole lot more interesting than the average YouTube/Facebook/Myspace-style "OMG lolololol!!1111"-type comments that one would find on most other websites.
"Michael Jackson, whose prime was before my birth by the way, is the Icon of icons. His exit from the world is a once in a life time event that affects everyone."
His prime was during my lifetime, and while I respect what he did, his passing makes zero difference in my life. As best I can tell, he reached and passed his peak. (Not that his not-quite-peak stuff wasn't or wouldn't have been good, but it could not match the effect of Thriller)
His death is sad, as are most deaths, but hardly earth-shattering, and certainly not "once in a lifetime", given that people such Elvis, MLK, and JFK died during my lifetime as well.
I hacker is, by definition, lazy in the smart meaning. A good hacker knows when you don't have to repeat work, and what is going on here? More discussion of the same thing; empty vagaries on the life of a strange man. This conversion of what MJ has left behind as a legacy and his life experiences is discussed elsewhere. For that matter it is being discussed /everywhere/.
We've all heard all about this subject, is it necessary to discuss a topic that can't be brought meaning through technical discussions or rational discourse?
One of the best comments in HN about HN-Eligibility.
May I add by saying that everytime there is a question of HN-Eligibility (every other day!),we should hot-link it here to this post by TomOfTTB. Better yet add it to the FAQ!
Uh ... Except at each point in time, there can be a different best selling album. It's not as if it's now a universal constant, that can never change, is it?
On the other hand, with the concept of "album" feeling slightly old-school, perhaps that makes it less probably that the king is ever dethroned, who knows.
I doubt his record will ever be dethroned, partly due to changes in the musical landscape.
There's been a great divergence in musical tastes since the 80's, probably aided by the increased availability of "niche" music that would have had too small an audience to be profitable in the past - dollars that would have gone to the #1 album are now being spread down "the long tail."
Michael Jackson's popularity also seemed to cut across racial lines and some age lines in a way that doesn't happen anymore. Can you imagine the same audience listening to Mariah Carey and Snoop Dogg? Tren Reznor's fans listening to Miley Cyrus? Jackson had a genre-crossing power.
I'm going to disagree with you about his music, even though I'm not a huge Michael Jackson fan, because he had a killer groove. But Jackson was never a musician first and foremost. He was a dancer. He was the best dancer of this last half century, bar none. He was the dancer that inspired enormous movements in dance. When he performed for Motown, none other than Fred Astaire, king of the old dancers, called him to congratulate him. I'm not a big fan of dance, but watching Michael in action was like watching a man defy physics. The way he moved inspired me to start working out and treating my body properly; because of him I want to learn to dance. I'll never dance like him, but he showed me that my body was an instrument as much as anything manmade can be.
To his death, he still had those moves. Just because he became the center of a freakish media circus doesn't mean he'd lost all talent. In fact, he's one of the few celebrities who never seemed to like his celebrity. He didn't get coked up or destroy things. The controversies surrounding him are all ones he wished would go away. He remained famous first and foremost for his incredible talent.
His death truly affects few, let alone profoundly.
I'm not an MJ fan and I never will be, but your comment is just overly myopic.
I know people who were impacted profoundly by his music and no doubt when I next see them, I will find out that his death has also affected them profoundly. Just because I personally am not affected in the slighest does not mean that I cannot understand why others will be.
That's funny, because myopic is exactly how I would describe the attention this is getting.
I guess it depends on your definition of "profound." I know people who are profoundly affected in the same sense when their fantasy football team loses.
Sounds like my definition of "profound" may contain a lower amount of pretentiousness than yours.
People are moved by many and varied things in this world. Often it's not necessarily the importance or the profundity of the thing its self (in this case Michael Jackson's music) but the associations that the individual connects to that thing.
You mock how someone could be affected by such things as their fantasy football team and by implication, Michael Jackson's music. I only see this as an indication that you have very little insight into the inner workings of your own mind or that of anyone else's.
Nope, I hate when my FF team loses. But I recognize it doesn't really matter and I think most people will have only a superficial feeling of loss.
The commenter above called this a "once in a lifetime event" that "has a profound impact on almost everyone." I don't think so, but maybe I'm too pretentious or lack insight. Thanks for that.
