I think there should be "An Infinite Literature Contest", where the contestants would submit a formal grammar and the texts in the language would be judged for literary and other qualities.
Not sure why you were downvoted, it is super interesting. I know nothing of songwriting but it seems like that could be read by a singing performer in similarly to how sheet music is read by an instrument performer. In the graph, there's additional information than just the words that a singer would need to perform the song accurately.
/re-iterate i know almost nothing of music except what i like which i've been informed over and over is incorrect hah.
I've been a musician for nearly 3 decades and this diagram is how really good songwriters think about structuring popular music. They just usually don't write it down like this. It's not only useful for lyrics, but for harmonic progression as well. As for the downvotes, it's probably because most here don't understand songwriting and think the diagram was nothing more than a joke.
There's a 7-minute version, with two more verses that aren't in the version you always hear on the radio. The one starting at 3:45 in that video is particularly powerful and chilling.
> Every now and then, I know you'll never be the boy
you always wanted to be. But every now and then, I know you'll always be the only boy who wanted me the way that I am. Every now and then, I know there's no one in the universe as magical and wondrous as you. Every now and then, I know there's nothing any better. There's nothing that I just wouldn't do.
Well, I never knew this till now:
> With 'Total Eclipse of the Heart', I was trying to come up with a love song and I remembered I actually wrote that to be a vampire love song. Its original title was 'Vampires in Love' because I was working on a musical of Nosferatu, the other great vampire story. If anyone listens to the lyrics, they're really like vampire lines. It's all about the darkness, the power of darkness and love's place in the dark.
It doesn't look like the second has been cut off to get the first, because the font is different. It looks like the second was an attempt to extend the first (also, it kills the joke)
How old are you, for curiosities sake? I'm born early 90s, fondly remembering me and a friend shaming all the rest of our group by singing this song (dramatically as well) as a duet whenever we were in (already loud) public spaces.
I'm 50, i have two boys ages 16 and 14. My wife was more into music than I was growing up (i grew up in rural areas, she grew up in the city). One of my favorite stories she has is helping Modest Mouse unload their van when playing in Dallas at Club Dada (small local venue) back in the 90s. She also has so many cool rave, hiphop, and sxsw stories from that era since she went to HS in Arlington TX (class of '95), UT for college, and then lived in NYC for a while dating a musician. Austin in the mid/late 90s was a very special place to be a young person.
Back in 1999, the UK had its first total solar eclipse for several decades and VH1 played the music video (though, not this one ;-)) on loop for an hour while it was happening.
I'm glad this is still on the Internet. It's exactly the sort of thing that almost never is, when I try to find it again several years after seeing it the first time.
I once worked with a guy mixing TV programmes and live DVDs; I knew he’d been a studio engineer at one point in his career. We were re-arranging our studios one day and as I picked up a pair of NS-10s he casually said “I mixed ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’ on those…”
I went to the Reading Rock Festival back in the 80s. she was viewed very much as middle of the road and when she came on, got roundly booed and many bottles of nefarious liquids were tossed at her and the band.
she and they were total pros, shrugged it off, she hurled some abuse back and within a couple of songs had the crowd eating out of the palm of her hand.
My mum had a cassette with some of her songs. We'd have it on for long trips. I loved the long version of Faster than the speed of night. it's basically just "carpe diem" in a different format, but i loved her voice and the slight melancholy and almost call to action that the song brought with it. Also, the video (of the shorter version) is peak 80's: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jm4CgwRxw3Y
Jim Steinman, Meat Loaf, and now Bonnie Tyler. It truly all has come to an end. I think Celine Dion is the last one still carrying on Steinman's legacy.
Absolute classic. If anyone is interested, the Footloose soundtrack (which has Holding Out For a Hero on it) is probably one of the greatest soundtracks of all time. The movie sucks but damn, this soundtrack is incredible.
My two-year-old son had started saying "turn around" in a sing-song kind of way several months back, and thus my wife and I, both babies of the 80s, had to start singing the song whenever he would do it. It became a fun thing that my son enjoys more than we do. That turned into regularly playing this song (and its covers) in the living room. We just did this again a few nights ago because he loves the song so much and requests it now.
While she didn't compose the song, she was the one to originally release it. Tina Turner's version came one year later with a sax and an iconic video, but otherwise Bonnie's version is pretty similar and not much worse imo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Best_(song)#Bonnie_Tyler_v...