I agree that it would usually be kind of silly to have any sort of profound association with one's FF team losing. My point was only that seemingly unimportant things can still have a profound effect on people, by associated feelings, if nothing else. Even if I don't share their feelings on this particular occasion, I can understand where they might come from.
An FF team loses many times and wins also, the king of pop dies once only. This has effected me, I am not sure about profoundly, but to some extent. Mostly because I, like many others of whatever age, grew up with his music and I personally felt a sort of anger that he was covered into all sorts of personal controversy rather than allowed to give this world more of his talent through other great albums that he would have made.
There is a sort of sadness to his later life which I believe will be used as the example of the culture of the 21st century media. Media can kill!
This is a man who like Tesla offered the world so much and yet died so low. It speaks a lot about the society we live in. You do not need to like his music, or the guy, or his dance moves, but it would be hard to deny that Michael has entertained the world like no one else I've experienced and his record proves that.
When the queen will die, here in the UK at least, I am sure that everyone will drop whatever they are doing to share the moment because she is a person loved greatly. If the US and perhaps the world entertainment had a King, that is Michael and I believe that he is greatly loved.
I wish him peace and I wish that the world learns from this sad tragedy. He will be remembered as the King of Pop for sure, but he also tests our prejudices - our judging of him as a freak because he wanted to change his nose - our ignorance of the effect that his skin colour might have had on him personally - our refusal to understand the profound effect that his childhood had on him, instead to insist that he judged according to conventions, a grown man does not have a playing ground park, as a freak - but above all our irrational mania with Michael as the person rather than the artist. This is like being more interested in what Einstein ate for dinner, rather than his relative theory, or being more interested that some great author does drugs than some magnificent novel he has written. The world now grieves, not only because this man had so much talent, but because this talent killed him!
His death affects ticket brokers... I got a 3 pack of tickets two days ago for his final show; they were just about the best seats on the market and I would have been able to sell two of them for enough to very comfortably finance my trip to see Michael Jackson in person.
So I'm personally affected in that I'm out $1000+ in potential profit and I'm missing the chance to see the King of Pop perform. It is a sad day for lovers of music.
You're being downvoted, but you're right to point out the commercial knock-on effect this will have. My sympathies are with all of the people involved in producing the forthcoming comeback tour - that would have been the shining diamond in nearly all of their résumes (dancers, lighting folks, producers, audio technicians, etc) and likely have changed many of their careers.
I actually am expecting them to utilize the current production planning for a series of tribute shows. Any number of singers would be happy to sing, and it is a waste for all the production planning to amount to nothing.
I am completely serious. I am sure Timberlake has offered, at this point it is up to Michael Jackson's family to decide what kind of tribute show they want to do as they have been inundated with offers.
Hacker news is not about hacking, not about news, and not about news about hacking. It's about posting links that apparently have become interesting to the community evolved here recently.
This includes, not limited to:
- iPhone news (if you live outside the US, disregard this as nobody gives a shit).
- Web frameworks (bonus if it uses an esoteric language)
- Anything distributed (CouchDB or MapReduce)
- Functional programming musings bordering on the philosophical by people who are contemplating writing a functional program.
If you are lost for news, but want to build credibility (points), you can consider doing any of the following.
- Go to TED, BBC, NYT or any of the other major feeds and add the newest item to HN.
- Post some course notes from MIT OCW (usually anything with a MIT or Stanford label on it translates into instant cred).
Finally, if you really need points and have exhausted other options, you can post the link to the SICP videos or pdf. This happens quite often but people seem to vote it up out of fear of neglecting their religious duties.
He paid the price for being an early adopter. His first surgeries were in the early 80s IIRC.
Technology has advanced a lot since then. Just watch any sort of celebrity reporting on TV and try to make out who's modded and who isn't. As a matter of fact pretty much all A- and B-celebs are. But on many you can't tell or just barely.
With a nod to HN one might say that MJ was in perpetual beta in that regard...
The business aspects of Jackson's career are, perhaps, interesting and useful to this audience. For example, he acquired the publishing rights to much of the Beatles catalog at a bargain price in the 80's.
This was, obviously in hindsight (and probably at the time, as well), a very astute move, and the value of that catalog of music has only increased over time. Most of us would be very happy to have made business deals that put tens of million in our pocket, while still holding a share worth more than originally paid.
I don't know who Jon and Kate are, but Paris Hilton definitely is a PR hacker. Or if she is not, she is something even weirder, a self-feeding PR loop.
It's an interesting point, I'll bite. What did Michael Jackson do that was in the hacker spirit, as opposed to just being an immensely talented musician?
I was hacking my Apple IIe with "Thriller" playing in the background. I would like to think that counts for something. Perhaps that doesn't warrant the top link on HN at all - after all his death has no impact on the computer world. At the same time, his cultural contribution to my generation is just as much important to me as was the contribution of Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Steve Jobs, and Steve Wozniak.
Funny you should mention that; I remember playing with single-bit audio on the Apple II's speaker, and the title track from Thriller was about the only thing you could digitize and still recognize. Of course, only about 20-30 seconds would fit into memory...
Eh, it doesn't make much difference in this case... this particular posting has been brought back from the land of the [dead]. I'd assume to stop the torrent of posts that were showing up about it on the new page.
Sure, but it's also on the top of every single news site in the English speaking world right now. One of the things that's always been nice about HN is that we've historically let news organizations be news organizations and we could stay on topic here. Clearly, I'm in the minority here, and I'll have to either accept the redditization of HN or find somewhere else to go.
I think it's also interesting to hear the hacker perspective on certain news items. Even though people can be pretty critical of technology, etc. there is a certain sensitivity here that is interesting to read when something totally non-technology related occurs.
i see this thread as less news-driven, and more commemorative (that's why i did not submit it with the title "Michael Jackson Dies"). you have to admit, as strange as he could seem sometimes, he did make some major contributions to the music industry. he's fairly entrepreneurial as well.
Look, I was a HUGE Michael Jackson fan when I was a kid; I bought all of his tapes as soon as they came out and wore more than a few of them completely out.
But when you look at these things in comparison:
HeyZap (YC S09) Launches Microtransaction Platform
Why CouchDB doesn't scale
Starting Out With Comet (Orbited) Part 2
Why A Low Calorie Diet Extends Lifespans: Critical Enzyme Pair Identified
and
RIP Michael Jackson
It just seems out of place. Clearly it's important to everyone here, given the sheer number of submissions it's gotten. I guess things have just changed here, that's all.
Maybe it depends on how old you are: to some of us, this guy dying is almost like Earth being hit by an asteroid. He's deep in the psyche of a lot of people on this planet, and it sortof transcends "topics".
I'm quite disappointed to see it here. Completely out of place. Comments are 90% people bickering about the meta non-sense of the story existing here. Here's something to think about... Cat Fancy magazine won't cover this story. They will cover fancy cats as usual. Do we want to have less integrity than Cat Fancy magazine? Really?
for younger people on this board its hard to understand how michael jackson's music has truly been a soundtrack to our lives.. for those of us growing up in the late 70's , 80's. Hearing certain songs, can bring back memories, that I could only associate with his songs. So if anything.. he's hacked the sounds and memories of my life, and his life should be celebrated.
I came here for topic specific issue - namely, technology and small scale business. All I see, on the other hand, are "this is why this tool suck/rule", "10 things/laws...", "Somebody Someone says..." - and now this, general news. That is what I get on reddit, HN degraded, unfortunately. I'm signing off.
+Atheist fundamentalist site. Look!!, people believing in fairly tales and rejecting the truth we the superior-smart-logical-thinker know.
+ "Reddit if you think my underwear stinks" kind of site.
+ Superficial articles for 15 years old.
It isn't. But there's more to life than hacking, and I spent just as much time trying to perfect my moonwalk one teenage summer as I did trying to get my programs to run.
Well, we get a reminder for every holiday. So if we're going to make the site a calendar, we might as well make it an obituary too. Next up: classifieds.
Quick question for those who maintain that this story should not be on Hacker News: where else can a person get timely notification of extremely notable events without being barraged with lots of noise? Don't say BBC Dot Co Dot UK or Wikinews or Wikipedia Current Events. I tried those -- way too much noise.