Too soon, she could have had a lot more life left to live these days, but a bad surgery ended it. Sucks. Try to avoid needing surgery as much as you can.
I'm curious now when this was announced. Yesterday, out of nowhere, TikTok showed me a video about someone praising "Total Eclipse of the Heart", despite not having this bubble in my profile. Kinda spooky to see the news now.
I discovered her wider music during the early days of COVID. I played her album Faster Than The Speed of Night on repeat. No world-class lyrics but she had such a beautiful unique voice, I got hooked.
I can't listen to her music now without being taken straight back to the hours and days lying alone on the sofa hoping for better days.
Before that. Her breakthrough album was 1977 and Total Eclipse of the Heart came out in 1982, so it was more the 8-track era. It remained a staple of radio plays (remember those?) through the 80s and 90s though, and was remade by Nikki French into a chart-topping dance version in 1995.
A lot of HN is folks in their late 30s, 40s, and early 50s (and sometimes even older!), so many folks here would've overlapped with the radio era. A lot of folks here were involved in making YouTube/Instagram/TikTok, not listening to it.
I'm old enough to remember Walkmans coming out in 1979, which was the start of the end of the boombox era. Approximately no-one was using 8-track at that point.
I'm not quite that old, but didn't people look down on cassettes due to their lower audio quality? Weren't most home systems (hi-fis) still vinyl or 8-track for a while longer?
A big driver of cassettes then was the write ability, unlike 8 tracks. You could borrow your friend's new vinyl album, pop in a new cassette tape on your hi-fi, and record a copy of the album to the tape. Of course the Walkman then made listening to your new album fully portable.
They did. However vinyl was considered better than 8 track. Cassette was a lot more portable than 8 track, and so where portability mattered it won. Elsewhere vinyl was considered better than 8 track and so it won (a few years latter CDs came and won).
Those who really cared about sound quality had reel to reel tape, but that was very rare. Almost no albums were ever released on reel to reel. You typically bought the vinyl and copied it to your own reels thus ensuring there were no scratches.
No one used 8-track for the quality. It was portable, and it would play continuously (it looped), great for sitting with your honey in a secluded area. And the physical quality of 8-tracks weren’t great. Based on the number of 8-track cartridges I saw on the side of the road while out running, the tape would apparently come loose from the cartridge and render it unusable.
By 1980, 8-tracks were relics being displaced by cassette.
That's not how it works. If upvotes alone mattered, HN would quickly degenerate into Reddit. The bar is whether "good hackers" would find this interesting.
Death notices of famous artists are the definition of off-topic: "most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic." If normies care about it, good hackers by definition probably don't.
I flag this and every such thread I come across. If Hacker News is going to be consistent in its espoused principles, this is non-technical content and thus not welcome. If that standard applies to far more substantive stories regardless of the quality of conversation they produce, it must apply here as well.
I did not say upvotes alone matter, but they should be the final say after all other mechanisms.
> The bar is whether "good hackers" would find this interesting.
If this were true, the majority of frontpage-entries would have to be removed.
> "most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities,[..]If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."
I guess the notable point here is "most" and "probably". The exception seems to be always news which are so important or dramatic that they are still not removed, and leaving the final decision to the upvotes. Which is why there are also regularly political and sometime seven sports entries (once or twice a year).
Despite being called hacker news, reality is not binary and rules should not be handled like that.
>but they should be the final say after all other mechanisms
They shouldn't be, and they aren't. The mods make the final decision and they will work against the consensus when they disagree with it. This is a very aggressively curated community.
>If this were true, the majority of frontpage-entries would have to be removed.
Maybe the majority of frontpage entries should be removed. Maybe the "HN is turning into Reddit" people are finally correct. But that is literally what the guidelines say. On topic - "Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity." Off topic - everything else, with the minor exception of "some new and interesting phenomenon" to gratify that intellectual curiosity.
I'm sorry but there is nothing new or interesting about the death of celebrities, and nothing about it to gratify intellectual curiosity. Their lives, maybe, but if someone wasn't worth discussing on Hacker News in life, they shouldn't be worth discussing post mortem.
>The exception seems to be always news which are so important or dramatic that they are still not removed, and leaving the final decision to the upvotes.
The final decision, in that case, is entirely up to the moderators. Threads with plenty of upvotes get flagged and stay flagged all the time.