Extremely notable events will pop-up everywhere. Before I saw it here, I had heard it on two IRC channels, saw it on a few news sites and I did a Google News search for it (which didn't add anything at all, because all those news things said nothing other than "MJ rushed to hospital" and after that "MJ died").
If HN is your only source of world news, I suggest you find at least one more. There are many things that don't pop up hear, that probably are relevant to you.
If HN is your only source of world news, I suggest you find at least one more
Google News and the news sites I have tried have way too much information. I want the top 10 or so current-events general-interest stories of the year: more than that would be just noise.
If you know of a news source like that besides Hacker News, I would be most grateful if you told me.
This is a pretty broad guideline - One that, if applied at face value, would dramatically decrease the quality of this board. Although I see a fair share of Reddit bashing from time to time on HN when discussing this degrade of quality in discussion, I have to admit that I like Reddit. This said, there is already a Reddit and I think most of the HN community would agree that HN is not supposed to be 'that type of board'.
I feel pretty safe in saying that one's intellectual curiosity can often times serve to be another person's bird cage lining. Further, is there anyone here claiming that posts pertaining to MJ's death are actually intellectually stimulating? Sure, the posts of the Internet slowing MAY be relevant - but only because of their relation to networking and Internet trends and traffic patterns... not because a pop singer died...
You all complaining about this submission are being pretty ridiculous. Despite all the disgusting derision about so-called mediocre music, this is actually a big deal.
Probably the most famous living person in the world died a few hours ago. This is not just some other celebrity news story. It's just a HN submission. It's not as if someone, heaven forbid, changed the Google home page in memory of Michael Jackson, that would be crazy (rolls eyes). Furthermore, he was very talented; though such an evaluation is subjective, it seems somewhat strange and incredulous to deny this much.
I hope the people making these weird derisive comments aren't involved in any kind of social networking or related startups as probably your only hope is that understanding something about people has nothing to do with building social software for them.
Maybe in the past but in recent years before his trial he had slipped out of knowledge. Even after the trial he slipped back into obscurity until recently.
I dont think he can be compared globally to, for example, David Beckham in modern times.
Jackson had been famous since he was 10 years old.
Sure, he hadn't been stealing recent headlines from Lindsay Lohan, but it's not like the millions of people familiar with him at some point during the 70s, 80s, or 90s just forgot about him.
That's a good point; many (though far from all) abused children turn into abusers later. Still, I decided a long time ago in the absence of first-hand information to withhold judgment about Michael Jackson. It could be that the terrible stuff that was reported about him was true, in which case it was probably the tip of the iceberg. But don't underestimate our society's capacity to demonize a weird person, especially when you throw in an inhumane media and extreme celebrity. It's easy for the popular conclusion to be wrong in such cases, adding one injustice to another.
Furthermore, the speculative nature of parents should not be underestimated when they allow a weird, rich person to be friends with their child. So yeah, either he was very weird (definite) or he was a child molester (possible).
4th he was abused by millions of fans and continues to be abused after his death
On the subject of child abuse (it had to come up at some point) all I will say is he wasnt a child abuser in the sense of pure evil (met some, he was nothing like that :)). More like unable to comprehend right/wrong and emotionally regressed. He needed help and no one gave it to him.
"Speechless", "I Can’t Help It"... "Another part of me" doesn’t want to believe it but as much as we want one can’t "beat it". You didn’t "stop till we got enough", "rocked our world" and "healed it"... - RIP MJ ...you’re "gone too soon"
Strange that he would have a heart attack at the age of 50, particularly considering that he cared obsessively about his health and was usually at peak physical performance for his shows. There must be more to this story.
I guessed at the time of the event that he was on drugs. He lost everything and was in more debt than some may think is possible for an individual. Turns out that is likely the cause, but I'm sure we will be hearing about this for a long time to come.
Perhaps the technology take on this is that Twitter was also briefly dead. Also this might have implications for marketing: did news sites that announced his death before it was confirmed get more page views than websites that waited?
http://twist.flaptor.com/trends?gram=michael%20jackson&s...
It's the highest peak we've seen for a person since we started tracking.