>Despite being called hacker news, reality is not binary and rules should not be handled like that.
Maybe. But if there are grey areas, this doesn't seem like one of them. I don't see why far more substantive stories so often get flagged for "politics" or being "non-technical" even when they involve a pile of dead bodies, or why we police humor and emotion like signs of cancer, but we get to wallow in the nostalgia of every dead celebrity that comes along.
> Anything that gratifies intellectual curiosity is on topic for HN! - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
That doesn't mean it has to gratify your curiosity or mine - no single article can do that for everyone. But it's clear that that's what makes the article on topic.
> One other aspect: the best HN submissions are the ones that are most uncorrelated with anything else that's gotten attention recently - or, as I used to put it, can't be predicted from any existing sequence
There is a "hide" link for threads not of interest, I strongly encourage it's use to optimize your forum participation experience; if this forum is not to your liking, there are others potentially more suited to what you desire.
> I flag this and every such thread I come across. If Hacker News is going to be consistent in its espoused principles, this is non-technical content and thus not welcome. If that standard applies to far more substantive stories regardless of the quality of conversation they produce, it must apply here as well.
Mods can turn off flag capabilities per account, keep this in mind. You won't know if your flags are effective or not.
And no matter your view on the subject, a pop singer dying is not a topic that is capable of gratifying intellectual curiosity. It's about as banal as things get.
I do think HN should have an obit: category and filter them out the main page.
It's one thing to have obits for people who wouldn't be covered by regular news, but "75 year old celebrity dies" is not any kind of new phenomenon.
It generates a decent amount of upvotes and discussion based on name recognition and nostalgia, but every thread is essentially the same, "Oh, that's sad, I liked their work, <personal anecdote of how they were touched by it>.".
Meta: More often than I should have, I have emailed HN and asked "Why can you not extend/build/etc" this? And, as expected, we'd get into a great email discussion about why that would provide a meaningful improvement over the existing experience. This is a forum of builders, makers, and hackers, to their unspoken point. The primitives provided are "good enough," Hacker News is feature complete. To build this on top of HN in a browser extension or mobile app is trivial, and so, I'd say "If you want this, build it and share with us."
- 19 Years after the first superscalar CPU, the CDC-6600
- 10 Years after RFC-675, the first TCP version.
- 14 years after the first ARPANET nodes where connected.
- 1 year after Hopfield Networks, paving the way to Boltzman Networks around two years laters, demonstrating how neural networks could learn to solve complex problems.
- The same year Kunihiko Fukushima developed his work on the Neocognitron for visual pattern recognition, a percursor for future work on Convolutional Neural Networks.
- 3 years before first papers on Backpropagation in neural nets.
- First paper on Reinforcement Learning with reward signals (Baron, Sutton and Anderson)
- 3 years after first smalltalk release.
- 2 years after IBM launched the PC.
- 1 year after 3Com launches the first Ethernet board for the PC.
- 1 Year after Sun Microsystems foundation.
- Unix and C 15th anniversary.
- 6 years after the first commercial relational database.
- 11 years after the first vector processor (Cray-1), arguably the great-grandfather of all modern GPUs
- The same year Borland released Turbo Pascal.
- The same year Apple launched Lisa, and one year before the first macintosh.
- 2 years before Intel launched the 80386 cpu.
- 2 years before C++ first commercial release.
Yeah, hardly a relevant year for us to discuss its culture on HN.
Very famous singer, multiple very famous songs, 40 yo song topped the carts during the 2024 Eclipse, was pretty much the theme song for a very small indie movie called Shrek 2.
There are a lot of HN users for whom this song (and its covers) was an integral part of our childhood. The Nikki French cover was one of the very first MP3s I ripped. The song is just part of growing up with the early personal computers and teaching ourselves how to code. Its kinda cannon.
If you're younger and you missed out on this, then I'm sorry. The older I get, the more I realise that the best of all the years really have gone by.
"Never heard of her" I don't know whether this is a UK thing or not, but her songs were still on heavy rotation here (i.e. before she died). I was at a karaoke last week and people did two of her songs. Her voice was distinctive.
I've been learning to play an instrument over the past year or and and we did one of her songs in the class.
So no, she was not forgotten by the time of her death.
Growing up in the 80s, I've known (and sung) this song all my life. But I just saw this flowchart for the first time today:
https://jeannr.tumblr.com/post/165291081/i-made-a-flow-chart...
I believe that's the original source, but it looks cut off. Here's a full version:
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/b1/82/dc/b182dcc291495c013c98...
That's actually a really interesting visualization of a professionally structured verse.
I think there should be "An Infinite Literature Contest", where the contestants would submit a formal grammar and the texts in the language would be judged for literary and other qualities.
Not sure why you were downvoted, it is super interesting. I know nothing of songwriting but it seems like that could be read by a singing performer in similarly to how sheet music is read by an instrument performer. In the graph, there's additional information than just the words that a singer would need to perform the song accurately.
/re-iterate i know almost nothing of music except what i like which i've been informed over and over is incorrect hah.
I've been a musician for nearly 3 decades and this diagram is how really good songwriters think about structuring popular music. They just usually don't write it down like this. It's not only useful for lyrics, but for harmonic progression as well. As for the downvotes, it's probably because most here don't understand songwriting and think the diagram was nothing more than a joke.
Steinman was a genius. One of the greatest rock composers of all time and he picked his performers brilliantly.
TIL Bonnie Tyler was the female Meat Loaf.
At the time it was pretty obvious, having just come off Meatloaf’s Bat Out of Hell being played on the radio ten times a day.
I just learned earlier this week that he produced “In The Dark of the Night” from Anastasia!
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Did you know there's a long version? (Of the song, not the flowchart, though another reply has that too)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Svz-W5w2bPM
There's a 7-minute version, with two more verses that aren't in the version you always hear on the radio. The one starting at 3:45 in that video is particularly powerful and chilling.
> Every now and then, I know you'll never be the boy you always wanted to be. But every now and then, I know you'll always be the only boy who wanted me the way that I am. Every now and then, I know there's no one in the universe as magical and wondrous as you. Every now and then, I know there's nothing any better. There's nothing that I just wouldn't do.
Well, I never knew this till now:
> With 'Total Eclipse of the Heart', I was trying to come up with a love song and I remembered I actually wrote that to be a vampire love song. Its original title was 'Vampires in Love' because I was working on a musical of Nosferatu, the other great vampire story. If anyone listens to the lyrics, they're really like vampire lines. It's all about the darkness, the power of darkness and love's place in the dark.
https://genius.com/Bonnie-tyler-total-eclipse-of-the-heart-l...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_Eclipse_of_the_Heart
It doesn't look like the second has been cut off to get the first, because the font is different. It looks like the second was an attempt to extend the first (also, it kills the joke)
Reminds me of when she was on Never Mind the Buzzcocks, and they played a "finish the lyrics" game: https://youtu.be/vl7UfjtLzcQ?t=260
Visual representation is your WORST friend: it will make things LOOK simple even if the real thing required the utter mastery to create.
Look at that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATbMw6X3T40
(or that: https://www.facebook.com/reel/1500354675104013)
Literal music video of Total Eclipse, one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsgWUq0fdKk
RIP Ms Tyler, you will be missed
That is so great. My wife and i love to annoy our teenage kids by getting Alexa to play this song and then singing along very dramatically haha.
How old are you, for curiosities sake? I'm born early 90s, fondly remembering me and a friend shaming all the rest of our group by singing this song (dramatically as well) as a duet whenever we were in (already loud) public spaces.
I'm 50, i have two boys ages 16 and 14. My wife was more into music than I was growing up (i grew up in rural areas, she grew up in the city). One of my favorite stories she has is helping Modest Mouse unload their van when playing in Dallas at Club Dada (small local venue) back in the 90s. She also has so many cool rave, hiphop, and sxsw stories from that era since she went to HS in Arlington TX (class of '95), UT for college, and then lived in NYC for a while dating a musician. Austin in the mid/late 90s was a very special place to be a young person.
Back in 1999, the UK had its first total solar eclipse for several decades and VH1 played the music video (though, not this one ;-)) on loop for an hour while it was happening.
If you like meta-songs, you may be interested in "Title of this song" by Da Vinci's Notebook:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HgmUgFEFzco&list=RDHgmUgFEFz...
There’s also one of A-Ha’s “Take on Me”.
“Haaaand comes out…”
Safety Dance is up there with the better ones, too.
Nowhere near as good though.
I think Bad Apple the literal version compares well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ReblZ7o7lu4
The back story of the writing of Total Eclipse ain't bad either: https://youtu.be/LGqYnj_Y3CI?t=70
Sony tried so hard to kill this when it was new
I had never seen the music video until the news started playing it. Super funny
I'm glad this is still on the Internet. It's exactly the sort of thing that almost never is, when I try to find it again several years after seeing it the first time.
I like to pretend that was filmed in the Hogwarts sixth form commmon room in the eighties
It pretty much was. It was filmed in a Victorian sanitorium, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holloway_Sanatorium (built 1873-1885) which is in keeping with your (and JK Rowling's) vision of public schools, in particular Hogwarts was modelled on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fettes_College (built 1864-1870) in a similar architectural style.
I came here to post this, glad you beat me to it. I pulled a muscle laughing the first time I saw this.
I once worked with a guy mixing TV programmes and live DVDs; I knew he’d been a studio engineer at one point in his career. We were re-arranging our studios one day and as I picked up a pair of NS-10s he casually said “I mixed ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’ on those…”
Did he mean on a set of NS10s or on THOSE NS10s?
The exact same NS10s!
I went to the Reading Rock Festival back in the 80s. she was viewed very much as middle of the road and when she came on, got roundly booed and many bottles of nefarious liquids were tossed at her and the band.
she and they were total pros, shrugged it off, she hurled some abuse back and within a couple of songs had the crowd eating out of the palm of her hand.
RIP Bonnie. A class act.
My mum had a cassette with some of her songs. We'd have it on for long trips. I loved the long version of Faster than the speed of night. it's basically just "carpe diem" in a different format, but i loved her voice and the slight melancholy and almost call to action that the song brought with it. Also, the video (of the shorter version) is peak 80's: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jm4CgwRxw3Y
Jim Steinman, Meat Loaf, and now Bonnie Tyler. It truly all has come to an end. I think Celine Dion is the last one still carrying on Steinman's legacy.
Her, and the dude from Sisters of Mercy.
This broke my heart:
> Despite coming from a big, musical family, Tyler and Sullivan never had children.
> I absolutely adore children.
> I did have a miscarriage when I was 40, I left it too late, you know?
I feel like, if you get into that situation, try to adopt or become a foster parent.
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And let us not forget "Holding Out For a Hero"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWcASV2sey0
Absolute classic. If anyone is interested, the Footloose soundtrack (which has Holding Out For a Hero on it) is probably one of the greatest soundtracks of all time. The movie sucks but damn, this soundtrack is incredible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Footloose_(1984_soundtrack)
Agree and disagree. Love the movie. Hate the remake. But the OST is really great. We can agree on that.
Featured towards the climax of Short Circuit 2, which was huge in my childhood. What a powerhouse piece of music!
I think of that movie every time I hear the song! That was one badass robot sequence.
"Suuuuure. Kidnap the humans, DESTROY THE MACHINE."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LABMISLl7Y8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTdHPAY7rOE
I love this. So many more people associate it with Shrek these days, so all the Johnny 5 comments warm my heart!
Yes, I will never fail to associate this music with Short Circuit 2, it is also burned into my childhood memory.
"Number 5 is alive!"
Where have all the good men gone and where are all the gods?
Is it too much to ask for a Streetwise Hercules?
'fraid so, the odds have risen too high.
We might need a white night on a fiery steed. One can dream.
Is it wrong that I prefer the Shrek version?
It's not. I prefer the bardcore version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nx-x_1lIXh4
Fun fact: the original was only produced in English but the Shrek remix (which is a *BOP*) got translated into every language the movie did.
Jellybean long version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4Wq3U86SyQ
Another brilliant Jim Steinman song
My two-year-old son had started saying "turn around" in a sing-song kind of way several months back, and thus my wife and I, both babies of the 80s, had to start singing the song whenever he would do it. It became a fun thing that my son enjoys more than we do. That turned into regularly playing this song (and its covers) in the living room. We just did this again a few nights ago because he loves the song so much and requests it now.
RIP Bonnie.
"Strong Songs" podcast breaking down Total Eclipse of The Heart: https://strongsongspodcast.com/blogs/episodes/s07e06-total-e...
Ugh, what a bummer. I'll be listening to Holding Out for a Hero on repeat today. Nothing gold can stay.
It seems to be a little known fact that she was... The Best: https://youtube.com/watch?v=LKV5YAxwv3Q
While she didn't compose the song, she was the one to originally release it. Tina Turner's version came one year later with a sax and an iconic video, but otherwise Bonnie's version is pretty similar and not much worse imo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Best_(song)#Bonnie_Tyler_v...
Too soon, she could have had a lot more life left to live these days, but a bad surgery ended it. Sucks. Try to avoid needing surgery as much as you can.
Little by little, memories of the 1980s fade.
"Every now and then, I get a little bit nervous That the best of all the years have gone by"
Sadly, Jim Steinman passed away half a decade ago:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Steinman
I still want to see the dream realized on Broadway of a Native-American inspired musical.
Tears in rain, etc.
For those into metal: I like this cover by Exit Eden: https://youtu.be/AD6VAZFHWLY
"It's a Heartache" is a very moving song. RIP.
+1 - one of my favorite songs of all time. Rod Stewart-esque than Stewart himself on this one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonnie_Tyler
Just as good a time as ever to post one of my favorite classic deep YouTube video's, Hurra Torpedo's cover of Total Eclipse of the Heart.
Slightly NSFW, some plumber's crack:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysUjYAi0WcQ
And this is another good time to remember Jim Steinman, the genius who brought us "Total Eclipse of the Heart" and many of Meatloaf's greatest hits.
https://jimsteinman.com/charts.htm
Celine Dion, Air Supply.
Bonnie Tyler's Holding Out for a Hero. This list goes on. The guy was a prolific rock composer genius.
The version from the wedding band in Old School will forever be in my mind.
https://youtu.be/FfUU1wJKXDc
...every nah'n'then I get a little bit terrified, I see the fuckin look in your eyes
I saw her around this time last year in munich... it was a great show and even tough i didn't grow up in the 80's im a fan! Rest in Peace Bonnie!
That's sad. She had such a distinct, unique voice.
That sucks, man. I actually liked her music. Especially "holding out for a hero".
RIP legend.
I'm curious now when this was announced. Yesterday, out of nowhere, TikTok showed me a video about someone praising "Total Eclipse of the Heart", despite not having this bubble in my profile. Kinda spooky to see the news now.
Probably one of those coincidences, like you talked about bouncy houses and now you’re seeing ads for bouncy houses
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her hit song, along with the nikki french dance remix have been on my coding playlist for 30yrs!
I discovered her wider music during the early days of COVID. I played her album Faster Than The Speed of Night on repeat. No world-class lyrics but she had such a beautiful unique voice, I got hooked.
I can't listen to her music now without being taken straight back to the hours and days lying alone on the sofa hoping for better days.
RIP you Welsh beaut
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There, got my upvote.
Nor is this a post that should be on HN, but here we are.
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Before that. Her breakthrough album was 1977 and Total Eclipse of the Heart came out in 1982, so it was more the 8-track era. It remained a staple of radio plays (remember those?) through the 80s and 90s though, and was remade by Nikki French into a chart-topping dance version in 1995.
A lot of HN is folks in their late 30s, 40s, and early 50s (and sometimes even older!), so many folks here would've overlapped with the radio era. A lot of folks here were involved in making YouTube/Instagram/TikTok, not listening to it.
I'm old enough to remember Walkmans coming out in 1979, which was the start of the end of the boombox era. Approximately no-one was using 8-track at that point.
https://public.tableau.com/static/images/U_/U_S_RecordedMusi...
In the USA, 8-track was always less than half vinyl singles sales, compact cassette exceeded 8-track's sales by 1980, and 8-track was dead by 1982.
I'm not quite that old, but didn't people look down on cassettes due to their lower audio quality? Weren't most home systems (hi-fis) still vinyl or 8-track for a while longer?
A big driver of cassettes then was the write ability, unlike 8 tracks. You could borrow your friend's new vinyl album, pop in a new cassette tape on your hi-fi, and record a copy of the album to the tape. Of course the Walkman then made listening to your new album fully portable.
There were consumer 8-track writers, and you could buy blank 8-tracks. But it was more expensive and less common; just never caught on.
Did not know! Before my time I guess.
They did. However vinyl was considered better than 8 track. Cassette was a lot more portable than 8 track, and so where portability mattered it won. Elsewhere vinyl was considered better than 8 track and so it won (a few years latter CDs came and won).
Those who really cared about sound quality had reel to reel tape, but that was very rare. Almost no albums were ever released on reel to reel. You typically bought the vinyl and copied it to your own reels thus ensuring there were no scratches.
No one used 8-track for the quality. It was portable, and it would play continuously (it looped), great for sitting with your honey in a secluded area. And the physical quality of 8-tracks weren’t great. Based on the number of 8-track cartridges I saw on the side of the road while out running, the tape would apparently come loose from the cartridge and render it unusable.
By 1980, 8-tracks were relics being displaced by cassette.
The heads on 8-track players would move physically to access the 4 pairs of stereo and inevitably would mis-track as they aged.
This was more awful than just the marginal fidelity of a perfectly aligned 8-track machine.
What does that have to do with whether or not this should be on HN?
By your logic, literally anything from the '80s is appropriate for this site, which is obviously not correct lol.
The people in this thread are sundowning. They’ll upvote absolutely anything that reminds them of their distant youth.
> A lot of HN is folks in their late 30s, 40s, and early 50s (and sometimes even older!)
And? Doesn’t make it on topic.
> A lot of folks here were involved in making YouTube/Instagram/TikTok, not listening to it.
I hope they struggle to sleep at night.
Death notices of famous artists are regularly on HN. If people upvote it, it should be worthy.
That's not how it works. If upvotes alone mattered, HN would quickly degenerate into Reddit. The bar is whether "good hackers" would find this interesting.
Death notices of famous artists are the definition of off-topic: "most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic." If normies care about it, good hackers by definition probably don't.
I flag this and every such thread I come across. If Hacker News is going to be consistent in its espoused principles, this is non-technical content and thus not welcome. If that standard applies to far more substantive stories regardless of the quality of conversation they produce, it must apply here as well.
> If upvotes alone mattered
I did not say upvotes alone matter, but they should be the final say after all other mechanisms.
> The bar is whether "good hackers" would find this interesting.
If this were true, the majority of frontpage-entries would have to be removed.
> "most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities,[..]If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."
I guess the notable point here is "most" and "probably". The exception seems to be always news which are so important or dramatic that they are still not removed, and leaving the final decision to the upvotes. Which is why there are also regularly political and sometime seven sports entries (once or twice a year).
Despite being called hacker news, reality is not binary and rules should not be handled like that.
>but they should be the final say after all other mechanisms
They shouldn't be, and they aren't. The mods make the final decision and they will work against the consensus when they disagree with it. This is a very aggressively curated community.
>If this were true, the majority of frontpage-entries would have to be removed.
Maybe the majority of frontpage entries should be removed. Maybe the "HN is turning into Reddit" people are finally correct. But that is literally what the guidelines say. On topic - "Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity." Off topic - everything else, with the minor exception of "some new and interesting phenomenon" to gratify that intellectual curiosity.
I'm sorry but there is nothing new or interesting about the death of celebrities, and nothing about it to gratify intellectual curiosity. Their lives, maybe, but if someone wasn't worth discussing on Hacker News in life, they shouldn't be worth discussing post mortem.
>The exception seems to be always news which are so important or dramatic that they are still not removed, and leaving the final decision to the upvotes.
The final decision, in that case, is entirely up to the moderators. Threads with plenty of upvotes get flagged and stay flagged all the time.
>Despite being called hacker news, reality is not binary and rules should not be handled like that.
Maybe. But if there are grey areas, this doesn't seem like one of them. I don't see why far more substantive stories so often get flagged for "politics" or being "non-technical" even when they involve a pile of dead bodies, or why we police humor and emotion like signs of cancer, but we get to wallow in the nostalgia of every dead celebrity that comes along.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48614633
> Anything that gratifies intellectual curiosity is on topic for HN! - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html That doesn't mean it has to gratify your curiosity or mine - no single article can do that for everyone. But it's clear that that's what makes the article on topic.
> One other aspect: the best HN submissions are the ones that are most uncorrelated with anything else that's gotten attention recently - or, as I used to put it, can't be predicted from any existing sequence
There is a "hide" link for threads not of interest, I strongly encourage it's use to optimize your forum participation experience; if this forum is not to your liking, there are others potentially more suited to what you desire.
> I flag this and every such thread I come across. If Hacker News is going to be consistent in its espoused principles, this is non-technical content and thus not welcome. If that standard applies to far more substantive stories regardless of the quality of conversation they produce, it must apply here as well.
Mods can turn off flag capabilities per account, keep this in mind. You won't know if your flags are effective or not.
>Mods can turn off flag capabilities per account, keep this in mind. You won't know if your flags are effective or not.
I'm well aware, but I still do it on principle.
With time and experience comes wisdom. I wish you wisdom.
> Anything that gratifies intellectual curiosity
And no matter your view on the subject, a pop singer dying is not a topic that is capable of gratifying intellectual curiosity. It's about as banal as things get.
I do think HN should have an obit: category and filter them out the main page.
It's one thing to have obits for people who wouldn't be covered by regular news, but "75 year old celebrity dies" is not any kind of new phenomenon.
It generates a decent amount of upvotes and discussion based on name recognition and nostalgia, but every thread is essentially the same, "Oh, that's sad, I liked their work, <personal anecdote of how they were touched by it>.".
Meta: More often than I should have, I have emailed HN and asked "Why can you not extend/build/etc" this? And, as expected, we'd get into a great email discussion about why that would provide a meaningful improvement over the existing experience. This is a forum of builders, makers, and hackers, to their unspoken point. The primitives provided are "good enough," Hacker News is feature complete. To build this on top of HN in a browser extension or mobile app is trivial, and so, I'd say "If you want this, build it and share with us."
Ask HN: Any good replacements for "Refined Hacker News?" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48845676 is an opportunity, for example. Show HN awaits for whatever you build.
Luckily HN provides an API, half baked and awkward as it is.
Nobody forced you to click on the article or jump into the comment section, did they?
It took the place of another more relevant story that could’ve been on the front page
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You seem to be new here, welcome to Hacker News.
Everyone is in charge of what you should find interesting and everyone will make it your problem.
Nah, occassional non tech stuff is very welcome. It’s interesting to see HN’s perspective on other things
Every now and then an article like this is fine.
Every now and then HN falls apart
Next total eclipse, 2026-08-12.
Total: Greenland, Iceland, Spain, Northeastern Portugal
Partial: Northern North America, Europe, West Africa
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_solar_eclipses_in_the_...
IIRC her best-known song saw a spike in popularity around the 2024 solar eclipse. (I know I played it a few times.)
Maybe it's not.
Guidelines:
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, (...) If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
Well, historically, 1983 is:
- 19 Years after the first superscalar CPU, the CDC-6600
- 10 Years after RFC-675, the first TCP version.
- 14 years after the first ARPANET nodes where connected.
- 1 year after Hopfield Networks, paving the way to Boltzman Networks around two years laters, demonstrating how neural networks could learn to solve complex problems.
- The same year Kunihiko Fukushima developed his work on the Neocognitron for visual pattern recognition, a percursor for future work on Convolutional Neural Networks.
- 3 years before first papers on Backpropagation in neural nets.
- First paper on Reinforcement Learning with reward signals (Baron, Sutton and Anderson)
- 3 years after first smalltalk release.
- 2 years after IBM launched the PC.
- 1 year after 3Com launches the first Ethernet board for the PC.
- 1 Year after Sun Microsystems foundation.
- Unix and C 15th anniversary.
- 6 years after the first commercial relational database.
- 11 years after the first vector processor (Cray-1), arguably the great-grandfather of all modern GPUs
- The same year Borland released Turbo Pascal.
- The same year Apple launched Lisa, and one year before the first macintosh.
- 2 years before Intel launched the 80386 cpu.
- 2 years before C++ first commercial release.
Yeah, hardly a relevant year for us to discuss its culture on HN.
Very famous singer, multiple very famous songs, 40 yo song topped the carts during the 2024 Eclipse, was pretty much the theme song for a very small indie movie called Shrek 2.
I think Shrek would be pro open source software and hardware if he knew what it was, so this makes it HN worthy
It's not even "geek music", to add to your perplexity.
There are a lot of HN users for whom this song (and its covers) was an integral part of our childhood. The Nikki French cover was one of the very first MP3s I ripped. The song is just part of growing up with the early personal computers and teaching ourselves how to code. Its kinda cannon.
If you're younger and you missed out on this, then I'm sorry. The older I get, the more I realise that the best of all the years really have gone by.
"Never heard of her" I don't know whether this is a UK thing or not, but her songs were still on heavy rotation here (i.e. before she died). I was at a karaoke last week and people did two of her songs. Her voice was distinctive.
I've been learning to play an instrument over the past year or and and we did one of her songs in the class.
So no, she was not forgotten by the time of her death.
Indeed - blocking space for the 600th OpenAI press release
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This isn't hacker news... but whatever i guess.